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The Right Way to Teach Beings is to Propose Truth, Not Impose it!

November 10, 2019 6:26 am

I climbed swiftly up the mountain until I was in the thick of the old forest that extended to the very end of my ancestral land, moving effortlessly through the snow that had exhausted me when I was a young boy and a young man. Many of the old trees I recalled were gone, and I was in a dense thicket of spruce and other fire trees when I came to the cement bench I had hauled to this high and deserted place when I had first returned in the twentieth century. It was a common kind of garden bench, curved about the bark of an immense tree, and deep enough for me to sit comfortably with my back against the tree to look down on the distant Chateau with her glorious lighted windows. On, the cold Winters I had spent under that roof, I thought, but only in passing. I was almost used to it now, the splendid palace that the old castle had become, and this sense of ownership, of being the lord of this land, the lord who could walk out to the very boundaries, and gaze on all that one ruled. I shut out the sound of distant music, voices, laughter. I wake slowly and without enthusiasm, spinning out each moment as long as possible. Here, under the bedclothes, is the safety of the primeval cave, the womb warmth of the lord’s lair. All humanity loves the security and comfort of these slow, drowsy moments: to us, they are vital. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

More than sleep itself, they stoke up our energy, making unreal past and future, and all the present except the sweet laziness of muscle and the mind’s soft meanderings. It is, I supposed, about an hour before full consciousness crowds in on me and I can no longer lie in peace. I wish, I really wish, it were possible to prolong that state of trance indefinitely, to hibernate my way into eternity so that the World’s events, great and small, passed unnoticed and unfelt. However, as I have gradually extended my sleeping hours from the normal eight to twelve or more, to fill in the long and empty days, I suppose I cannot complain. For myself, I am content enough alone, although at times the need for emotional contact with another human being becomes hard to bear. I cannot be bothered to cook anything, so I make a pot of tea, have a slice of break, switch on the radio, and attempt to read the day-old paper. Before long it beings to bore and annoy me. I turned my head to the left and started to gaze at the murals on the wall, which had the eerie perfection of a vampire painter, and it made them look both magnificent and contrived at the same time, as if someone had blasted the walls with photographic images and then a team had painted them in. Thus, if a man should die, yet his personality in his home allowed to live on in that his possessions and choice of their settings are left and where they are, his presence will continue to be felt. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

If he has passed his physical body and mental characteristics on to his children, and they continue to live in this home, his presence will be felt more strongly. Furnished rooms, though obviously not completely empty, have this same anonymity, so that the newcomer, feeling lost in the void, is indefinably cheered at the discovery of an bedroom with comforters and pillows already on the bed, or a living room with plush sofas and art on the walls, with their message that the vacant space has been filled in the past and can be so in their own share of its future. To be precise, I have no roots, and, apart from an African wood carving on the mantelpiece and a couple of books on the bedside table, the room is as impersonal as when I first took it. The carving is about all I have left f my childhood and family (from whom, obviously, I had to sever myself) and was collected by my grandfather, who specialized in African primitives. The books, relics of school-day enthusiasm, have remained unopened for months now, giving way to an endless stream of newspapers and periodicals. A part from the extremes of fear and weakness of resolution, no softness of any kind must be shown or shared, for softness has no place in our World. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

It is at once shunned and despised when we come across it, because to be soft is to be constantly shamed and hurt, to lose illusions before others can be built up, to invite trickery, to open the door for the profiteer, the violent or the mad, to allow that vital and precious awareness to be dulled. From the time of my own high school days, I have heard judgments and words, sometimes spoken by the people I love, sometimes by those I despise. It can be difficult to ignore the self-defeating invective. It took many years of experience in life, and some invaluable psychoanalytic therapy, for me to overcome such influences on my own attitude. However, even before I had succeeded in rebutting and then rejecting the hostile viewpoints, I had reacted to them. Since them, I have learned through observation that my reaction was not unusual. The need for self-acceptance is buried within many of us, and we can only throw off the influence of those who think us beneath them by always striving, despite the hardship and impediment, to excel even beyond our own capacities. Our ethical standards must be above reproach, our honesty greater than that of others, our loyalty to friends and ideals firmer than that of other people, precisely because—knowingly or not—they think so little of some of us, and precisely in that order that we must think the more of ourselves. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

At each turn of life and at all moments of the day, it is important for us to convince ourselves that we are as good as the next person; in fact, better. It is necessary for us to believe in ourselves, as it must be for all successful persons. Because humankind can make it so difficult for us to preserve our self-esteem, it may be necessary to hold aloft our own activities, to drive on with our own achievements in order that our faith in self can survive the impact of many crushing blows. And those who have studied the personality adjustments of people in other marginalized groups, whether of the character, will recognize the struggle as following a not uncommon pattern. The stages of the Quest for Truth passes by degrees from the disciplining of the ego to the opening of consciousness to God. For me personally, I was spurred by a belief that if my learning were greater, my thinking deeper, my talents more creative, then the loftier would be the stature which I could assume in my own eyes. On this journey there are stages of ascent, stations of understanding lights of peace, and shadows of despair. If we continue the inner work we will pass through various stages of development. It would be a mistake to believe that one has reached a final attitude or a fixed set of values. Between the beginner and the adept is this difference: that the state of being which the one looks up to with awe-struck wonder seems entirely natural to the other. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

Here is, perhaps, a phase of the laws of compensation. It is a counterpart of the bravado displayed by the cowardly, the overlording shown by the diminutive, the conceit by those who suffer from an inferiority of feeling to utilize scientific foundation for its group attitude as justification for discrimination. In other fields, it is called a defense mechanism, or a Napoleonic complex. However, it is not the origin that matters. We are concerned with the results, whether beneficial or destructive to society and to the individual. A small person is anti-social when one seeks to compensate for one’s defects, in one’s own image, for whatever inferior trait by a display of dictatorial traits in which one uses other people as pawns. One’s behavior stems from a factor beyond his or her control, and may be turned to other directions, and does not make it the more palatable for society. When people are oppressed and discriminated against, however, many of their achievements may stem from the effort of the individual to excel in order to combat the influence of universal condemnation on one’s self-esteem. This is a beneficial consequence, even though it may (or may not) arise from an unfortunate source. People tell us we should tolerate others with differences, but tolerance is one of the ugliest words in our language. No word is more misunderstood. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

We appeal to other beings to be tolerant of others—in other words to be willing to stand them. I do not want to be tolerated, and I cannot see why anyone else should be struggling to be tolerated. If people are no good, they should not be tolerated, and if they are good, they should be accepted. In the intergroup relations people are far from having attained acceptance of peoples other than themselves. Tolerance—in the sense of willingness to put up with the existence of others—is still to be achieved. However, what is it but a miserable compromise? In the name of humanity appeals are made to various groups to tolerate each other, when tolerance is actually hardly more desirable than intolerance. The latter is only slightly more inhumane than the former. People cutting across all racial, religious, national, and caste lines, frequently react to rejection by a deep understanding of all others who have likewise been scorned because of their belonging to a marginalized group. It is not for us to join with those who reject millions or billion of our fellow beings of all types and groups, but to accept all beings, an attitude forced upon us happily by the stigma of being cost out of the fold of society. And today, the deep-rooted prejudices that restrict marriages and friendships according to social strata—family wealth, religion, color, and a myriad of other artifices—are conspicuously absent among the submerged groups that makes up the marginalized members of our society. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

The sympathy for all humankind—including groups similarly despised in their own right—that is exhibited by so many people who feel like they are outcasts, can be a most rewarding factor, not only for the individual, but for society. The person learning to accept oneself can—and often does—demonstrate that he or she harbors no bitterness, for one learns, of necessity, the meaning of turning the other cheek. One is forced by circumstances to answer hate with love, abuse with compassion. It is no wonder, then, that one can as a doctor, educator, or pacifist, show a tenderness to others, no matter how tragic their dilemma, that is seldom forthcoming from people who have themselves not deeply suffered. The humiliations of life can distill a mellow reaction, a warmth and understanding, not only for people in like circumstance, but for all the unfortunate, the despised, the oppressed of the Earth. People who are rejected and accept their circumstances are compelled to constantly search for the answers to their problems within themselves. Reminded of the “baseness” and the “ugliness” of one’s acts, one wishes to understand what differentiates one from all other around them. This introspective study pervades the entire personality and all its activities. The great why, the infantile manifestation of curiosity that strives, in the less inhibited mind of the child, to gain the key to the ultimate riddle of a being’s life and its meaning, is typical of those who have been marginalized. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

Unable, perhaps, to develop the extrovert qualities which require a receptive World in which to have free play; struggling to find a solution to the mystery of one’s own imperious desires; not suited for unquestioning acceptance of the facts of one’s self without an understanding of these facts—the invert finds much of one’s thought process consumed with inner projection. The flare-up of temper, the critical perception of a work of art, the basis of a broken friendship, the unfinished task at work, the daydream and the nightmare—whence come these facets of life, what are their hidden meanings, how do they tie in with the total personality? These perceptive abilities, sharpened by inner search, can be and frequently are applied to an understanding of all people. On the surface this seems to be confined to the ability to recognize hidden, latent, or well-disguised talent behind the façade of respectability, but it also permits recognition of the concealed meaning of a poem, the delayed break of a handshake, even the condemnatory attitude of a hostile person. This ability is, in a sense, a form of self-protection. Analytical abilities that are developed by introspection, sharpened by the search for a glimpse behind anonymous mask, are extended to the understanding of all phases of human behavior. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

Because some individual learns that one’s activities, thoughts, philosophies, aspirations, are understandable in the light of full knowledge of the intricacies of the emotional structure; because one learns that the motives for an action may be camouflaged so thoroughly that it seems to stem from the very opposite of its actual source; because, in short, one is forced to obtain a wealth of knowledge about the personal psychological make-up, one can and frequently does this to the fuller understanding of others. And when to this understanding is added compassion for all individuals and groups, no matter to what tragic pass life has brought them, a rare combination of worthwhile traits is obtained. It is understood that beyond discussion, not based on unthinking faith, blind passion, illogical reasoning, or linger prejudices that are one time or another were part of the ruling mores of society fails to receive its day in court. Not all people have been able to utilize their disadvantageous position for self-improvement in every respect and in all direction. I have pointed out the struggle to excel, but many people are easily defeated. Their resiliency in the face of the burden they carry is insufficient to meet the experiences of life. I have outlined the understanding that is extended to other individuals and groups that struggle, each in its own manner, against exclusion. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

However, many people, even those in marginalized groups, are deeply rooted in prejudice. They have been unable to learn the lesson that should be so apparent to them in the face of the World’s bigotry and persecution. I have depicted the individual turned compassionate toward one’s fellow beings, but there are those whose cruelty is lustful and murderous. Self-study and insight are not always present, nor is skepticism of necessity a constructive force. However, it is the very essence of democracy, the antithesis of totalitarianism, that justice and fair play are desirable ends in themselves. Repression and intolerance are to be condemned, no mater what lofty purpose may motivate them or what useful result may unwittingly issue therefrom. The beneficial reaction that turns repression to the finer purpose in life is far from a justification of that of course. In fact, the opposite is true, for it is a demonstration of character, power, and intellect of the invert that gives the lie to the name-calling of one’s enemies and proves all the more one’s worthiness of acceptance by society. The desirable ends which I have outlined must, in fact, be weighed against the needless sufferings, the dejection and humiliation, the extortion and the court trials—all issuing from the same repressive character of modern culture. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

The great energy of those who have utilized the contempt of their fellows as an incentive to further creativity must be balanced against the energy expended and wasted in the struggle against this very same contempt. There is a poetic irony in the future of the once marginalized in society, for one will use the high attainments of character to struggle against the very injustices that are so largely responsible for these attainments, and the successful termination of repressive attitudes may erase the very achievements that were used to effect this termination. Nevertheless, I am convinced that there is a permanent place in the scheme of things for the person reaching for self-actualization—a place that transcends the reaction to hostility and that will continue to contribute to social betterment after social acceptance. Power is required for communication. To stand up before an indifferent or hostile group and have one’s say, or to speak honestly to a friend truths which go deep and hurt—these require self-affirmation, self-assertion, and even at times aggression. This point is so self-evident that it is generally overlooked. Hence, many are mighty in contradiction. My experience in psychotherapy convinces me that the act which requires the most courage is the simple truthful communication, unpropelled by rage or anger, of one’s deepest thoughts to another. We generally communicate most openly only to those who are our equals in power. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

Violence itself is a kind of communication. They cannot communicate with language, so they strike out in violence. However, it is still a language, however rudimentary or primitive, appropriate in certain conditions, and necessary in others. Some people are violence because they do not possess the self-esteem necessary for communication. They cannot stand and deliver themselves of their feelings in relation to others; indeed, unable to formulate them, they are unsure of what their feelings really are. The sooner people in power turn their minds away from exploiting taxpayers and the less affluent for financial gain and become concerned with the rights of people as human beings, the sooner the violence will be mitigated. There is something more important that powerful nations need to send to our leaders and children. This is the poets. For the poets (and writers in general) are the ones skilled in communication. They can speak in universal forms which will be understood by people of whatever color or nationality. They speak the language of consciousness, of dignity, regardless of race or color; they can cultivate the integrity of the marginalized and the other characteristics that are essential to being human. For they know that communication makes community, and community is the possibility of human beings living together for their mutual psychological, physical, and spiritual nourishment. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

The kind of communication that overcomes the impulse to violence and that binds persons to each other is a kind of talking that is conciliatory and restorative. In psychotherapy we find that the difficulties experiences by a man and a wife in a relationship can be gauged roughly how much trouble they have in communicating with each other. When there is difficulty understanding what the other is talking (or not talking) about, we can assume an estrangement. Then the person is simply not (or perhaps does not want to be) tuned in on the wave length of the others. Intellectualizing or talking abstractly is a symptom of the same thing—a desire not to communicate one’s real feelings, a blocking-off of one’s total self. As hostility grows, projection increases also; there is apt to be a good deal of allegations and an increase in distance, all of which is indicative of growing hostility. We know that we shall get to the stage of violence ere long. Psychotherapy is reversing that process so that the person can talk on the same wave length. Even if the couple decides to divorce, at least they decide it together, and the process has that much more community in it. Communication recovers the original “we” of the human being on a new level. Authentic communication depends on authentic language. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

Authentic talk is organic—the speaker communicates not merely with words but with one’s body also; one’s gestures, one’s movements, one’s expression, one’s tone of voice communicate the same thing as one’s words. One speaks not as a disembodied voice but as one organic totality to another. We would not communicate unless we valued the other, considered one worth talking to, worth the effort to make our ideas clear. This is communicating without talking down, without patronizing. Communication implies the presence of social interest. One has to have an interest in the other to make it worthwhile to hear one. This means one relates to another not as receptacle for the expression one one’s pleasures of the flesh, or as a being to be exploited for the assuaging of one’s own loneliness, or in any other way as an object, but as a human being in the full meaning of that term. Communication leads to community—that is, to understanding, intimacy, and the mutual valuing that was preciously lacking. Community can be defined simply as a group in which free conversation can take place. Community is where I can share my innermost thoughts, bring out the depths of my own feelings, and know they will be understood. These days there is a greater search for community, partly because our human experience of community has largely evaporated and we are lonely. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

The term community gives birth to a rich cluster of words, all of which have powerful connotations. There is commune, a relatively new word with an optimistic ring; and communion, an old word with new meaning that has for many of us a still more beneficial tone. However, when we come then to a cognate which is taken negatively by many people—namely communism. All these words have the same root. Community is destroyed by destructive violence. If I, like Cain, commit a senseless act of ending a life, I must flee into the desert, driven by my guilt at having take the life of my brother Abel; a cleavage now exists between me and other members of my erstwhile community. In this sense I shrink my World and thus kill part of myself. I need my enemy in my community. He or she or they keep me alert, vital. I need one’s criticism. Strange to say, I need him or her or them to posit myself against. If I could learn something from one, I would walk twenty miles to see my worst enemy. However, beyond what we specifically learn from our enemies, we need them emotionally: our psychic economy cannot get along well without them. Persons often remark that curiously to them, they feel a singular emptiness when their enemy dies or is incapacitated. All of which indicates that our enemy is as necessary for us as is our friends. Both together are part of authentic community. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

Community is where I can accept my own loneliness, distinguishing between that part of it which can be overcome and that part of it which is inescapable. Community is the group in which I can depend upon my fellows to support me; it is partially the source of my physical courage in that, knowing I can depend on others, I guarantee that they also can depend on me. It is where my moral courage, consisting of standing against members of my own community, is supported even by those I stand against. “And it came to pass that I prayed unto the Lord that he would give unto community grace, that they might have charity,” reports Ether 12.36. O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell, let it not be among the jumbled heap of murky buildings; climb with me the steep,–Nature observatory—whence the dell, its flowery slopes, its river’s crystal swell, may seem a span; let me thy vigils keep ‘mongst boughs pavillion’d, where the deer’s swift leap startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell. But though I’ll gladly trace these scenes with thee, yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind, whose words are images of thoughts refin’d, is my soul’s pleasure; and it sure must be almost the highest bliss of human-kind, when to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

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Evil Flows from Poisoned Wells; Good Flows from Pure and Crystal Fountains, Dazzling a Silvery Shower of Love and Beauty!

November 2, 2019 1:40 am

We seek to perfect what we are, not to constantly alter it. We seek to find something that is a true expression of our soul with which is to shape what makes up our form. However, there is no need for you to trouble yourself over these things. If your reasoning is correct, it should throw some light upon the peculiar quality of property delinquency in the delinquent subculture. We have already seen how the rewardingness of a college-boy and middle-class way of life depends, to a great extent, upon general respect for property right. In an urban society, in particular, the possession and display of property are the most ready and public badges of reputable social class status and are, for that reason, extraordinarily ego-involved. That property actually is a reward for middle-class morality and the possession of property. The middle-classes have, then, a strong interest in scrupulous regard for property rights, not only because property is intrinsically valuable but because the full enjoyment of their status requires that status be readily recognizable and therefore that property adhere to those who earn it. The cavalier misappropriation or destruction of property, therefore, is not only a diversion or diminution of wealth; it is an attack on the middle-class where their egos are most vulnerable. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

Group stealing, institutionalized in the delinquent subculture, is not just a way of getting something. It is a means that is the antithesis of sober and diligent labor in a calling. It expresses contempt for a way of life by making its opposite a criterion of status. Money and other valuables are not, as such, despised by the delinquent. For the delinquent, and the non-delinquent alike, money is a most glamorous and efficient means to a variety of ends and one cannot have too much of it. But, in the delinquent subculture, the stolen dollar has an odor of sanctity that does not attach to the dollar saved or the dollar earned. This delinquent system of values and way of life does its job of problem-solving most effectively when it is adopted as a group solution. We have stressed that the efficacy of a given change in values as a solution and therefore the motivation to such a change depends heavily upon the availability of reference groups within which the deviant values are already institutionalized, or whose members would stand to profit from such a system of deviant values if each were assured of the support and concurrences of the others. So it is with delinquency. We do not suggest that joining in the creation or perpetuation of a delinquent subculture is the only road to delinquency. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

We do believe, however, that for most delinquents delinquency would not be available as a response were it not socially legitimized and given a kind of respectability, albeit by a restricted community of fellow-adventurers. In this respect, the adoption of delinquency is like the adoption of the practice of appearing at the office in open-collar and shirt sleeves. It is much more comfortable, is it more sensible than full regalia? Is it neat? Is it dignified? The arguments in the affirmative will appear much more forceful if the practice is already established in one’s milieu or if one sense that others are prepared to go along if someone makes the first tentative gestures. Indeed, to many of those who sweat and chafe in ties and jackets, the possibility of an alternative may not even occur until they discover that it has been adopted by their colleagues. This way of looking at delinquency suggests an answer to a certain paradox. Countless mothers have protested that their “Simon” was a good boy until he fell in love it a certain bunch. However, the mothers of each of Simon’s companions hold the same view with respect to their own offspring. It is conceivable and even probable that some of these mothers are naïve, that one or more of these youngsters are “rotten apples” who infected the others. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

We suggest, however, that all of the mothers may be right, that there is a chemistry in the group situation itself which engenders that which was not there before, that group interaction is a sort of catalyst which releases potentialities not otherwise visible. This is especially true when we are dealing with a problem of status-frustration. Status, by definition, is a grant of respect from others. A new system of norms, which measure status by criteria which one can meet, is of no value unless others are prepared to apply those criteria, and others are not likely to do so unless one is prepared to reciprocate. We have referred to a lingering ambivalence in the delinquent’s own value system, an ambivalence which threatens the adjustment one has achieved and which is met through the mechanism of reaction-formation. The delinquent may have to contend with another ambivalence, in the area of one’s status sources. The delinquent subculture offers him status as against other children of whatever social level, but is offers hum this status in the eyes of one’s fellow delinquents only. To the extent that there remains a desire for recognition from groups whose respect has been forfeited by commitment to a new subculture, one’s satisfaction in one’s solution is imperfect and adulterated. One can perfect one’s solution only by rejecting as status sources those who reject one. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

This too may require a certain measure of reaction-formation, going beyond indifference to active hostility and contempt for all those who do not share one’s subculture. One becomes all the more dependent upon one’s delinquent gang. Outside that gang one’s status position is now weaker than ever. The gang itself tends toward a kind of sectarian solidarity, because the benefits of membership can only be realized in active face-to-face relationships with group members. This interpretation of the delinquent subculture had important implications for the sociology of social problems. People are prone to assume that those things which we define as evil and those which we define as good have their origins in separate and distinct features of our society. Evil flows from poisoned wells; good flows from pure and crystal fountains. The same source cannot feed both. Our view is different. It holds that those values which are at the core of the American way of life, which help to motivate the behavior which we most esteem as typically American, are among the major determinants of that which we stigmatize as pathological. More specifically, it holds that the problems of adjustments to which the delinquent subculture is a response are determined, in part, by those very values which respectable society holds most sacred. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

The same value system, impinging upon children differently equipped to meet it, is instrumental in generating both delinquency and respectability. The rebel insists that one’s identity be respected; one fights to preserve one’s intellectual and spiritual integrity against the suppressive demands of one’s society. One must range oneself against the group which represents to one conformism, adjustment, and the death of one’s own originality and voice. Continuously through human history and through the life-span of each one of us, there goes on this dialectical process between individual and society, person and group, being and community. When either pole of the dialectic is neglected, impoverishment of the personality sets in. Every being has from time to time impulses to shock one’s society, fantasies of outraging one’s neighbors. Paradoxically enough, one’s own continued mental vitality depends on this. Also, paradoxically, the community itself, even though it condemns the outrage, gets its health, vitality and new growth from the outrage. This shows once again that human beings do not grow in one-dimensional fashion toward something better and better, but rather by a dynamic process, a thesis and antithesis; they grow down at the same time as they grow up, deeper while they grow higher. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

The Garden of Eden myth portrays the rebellion as being against God. And, indeed, it is against authority, against the status quo, against whatever clings to the values of the past rather than looks to the future. What is omitted from the rhetoric in this rebellion is that the outcome is not either/or, but a dialectical interplay: we need authority as we rebel against it. We rebel against the culture with the very language and knowledge that we learned from the culture; we revolve against or parents while loving them at the same time. The rebel also needs one’s society. One’s language, one’s concepts, one’s way of relating to others all come from that culture which one now opposes. One rises from the society, criticizes it, and aligns oneself with those who are trying to reform it; and all the while one is a member of the very culture one opposes. If one thinks of civilization as ungrateful in killings its prophets, one also sees the absurdity of the whole question of gratitude or ingratitude in the behavior of the rebel. This is why I call the relationship dialectic. It is a dynamic interrelationship in which each pole exists by virtue of the other pole—as one changes, the other does likewise. Beings therefore have a right to fear that society may unhuman them. Yet no being has made the best of one’s gifts without the setting [up] of a helpful society, such as the Greek or the Italian city states. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

Always the animal drive for self, the jungle of nature, waits to disrupt one’s city. And yet that force, anti-social as it is, is not all alien or all bad. The mind that drives it is full of human wishes. The Greeks remembered that every mind, good as well as bad, takes strength from our animal body. It is the nature of society to suppress that individual person. Pointing this out, it is a surprise that people do often talk as through the group ought to behave differently. Society can be spoken of as being bureaucratic, juggernaut, supertechnocratic, all implying that while society has its faults, we are what we are. On one hand, this arises from a utopianism—the expectation that when we develop a society which trains us rightly, we will all be in fine shape. On the other hand, it is like a child wheeling one’s parents because they are not taller or in some other way different from what they are. All of which society cannot be expected to be. For society, on one side, is us. The rebel is a split personality that one realizes one’s society nursed one, met one’s needs, and gave one security to develop one’s potentialities; yet one smarts under its constraints and finds it stifling. The rebel is continually struggling to make the society into a community. People feel they rebel, therefore they exist. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

In our particular day, the rebel fights the mechanizing bureaucratic trends not because these in themselves are evil, but because they are the paramount modern channels for the dehumanizing of beings, the stultifying loss of integrity, and the indignity of beings. One fights affluence for a similar reason, for one thinks that an abundance of wealthy may erode power, and riches are particularly dangerous for the well-being of republics because corruption has a tendency to set in and take precedence over justice, family values and human rights. The rebel also may be found in the colorful, albeit sometimes tattered, clothes of the dropout. The young person rightly sensing the threat to one’s values and to one’s life in the Syrian war, pollution, and the dehumanization which seems to accompany our vast technological progress, drops out of society for a period. One’s action is protest against the rigidity of society, but it is also a time in which one can find oneself. It is similar to the withdrawal of Jesus to the wilderness to find inner integrity before beginning their ministries. It is also similar to that period of wandering taken by the students of the Middle Ages as an integral part of their education. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

True, the dropout can never completely deny one’s culture, never entirely sever one’s umbilical cord. One takes it with one to the mountain or the dessert in one’s language, one’s way of thinking, and even as an object against which to protest. However, in one’s withdrawal one can get new perspective, a new awareness of oneself which may stand one in very good stead later on. I have had the impression in talking with hipsters that for some of them the year or so they dropped out protected them from psychosis. It gave them some breathing time in the burdensome sequence of nursery, elementary school, high school, college, graduate school—during which many of them find themselves in a genuine danger of suffocation. Often the dropping out serves a purpose similar to psychoanalysis. No one would argue that the dropout has not selected a more satisfactory way of working things out, not to say less expensive for all concerned, than a stint in a mental hospital. It is entirely possible that one comes back from one’s seemingly lighthearted wanderings with a new seriousness in one’s relationship to oneself and one’s society. Human beings can be conditioned into any form of Nazilike obedience or antlike organization of colonies. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

However, we must not forget at the same moment that there are individuals who from time to time pull themselves and oppose the group even to the extent of going to prison. Edward Snowden, the Berrigan brothers, and Bonhoeffer come to mind. Daniel Ellsberg’s decision to make the Pentagon Papers available to the people was the one tangible step he felt he could take to shorten the Vietnam war. Some people become rebels because they have empathy for the suffering of people, especially helpless children. Rebellion can be a flamboyant, long struggle for psychological integrity. However, whatever the motives, it is clear that rebels step out because in many cases they are performing acts against law and order. With social media, people are less dependent on the news because they can get their points out using mass communication and modern technology in the service of the rebellion. There is no escape from living through this dialectical conflict of individual and society. The only choice is whether one will live it through constructively and with zest and dignity or waste one’s energy and substance protesting against a Universe which is not organized according to one’s living. No matter how much society is changed—and much of it cries to high Heaven for change—there still will exist the fundamental dialectical situation of individuation against the conformist, leveling tendencies of the society. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

Some societies have recognized and made allowance for the destructive, protesting, anarch needs of the citizens. Then you get situations like what is going on in China. Tens of thousands of protesters in Hong Kong are peacefully marching on the 22^nd anniversary of the former colony’s handover from Britain to China, but also a group of protestors took their frustrations out, as hundreds of young protestors broke into the heart of the government of Hong Kong’s legislative council. We need our ways of mocking authority. We have our Halloween and April Fools’ Day. However, we need ways of channeling our secret dreams of outraging our neighbors and scandalizing the town fathers—in short, of symbolically expressing our dreams of revenge on a society that thwarts and confines us. An interesting example of this is the scapegoat king, who accepts the scepter knowing that he will be killed during some riotous saturnalia in which all authority is mocked. And consider the mocking of ultimate religious authority in the crucifixion of God’s son, Jesus. The expression of our disdain and mocking—indeed, of all these so-called negative and destructive emotions—enables us then to see and experience more clearly the beneficial side of religious conviction. We can change the forms of these beneficial and negative sides of human nature, but we cannot change the fact of them without amputating part of human experience and impoverishing ourselves. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

Are not the excesses in American life—one of which is violence—symptoms in part of a lack of sound opportunities to let out the secret dreams of revenge on the society that thwarts and contains the individual. You cannot in fact bottle up these deep feelings of protest in a World as mechanical as ours and think that you will syphon them off casually in lacy thrillers and in little evasins of the forces of order. Anti-social feelings in a hierarchy society like ours are first a power, then a commodity on which some unscrupulous leader can raise to fame, and become the spokes persons for the dream of violence of all the underrepresented. The recognition of the value of the rebel would go a long way in channeling such daimonic forces in constructive directions. For the rebel does what the rest of us would like to do but do not dare. Not that Christ willingly takes on Himself the sins and the scorns of beings; He acts, lives, and dies, vicariously for the rest of us. This is what makes Him a rebel. The rebel and the savior then turn out to be the same figure. Through his rebellion the rebel saves us. We see here another demonstration of my previous thesis—that civilization needs the rebel. The possibilities of the human being are unlimited, and that statement can be de-energizing. If you take it at face value, there is no real problem anymore. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

Every problem will sooner or later be overcome by these unlimited possibilities; there remain only temporary difficulties that will go away on their own accord when the time comes. Saying that possibilities are unlimited to a person who has not figured out how to overcome a situation, however, is like putting someone into a canoe and pushing one out into the Atlantic toward England with the cheery comment, “The sky is the limit.” The canoer is only too aware of the fact that an inescapably real limit is also the bottom of the ocean. There is the inescapable physical limitation of death. We can postpone our death slightly, but nevertheless each of us will die and at some future time unknow to and unpredictable by us. Sickness is another limit. When we overwork, we get ill in one form or another. There are obvious neurological limits. If the blood stops flowing to the brain for as little as a couple of minutes, a stroke or some other kind of serious damage occurs. Despite the fact that we can improve our intelligence to some degree, it remains radically limited by our physical and emotional environment. There are also metaphysical limitations which are even more interesting. We can blind ourselves to reality and come to grief. True, we can surpass to some extent the limitations of our family backgrounds or our historical situations, but such transcendence can occurs only to those who accept the fact of their limitation to begin with. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

For seekers of truth, real fruit is only borne when one seeks within, for the indwelling God, who author of our soul. The question of how far one will be prepared to travel in this quest has no geographical reference. It is a metaphorical one and refers only to the time one can give each day to the exercises, studies, and devotions, as well as to the moral ideals one can bring oneself to pursue. One is not asked for more than one feels one can humanly give under one’s present circumstances and responsibilities. We do not need to cross the sea to find God—the Word is nigh thee, is in thy heart. To come to know our true divine power, we must continually become something greater and therefore that which we were must come to an end. Immortality through it sounds good on the surface in an exoteric sense is truly the source of attachment and fear of change. Embracing God is overcoming perfection. Through the depths of your soul you must also come to realize that all systems of enslavement which emanate from this concept of external divinity are equally useless when compared to your potential. Simply reading and understanding it intellectually is not enough. It must be experiences through the work itself so that you have become stronger in faith, so strong that you can rise above stress and anxiety. “They were in captivity, and again the Lord did deliver them out of bondage by the power of his word; and we were brought into this land, and here we began to establish the church of God throughout this land also,” reports Alma 5.5. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

The Challenges You Face in Your Own Life Experience Will be Trying, to Say the Least, for it Has a Glory and Naught Else Can Share it!

October 24, 2019 12:51 am

I have guest here! Where exactly did you come from? It is once in a blue Moon a boat ties up at my dock. However, you are most welcome. We are very private here, you understand, I cannot invite you to stay. But these are all golden dreams. On, tell me, who was it first announced, who was it first proclaimed, that beings only do nasty things because one does not know one’s own interests; and that if one were enlightened, if one’s eyes were opened to one’s real normal interests, beings would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once become good and noble because, being enlightened and understanding one’s real advantage, one would see one’s own advantage in the good and nothing else, and we all know that not one being can, consciously, act against one’s own interests, consequently, so to say, through necessity, one would begin doing good? Oh, the babe! Oh, the pure, innocent child! Why, in the first place, when in all these thousands of years has there been a time when beings have acted only from their own interest? What is to be done with the millions of facts that bear witness that beings, consciously, that is, fully understanding their real interest, have left them in the background and have rushed headlong on another path, to meet peril and danger, compelled to this course by nobody and by nothing, but, as it were, simply disliking the beaten track, and have obstinately, willfully, struck out another difficult, absurd way, seeking it almost in the darkness. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

So, I suppose, this obstinacy and perversity were pleasanter to them than any advantage…Advantage! What is advantage? And will you take it upon yourself to define with perfect accuracy in what the advantage of beings consists? And what, if it so happens that a being’s advantage, sometimes, not only may, but even must, consist in one’s desiring in certain cases what is harmful to oneself and not advantageous. And if so, there can be such a case, the whole principle falls into dust. What do you think—are there such cases? You laugh; laugh away gentlemen, but only answer me: have being’s advantages been reckoned up with perfect certainty? Are there not some which not only have been included but cannot possibly be included under any classification? You see, you gentlemen and ladies have, to the best of my knowledge, taken your whole register of human advantages from the averages of statistical figures and political-economical formulas. Your advantages are prosperity, wealth, freedom, peace—and so on, and so on. So that the being who should, for instance, go openly and knowingly in opposition to all that list would, to your thinking, and indeed mine too, of course, be an obscurantist or an absolute mad person: would not one be? However, you know, this is what is surprising: when they reckon up human advantages, why does it so happen that all these statisticians, sages, and lovers of humanity invariably leave out one? #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

They do not even take it into their reckoning in the form in which it should be taken and the whole reckoning depends upon that. It would be no great matter, they would simply have to take it, this advantage, and add it to the list. However, the trouble is, that this strange advantage does not fall under any classification and is not in place in any list. I have a friend for instance…Ech! Gentlemen and ladies, but of course he is your friend, too; and indeed there is no one, no one, to whom he is not a friend! When he prepares for any undertaking this gentleman immediately explains to you, elegantly and clearly, exactly how he must act in accordance with the laws of reason and truth. What is more, he will talk to you with excitement and passion of the true normal interest of humans; with irony he will upbraid the short-sighted fools who do not understand their own interests, nor the true significance of virtue; and, within a quarter of an hour, without any sudden outside provocation, but simply through something inside one which is stronger than all one’s interests, one will go off on quite a different track—that is, act in direct opposition to what one just been saying about oneself, in opposition to the laws of reason, in opposition to one’s own advantage—in fact, in opposition to everything…I warn you that my friend is a compound personality, and therefore it is difficult to blame him as an individual. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

The fact is, gentlemen and ladies, it seems there must really exist something that is dearer to almost every being than one’s greatest advantages, or (not to be illogical) there is a most advantageous advantage (the very one omitted of which we spoke just now) which is more important and more advantageous than all other advantages, for the sake of which a being if necessary is ready to act in opposition to all laws; that is, in opposition to reason, honour, peace, prosperity—in fact, in opposition to all those excellent and useful things if only one can attain that fundamental, most advantageous advantage which is dearer to him than all. “Yes, but it is advantage all the same” you will retort. However, excuse me, I will make the point clear, and it is not a case of playing upon words. What matters is, that this advantage is remarkable from the very fact that it breaks down all our classifications, and continually shatters every system constructed by lovers of humankind for the benefit of humankind. In fact, it upsets everything. However, before I mention this advantage to you, I want to compromise myself personally, and therefore I boldly declare that all these fine systems—all these theories for explaining to humankind their real normal interests, in order that inevitably striving to pursue these interests they may at once become good and noble—are, in my opinion, so far, mere logical exercises! Yes, logical exercises. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

Why, to maintain this theory of the regeneration of humankind by means of the pursuit of one’s own advantage is to my mind almost the same thing as…as to affirm, for instance, following Buckle, that through civilization humankind becomes softer, and consequently less bloodthirsty, and less fitted for warfare. Logically it does not seem to follow from one’s arguments. However, beings have such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that one is ready to distort the truth intentionally, one is ready to deny the evidence of one’s senses only to justify one’s logic. I take this example because it is the most glaring instance of it. Only look about you: blood is being spilt in streams, and in the merriest ways, as though it were champagne. Take the whole of the nineteenth century in which Buckle lived. Take Napoleon—the Great and also the present one. Take North America—the eternal union. Take the farce of Schleswig-Holstein…And what is it that civilization softens in us? The only gain of civilization for humankind is the greater capacity for variety of sensations—and absolutely noting more. And through the development of this many-sidedness beings may come to finding enjoyment in bloodshed. In fact, this has already happened to them. Have you noticed that it is the most civilized gentlemen who have been the subtlest slaughterers, to whom the Attilas and Stenka Razins could not hold a candle, and if they are not so conspicuous as the Attilas and Stenka Razins it is simply because they are so often met with, are so ordinary and have become so familiar to us. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

In any case civilization has made humankind if not more bloodthirsty, at least more vilely, more loathsomely blood-thirsty. In old days one saw justice in bloodshed and with one’s conscience at peace exterminated those one thought proper. Now we do think bloodshed abominable and yet we engage in this abomination, and with more energy than ever. Which is worse? Decide that for yourselves. They say that Cleopatra (excuse an instance from Roman history) was fond of sticking gold pins into her slave-girls breasts and derived gratification from their screams and writhings. You will say that that was in the comparatively barbarous times; that these barbarous times too, because also, comparatively speaking, pins are stuck in even now; that though beings have now learned to see more clearly than in barbarous ages, one is still far from having learnt to act as reason and science would dictate. However, yet you are fully convinced that one will be sure to learn when one gets rid of certain old bad habits, and when common sense and science have completely re-educated human nature and turned it in a normal direction. You are confident that then beings will cease from intentional error and will, so to say, be compelled not to want to set one’s will against one’s normal interests. That is not all; then, you say, science itself will teach beings (through to my mind it is a superfluous luxury) that one never has really had any caprice or will of one’s own, and that one is something of nature of a piano-key or the stop of an organ, an that there are, besides, things called the laws of nature; so that everything one doe is not done by one’s willing it, but is done of itself, by the laws of nature. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

Consequently we have only to discover these laws of nature, and beings will no longer have to answer for their actions and life will become exceedingly easy for one. All human actions will then, of course, be tabulated according to these laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms up to 108,000, and entered in an index; or, better still, there would be published certain edifying works of the nature of encyclopedic lexicons, in which everything will be so clearly calculated and explained that there will be no more incidents or adventures in the World. Then—this is all what you say—new economic relations will be established, all ready-made and worked out with mathematical exactitude, so that every possible question will vanish in the twinkling of an eye, simply because every possible answer to it will be provided. Then the “Palace of Crystal” will be built. Then…In fact, those will be halcyon days. Of course there is no guaranteeing (this is my comment) that it will not be, for instance, frightfully dull then (for what will one have to do when everything will be calculated and tabulated?), but on the other hand everything will be extraordinarily rational. Of course boredom may lead you to anything. It is boredom sets one sticking golden pins into people, but all that would not matter. What is bad (this is my comment again) is that I dare say people will be thankful for the gold pins then. Beings are stupid, but one is so ungrateful that you could not find another like one in all creation. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

I, for instance, if all of a sudden, apropos of nothing, in the midst of general prosperity a gentleman with an ignoble, or rather with a reactionary and ironical, countenance were to arise and putting his arms akimbo, say to us all: “I say, gentlemen, had not we better kick over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds, simply to sent these logarithms to the devil and to enable us to live once more at our own sweet foolish will!”, I would not be in the least surprised. That again would not matter; but what is annoying is that one would be sure to find followers—such is the nature of beings. And all that for the most foolish reason, which, one would think, was hardly worth mentioning: that is, that beings everywhere and at all times, whoever one may be, has preferred to act as one chose and not in the least as one’s reason and advantage dictated. And one may choose what is contrary to one’s own interests, and sometimes one absolutely ought (that is my idea). One’s own free unfettered choice, one’s own caprice—however wild it may be, one’s own fancy worked up at times to frenzy—is that very “most advantageous advantage” which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms. And how do these wiseacres know that beings want a normal, a virtuous choice? What has made them conceive that beings must want a rationally advantageous choice? #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

What beings want is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice. For some time now I have been talking to people who have served as subjects (Ss) in psychologists’ experiments. They have told me of their experience, and it has troubled me. I want to share my concern with my colleagues. The letter that follows is my effort to consolidate the attitudes and feelings of the people to whom I talked. Dear E (Experimenter): My name is S. You do not know me. I have another name my friends call me by, but I drop it, and become S number 27 as soon as I take part in your research. I serve in your surveys and experiments. I answer your questions, fill out questionnaires, let you wire me up to various machines that record my physiological reactions. I pull levers, flip switches, track moving targets, trace mazes, learn nonsense syllables, tell you what I see in inkblots—do the whole barrage of things you ask me to do. I have started to wonder why I do these things for you. What is in it for me? Sometimes you pay me to serve. More often I have to serve, because I am a student in a beginning psychology course, and I am told that I will not receive a grade unless I take part in at least two studies; and if I take part in more, I will get extra points on the final exam. I am part of the Department’s “subject-pool.” When I have asked you what I will get out of your studies, you tell me that, “It is for Science.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

When you are running someone particular study, you often lie to me about your purpose. You mislead me. It is getting so I find it difficult to trust you. I am beginning to see you as a trickster, a manipulator. I do not like it. In fact, I lie to you a lot of the time, even on anonymous questionnaires. When I do not lie, I will sometimes just answer at random, anything to get through with the hour, and back to my own affairs. Then, too, I can often figure out just what it is you are trying to do, what you would like me to day or do; at those times, I decide to go along with your wishes if I like you, or foul you up if I do not. You do not actually say what your hopes or hypotheses are; but the very setup in your laboratory, the alternatives you give me, the instruction you offer, all work together to pressure me to day or do something in particular. It is as if you are whispering in my ear, “When the light comes on, pull the left switch,” and then you forget to deny that you have whispered. However, I get the message. And I pull the right or the left one, depending on how I feel toward you. You know, even when you are not in the room—wen you are just the printed instructions on the questionnaire or the voice on the tape recorder that tells me what I am supposed to do—I wonder about you. I wonder who you are, what you are really up to. I wonder what you are going to do with the “behavior” I give you. Who are you going to show my answers to? Who is going to see the marks I leave on your response-recorders? #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

Do you have any interest at all in what I think, feel, and imagine as I make the marks you are so eager to study and analyze? Certainly, you never ask me what I mean by them. If you asked, I would be glad to tell you. As a matter of fact, I do tell my roommate or my girl friend what I thought your experiment was about and what I meant when I did what I did. If my roommate could trust you, he could probably give you a better idea of what your data (my answers and responses) mean than the idea you presently have. God knows how much good psychology has gone down the drain, when my roommate and I discuss your experiment and my part in it, at the beer-joint. As a matter of fact, I am getting pretty tried of being S. It is too much like being a punched IBM card in the University registrar’s office. I feel myself being pressured, bulldozed, tricked, manipulated every where I turn. Advertisements in magazines and commercials on TV, political speeches, salesmen, and con men of all kinds put pressure on me to get me to buy, say, or do things that I suspect are not for my good at all. Just for their good, the good of their pocketbooks. Do you sell your “expert knowledge” about me to these people? Is this why you keep reviewing my case every month for four years and then sending the packets all over the Untied States of America? Is this why you are asking third parties to fill out forms my condition that my health information privacy rights, and then what I tell you is leaked all over the World? If that is true, then you are really not in good faith with me. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

You have told me that when I show myself to you and let you study me, that in the long run it will be for my good. I am not convinced. You really seem to be studying me in order to learn how to influence my attitudes and my actions without realizing it. I resent this more than you realize. It is not fair for you to get me to show how I can be influenced and then for you to pass this information along to people who pay your salary or pay your bribes, or give you money to equip your laboratory, and then not acknowledge there is a data breach of my information, which you are responsible and can be held civically and legally responsible for. I do not like that you put my life in danger. I do not like that you are a threat to my health and safety. I feel used, like a science experiment, and I do not like it. However, I protect myself by not showing you my whole self or by lying. Did you ever stop to think that your articles, and the textbooks you write, the theories you spin—all based on your data (my disclosures to you)—may actually be a tissue of lies and half-truths (my lies and half-truths) or a joke I have played on you because I do not like you or trust you? That should give you cause for some concern. Now look, Mr. E, I am not “paranoid,” as you might say. Nor an I stupid. And I do believe some good can come out of my serving in your research. Even some good for me. I am not entirely selfish, and I would be glad to offer myself up for study, to help others. However, somethings have to change first. Will you listen to me? Here is what I would like from your researchers: #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

I would like you to help me gain a better understanding of what has made me the way I am today. I would like to know this because I want to be more free than I feel. I would like to discover more of my own potentialities. I would like to be more whole, more courageous, more enlightened. I would like to be able to experience more, learn better, remember better, and express myself more fully. I would like to learn how to recognize and overcome the pressures of other people’s influences, of my background, that interfere with my going in the paths I choose. Now, if you would promise to help me in these ways, I would gladly come into your lab and virtually strip my body and soul naked. I would be there meaning to show you everything I could that was relevant to your particular interest of the moment. And I can assure you, that is different from what I have been showing you thus far, which is as little as I can. In fact, I cross my fingers when I am in your lab, and say to myself, “What I have just said or done here is not me.” Would not you like to change? Can you handle my truth, the full truth? Do you even really know what you are investigating? If you will trust me, I will trust you, if you are trustworthy. I would like you to take the time and trouble to get acquainted with me as a person, before we go through your experimental procedures. And I would like to get to know you and what you are up to, to see if I would like to expose myself to you. Can you imagine your body being violated by strangers you never met without your consent? #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

Sometime, you remind me of physicians. They look at me as the unimportant envelope that conceals the information they are really interested in. You have looked at me as the unimportant package that contains “responses,” and this is all I am for you. Let me tell you that when I feel this, I get back at you. I give your responses, all right; but you will never know what I meant by them. You know, I can speak, not just with words, but with my action. And when you have thought I was rending to a “stimulus” in your lab, my response was really directed at you; and what I meant by it was, “Take this, you unpleasant so-and-so.” Does that surprise you? It should not. Another ting. Those tests of yours that have built-in gimmicks to see if I am being consistent, or deliberately lying, or just answering at random—they do not feel me. Actually, if you would get on level with me, they would not be necessary. There are enough con men and women in the World, without your joining their number. I would hope that psychologist would be more trustworthy than politicians or salesmen. I will make a bargain with you. You show me that you are doing your research for me—to help me become freer, more self-understanding, better able to control myself—and I will make myself available to you in any way you ask. And I will not play jokes and tricks on you. I do not want to be controlled, not by your or anyone else. And I do not want to control other people. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

I do not want you to help other people to understand how I am or can be “controlled,” so that they can then control me. Show me that you are for me, and I will show myself to you. You work for me, Mr. E, and I will truly work for you. Between us, we may produce a psychology that is more authentic and more liberating. Some lead an austere life and emaciate themselves; some give clear instructions to their disciples; some rule kingdoms quite justly and rightly; some openly hold disputations with other schools of thought; some write down their teachings and experiences; others simulate ignorance; a few do even responsible actions; but all these are famous as wise beings in the World. Some of the enlightened ones sit as recluses in prayer, others travel and preach, still others create centers where they teach, a fourth class heal the sick, and a fifth write. Each does what one’s tendency or mission dictates. The sage may sit under a village tree, head an ashram, or live as a sequestered hermit. One may also live in a luxurious palace, head a business organization, or farm land. These things are not the point, which is one’s consciousness of divine presence. The World, its pleasures and treasures, does not deceive one: one sees through its values even if one is active in the midst of it. These powers will seep into the physical plane by drawing upon the power of the ley lines as well as the power hidden within nature. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

Turning the cord inside our represents backward knowledge and the passage of the consciousness from the limited confines of the body into the other Worlds unseen by the masses. This is to gain the power to move though Worlds to create change within this realm of illusory limits, to make things easy. To help fuel and facilitate the process of soul introspection and open up psychic vision while also providing a more internal endurance needed to face this World. Understand that you are in control. Negative energy that attacks you in this realm are gnats to be swatted, despite how others may be tormented by them. They are reflections of their fear, not yours and you do not have to have anything to do with such folly. The infernal forces will gain momentum in the direction of becoming your allies in creation. Oppressive circumstance that may be experienced here becomes tension to be harnessed and mastered for your own liberation. It becomes a tool within your toolbox of becoming. Like all of these realms it is your will and personal power which can liberate you. Ground this power by investing time in the corporeal plane toward consciously applying effort toward ascent and personal evolution. Look for obstacles to overcome for the sake of overcoming them alone. Do hard thing. Become superior. Work harder, exercise harder, pray longer. Run until you sweat and keep running. Push yourself to the Heavenly extremes until it hurts. Then keep moving through the torment to further connect to the powers of Heaven so you can access them. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

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Is Life Only a Stream of Random Events Following One Another Haphazardly? Or is there an Order, a Meaning, a Purpose Behind it All?

October 22, 2019 12:43 am

You do not know the meaning of philosophical insight, or spiritual engagement, or true growth. People struggle to instill in their children some private sense of honor or dignity which will help the child survive. This means, of course, that they must struggle, stolidly, incessantly, to keep this sense alive in themselves, in spite of the insults, the indifferences, and the cruelty they are certain to encounter in their working day. They patiently browbeat the landlord into fixing the heat, the plaster, the plumbing; this demands prodigious patients; nor is patience usually enough. In trying to make their hovels habitable, they are perpetually throwing good money after bad. Such frustration, so long endured, is driving many strong, admirable men and woman whose only crimes is their culture or lack of affluence to the very gate of paranoia. One remembers them from another time—playing handball in the playground, going to church, wondering if they were going to be promoted at school. One remembers their wedding day. And one sees where the girl is now—vainly looking for salvation from some other embittered, trussed, and struggling boy—and sees the all-but-abandoned children in the streets. A ghetto can be improved in one way only: out of existence. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

Ignoring the less fortunate or making fun of them is no one to justify one’s own crimes. This perpetual justification empties the heart of all human feeling. The emptier our hearts become, the greater will be our crimes. The country will not change until it re-examines itself and discovers what it really means by freedom. In the meantime, generations keep being born, bitterness is increased by incompetence, pride, and folly, and the World shrinks around us. It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one’s own: in the face of one’s victim, one sees oneself. Walk through the streets of America and see what we, this nation, have becomes. You can see that the whole force of social sanction would fall behind the king to protect one’s definitions of social custom and his ritual prerogatives; otherwise the tribe would lose well-being and life. We might say that the safeguarding of custom imposes tyranny because of the need for the king or queen’s power. The more successful a king or queen, the more prerogatives one could enjoy: one was judged by results. If the harvest (or economy) were good the people were prepared to put up with a moderate amount of tyranny. Protection of custom and criminal jurisdiction go together so naturally, then, that we should not wonder that ritual centralization also came to mean control of the power to punish. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

Another large step in the evolution of inequality seems to me to be summed up here. To us a police force is part of life, as inevitable, it seems, as death and taxes; we rely on the police to punish those who hurt us. However, it has not always been so. In simple egalitarian societies there is no police force, no way to settle a wrong except to do so yourself, family against family. However, if there is no police force to enforce the law, there is also none to coerce you for any reason. You have to stay alert, but you are also freer. A police force is usually drawn up temporarily for special occasions and then disbanded. However, the result, alas, is not as innocent as it must have seemed to people living during these transitions. What they were doing was bartering away social equality and a measure of personal independence for prosperity and order. There was now noting to stop the state from taking more and more functions and prerogatives into itself, from developing a class of special begins at the center and inferior ones around it, or from beginning to give these special beings a larger share of the good things of the Earth. What we see is that private interests became more and more separated from public interests—until today we hardly know what is public interest. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

Students who look for the point at which economic activity and social morality begin to pull apart usually focus on the potlatch: it was evidently around the process of redistribution that gift giving gradually changed into grabbing and keeping. As the power figures got more and more ascendancy vis-à-vis the group, y could take a fixed portion of the surplus with the involvement of the people. And this is what we are seeing in California, a state that boasts about have a $21 billion budget surplus, but also has the highest taxes, an affordable housing crisis, and a huge homeless population. The classic potlatch was a redistribution ceremonial pure and simple. The object was to humiliate rivals, to stand out as tall as possible as a big person, a hero. At the same time, the grander was the expiation before the community and the gods to whom the goods were offered. Both the individual urge to maximum self-feeling and the community well-being were served. The chiefs became the principal takers and destroyers of goods. In this was a feudal structure could naturally develop. Another suggestive way of looking at this development is to see it as a shift of the balance of power, away from a dependence on the invisible World of the gods to a flaunting of the visible World of things. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

Again, it is only natural that once the god became visible in the person of the king or queen, one’s powers became those of this World—visible, temporal powers in the place of invisible, eternal ones. One would come to measure one’s power by the piles of things one actually possessed, by the glory of one’s person, and not, as before, by the efficiency of the ritual technics for the renewal of nature. Keep in mind that it is entirely for the seeker to set one’s own rate of progress. Even the being who is interested only in theoretical discussion thereby, and to that extent, promotes one’s own good. If through inclination or circumstances one prefers to let one’s aspirations remain only at the level of reading and discussion, that at lest is better than being entirely uninterested in them. It will be for one to decide whether to endeavour to obtain the fullest realization of one’s aspirations in practical life. There is room for both classes on this Quest. One should not be discouraged because others have gone ahead on the path more quickly than one, any more than one should be gratified because some have gone ahead more slowly than one, for the fact is that the goal one seeks is already within one’s grasp. One is the Overself that one seeks to unite with, and the time it seems to take to realize this is itself an illusion of the mind. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

Let one, therefore, go forward at one’s own rate and within the limits of one’s own strength, leaving the result in the hands of God. If one imposes on themselves an impossible ideal, an unattainable standard, they must expect the sense of frustration that will overtake them later. It is better an aspirant should know one’s limitations now than that, filing to do so, one should know tragic disappointments and unutterable despair later. It is better in such a case that one should realize that one is engaged on a long search whose end one cannot reach in this incarnation. How can the naïve inexperienced beginner fail to commit errors and neglect precautions; how can one not be deceived by one’s own imaginations or puzzled by the contradictions and paradoxes which best this path? The newly awakened aspirant should search for clues without losing one’s balance or overreaching new enthusiasm. Of what use is it to reproach oneself again and again for being what one is? How could one have been otherwise, given one’s heredity, environment and history? If I complain I have no will of my own, that people are influencing me in subtle and mysterious ways, you will accuse me of being paranoid and direct me to a psychotherapist. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

If I put on a white laboratory coat, and assert that you have no will f your own, that your action and experience can be manipulated, predicted, and controlled, then I am recognized as a scientific psychologist, and honored. This is most peculiar. A revolution is going on in psychology. A different image of humans is being tried as a guide to research, theory, and application. Over years, theorists have conceptualized humans as machines; as an organism comparable to rates, pigeons, and monkeys; as a communication system; as an hydraulic system; as a servo-mechanism; as a computer—in short, one has been viewed by psychologist as an analogue of everything but what one is: a person. Humans are, indeed, like all those things; but first of all they are a free, intentional subject. The consumers of psychological writing tended to take our models too seriously and actually started to treat people as if they were the modes that theorists used only as tentative guides to inquiry. However, no, psychologist are using their experience of themselves as persons as a guide to exploring and understanding the experience of others. This is not the death of “objective,” scientific psychology. Rather, it may prove to be the birth of a scientifically informed psychology of human persons—a humanistic psychology. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

Humanistic psychology is a goal, not a doctrine. It owns its renaissance to the growing conviction that current and past approaches to the study of humans have reached their limits in elucidating human’s behavior and their “essence.” It is a growing corpus of knowledge relating to the questions, “What is a human being, and what might humans become?” Thus, humanistic psychology can be regarded in analogy with industrial psychology or the psychology of mental health or of advertising. These specialties are systems of knowledge bearing on particular families of questions: for instance, what variables affect morale, or the output of the workers, or the maintenance of wellness, or the purchasing behavior of potential customers. Humanistic psychology asks, “What are the possibilities of humans? And from among these possibilities, what is optimum human, and what conditions most probably account for one’s attainment and maintenance of these optima? If psychologist aim to predict and control human behavior and experience, as in their textbooks they claim, they are assigning humans to the same ontological status as weather, stars, minerals, or lower forms of animal life. We do not question anyone’s right to seek understanding in order to better control one’s physical environment and adapt it to one’s purposes. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

We properly challenge any human’s right to control the behavior and experience of one’s fellows. To the extent that psychologist illumine human existence to bring it under the deliberate control of someone other than the person one’s self, to that extent they are helping to undermine some person’s freedom in order to enlarge the freedom of someone else. If psychologist reveal knowledge of “determiners” of human conduct to people other than the ones from who they obtained this understanding, and if they conceal this knowledge from its source, the volunteer subjects (who have offered themselves up to the scientist’s “Look”), they put the recipients of the knowledge in a privileged position. They grant them an opportunity to manipulate beings without their knowledge or consent. Thus, advertisers, business people, military leaders, politicians, the new media al seek to learn more about the determiners of human conduct, in order to gain power and advantage. If they can sway human behavior by manipulating the conditions which mediate it, they can get large numbers of people to forfeit their own interests and serve the interests of the manipulator. Only if the ones being manipulated are kept mystified as to what is going on, and if their experience of their own freedom is blunted, such secret manipulation of the masses or of an individual by some other person is possible. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

Psychologist face a choice. We may elect to continue to treat our people as objects of a study for the benefit of some elite; or we may choose to learn about determiners of the human conditions in order to discover ways to overcome or subvert them, so as to enlarge the person—that is, everyone’s—freedom. If we opt for the latter, our path is clear. Our ways of conducting psychological research will have to be altered. Our definition of the purpose of psychology will have to change. And our ways of reporting our findings, as well as the audiences to whom the reports are directed, will have to change. We shall have to state openly whether we are psychologists-for-institutions or psychologists-for-person. The trouble with scientific psychologists is that many have, in a sense, been “bought” by the court, the media, and businesses to represent their agenda. We have in our hands the incredible power to discover conditions for behavior or for ways of being in the World. We have catalogued of the factors which have a determining effect on human behavior and on our condition. We know that, in every experiment that we analyze, there is always an error term, “residual variance”; and we seek to exhaust this residual variance to the best of our ability. We get better at it as we learn how to identify and measure more and more relevant variables. The trouble is, as I see it, that if we exhaust all the variance, the subjects of our study will be not a being, a human person, but rather a robot. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

Scientific psychology has actually sought means of artificially reducing variance—humanness—among beings, so that they will be more manipulable. Our commendable efforts (from technical viewpoint) in the fields of human engineering, teaching methods, motivation research (in advertising), and salesmanship have permitted practitioners in those realms to develop stereotyped methods that work at controlling outcomes—outcomes that are good for business or political, but necessarily good for the victim. We have taught people how to shape humans into a way of being that makes them useful. We have forgotten that an image of humans as useful grows out of a more fundamental image of humans as the being who can assume many modes of being, when it is of importance to one to do so. I think that a scientific psychologist committed to the aims of humanistic psychology would utilize one’s talents for a different purpose. For example, if individuality and full flowering growth as a person were values, one would seek means of maximizing or increasing the odds for maximization of these ways of being. An example of the biased use of scientific know-how is brainwashing. The brainwasher, through scientific means, seeks to insure that the prisoner will behave and believe as one’s captors wish. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

The same psychologist who invented the means of brainwashing know how to prevent it from happening. The latter class of knowledge is more in keeping with the aims of humanistic psychology and should be more avidly sought and then applied in more realms than presently is the case, if the humanistic psychology is to be furthered. Learning about human nature is to create change in our lives. Since the beginnings of recorded history, we have been enslaved over gold and other resources. Psychology is supposed to defile the intentions of this desire to enslave. We must learn to gain the power to move through Worlds to create change within this realm of illusory limits. To make things simple and easy. The mental stress of this plane of existence can cause madness as one observes the chaos within the collective consciousness and the effects that it has upon the collective corporeal life experience. This realm can be an accumulation of negative and useless mental garbage which is an abomination to the potential of human mental faculties and the inherent potential of the mind. How odd it seems that psychology has learned more about humans at their worst than at their best. How sad it seems that psychology has employed its powers of truth-finding to serve ignoble masters. I would like to propose that we do not wait until the scarcity of “full-functioning beings” becomes a national emergency. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

Rather, I would propose that we psychologist reconcile our aims and commitment to truth and our adherence to the canons of scientific inquiry with our human concerns that beings be free, that they grow. I propose that we commence an all-out program of investigation on many fronts to seek answers to the questions humanistic psychology is posing. For example, we need psychologist with the most informed imaginations and talent for ingenious experimentation to wrestle with such questions as, “What are the outer limits of human potential for transcending biological pressures, social pressures, and the impact on a person of one’s past conditioning?”; “What developmental and interpersonal and situational conditions conduce to courage, creativity, transcendent behavior, love, laughter, commitment to truth, beauty, justice, and virtue?” These questions themselves, and even my proposal that we address them, once struck me as less than manly, as tender-hearted and sentimental. I would never have dared pose them to mist of my mentors during my undergraduate and graduate-student says. We are supposed to be tough and disciplined, which meant that we were only to study questions about some very limited class of behavior, not questions about the larger human concerns. “Leave those to the philosophers, minister, and politicians,” we are told. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

Questions about the image of humans smacked too much of philosophy and were not our proper concern. Actually, our teacher intended only that we learn the tools of our trade, not that we stifle our humanistic concerns; but they produced that outcome anyway. I am making a plea for the powers of rigorous inquiry to be devoted to questions, answers to which will inform a growing, more viable image of beings as human being with potentiality, not solely biological or socially determined being. Through being exposed to the mental chaos over time, one will begin to adjust to the torment of one’s experiences through personal evolution. One will develop severe empathy and will begin to perceive all of the mental weakness of those around them and all the emotional turmoil that comes alone with it. This will enable one to perceive it within one’s self in order to begin ridding oneself of it. If one can remain centered in self, one can transmute this weakness into power. It is at this point that one can utilize strength of mind and will to begin to harness and control this infernal landscape and all infernal powers which dwell within it by becoming one with it. This is the only way to be liberated from it. To ground this power within one should apply methods of personal mental control. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

When researchers are transparently pledged to further the freedom and self-actualizing of their subjects, rather than be unwitting servants of the leaders of institutions, then they will deserve to be and to be seen as recipients of the secrets of human being and possibility. I can envision a time when psychologist will be the guardians of the most intimate secrets of human possibilities and experience and possessors of knowledge as to how beings can create one’s destiny because beings have showed one; and I hope that if we “sell” these secrete to advertisers, business people, politicians, mass educators, and the military, we shall not do so until after we have informed our subjects, after we have tried to “turn them on,” to enlarge their awareness of being misled and manipulate. I hope, in short, that we turn out to be servants and guardians of individual freedom, growth, and fulfillment, and not spies for the institutions that pay our salaries and research costs in order to get a privileged peep at human grist. Indeed, we may have to function for a time as counterspies, or double spies—giving reports about our subjects to our colleagues and to institutions, and giving reports back to our subjects as to the ways in which institutions seek to control and predict their behavior for their (the institutions’) ends. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

You will begin to notice how the power of speech is indeed abused and taken for granted. You will start to perceive the vibrations of words mold the very reality which surrounds others. Our words have power and are an expression of true will and divine potential. However, words today are wasted and the power of them is therefore minimized. This minimizes our collective power as a race. Newspapers are written at a sixth grade level so that the subtle nuances and intricacies of communication cannot be learned. Slang and useless words with no meaning are prevalent. This negative energy is accumulated and manifestation of the energy of those unless words happens very fast. One must strive to become peaceful and expand beyond the voice of chaos through silence. You will adjust to the burden. At this point you can generate internal power through silence and attempt to speak order into this World and compel the infernal power which dwell here. With practice, one will become successful. As a result, your words within the physical plane will gain much more power. To ground this power, listen your conscience as it guides you in methods of harnessing the vibrations of the words of others to fuel your own power of creation. Work toward respecting the power of speech. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

Respect speech as your power and speak with purpose. Invest your energy with word instead of spending it on find solace in silence. Much energy is wasted every day by the masses by investing energy into things that do not serve them. Adults spend hours a day playing video games and watching television. We get into useless power struggles for the sake of meaningless dominative purpose with powerless people. Do not become programmed to harm others, nor lie, cheat and steal through consumerism, jealousy and imposed attachments to things. That is the way to the realm of torment and slavery which seeps into the physical plane drip by drip by drip grounding us as a whole to a lower consciousness, which results in the stifling of our evolution and ascent and limits our awareness. “And they did humble themselves even in the depths of humility; and they did cry mightily to God; yea, even all the day long did they cry unto their God that he would deliver them out of their affliction,” reports Mosiah 21.13. The originality and individuality which are proofs of the prophet’s creativity will define themselves by one’s differences from other seers, even though some have drawn from one and the same MIND. These differences are inevitable and must appear. No two humans are completely alike. And having a beautiful home makes life much more enjoyable, it also helps children perform better at school and makes adults perform better at work. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

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The Power of the Ballot We Need in Sheer Self-Defence—Else What Shall Save Us from a Second Slavery?

October 21, 2019 3:33 am

It 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

And 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

Just 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

One 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

Here 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

In 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

A 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

However, 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

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

Still, 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

The 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

If 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

These 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

Innocence 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

Because 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

This 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

The 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

For 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

No, 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

Being 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 20

As the Essence of Courage is to Stake One’s Life on a Possibility, so the Essence of Faith is to Believe that the Possibility Exists!

October 18, 2019 1:28 am

So, nobody ever accused me of acquiring any real wisdom in my two hundred years on this Earth. I know only one way to proceed. Previous investigations have pointed to the multiplicity of causes of loneliness. Those experiencing loneliness tend to be widowed and single people, living alone, in their eighties rather than in their sixties, they tend to be men rather than women and to be the relatively infirm. Loneliness cannot be regarded as the simple direct result of social circumstances, but is rather an individual response to an external situation to which other seniors may react quite differently. There seems to be no single cause of severe loneliness in those in retirement age. In several respect the present inquiry reached similar results. Forty-sic percent of widowed people said they were very or sometimes lonely, 42 percent of those living alone, 53 percent of those in their late seventies and eighties and 43 percent of those who were infirm, compared with 27 percent in the sample as a whole. However, it is possible that less emphasis should be given to personal differences and to a multiplicity of causes. The results also suggested that a single social factor may be fundamental to loneliness. This is the recent deprivation of the company of a close relative, usually a husband or wife or a child, through death, illness or migration. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

Examination of individual interview-reports showed that of the 56 people saying they were very or sometimes lonely, 28 had been recently bereaved and 17 separated from children. This seemed to be the chief cause of their loneliness. A further 11 had experiences other drastic changes in family circumstances. It is necessary to consider these lonely people. All but four of the 28 who had been recently bereaved had lost a husband or wife within the previous 10 years. “No one know what loneliness is till your partner happens to go.” “You do not realize it until you know it. But loneliness is the worst thing you can suffer in life.” The men in particular talked about their bereavement with very deep feeling. “I miss her. Every time I look over there—that is her seat. People kept telling me to have someone to look after me but I said to myself, there will never be another woman who will take her place.” Three of them did not talk, they wept. Mr. Heart had lost his wife seven years earlier. He lived with an unmarried son but he had no daughter. “Sometimes I get lonely. I think of her. There is not a day passes but se is in my mind. When she died, I do not know how I stood on my feet. You do not know what it is when you do not have a wife. I wish I had a daughter. If you had a daughter it would put your in mind of your wife. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

“Sometimes I think I hear her calling in the next room. She was what you call exceptional, exceptional good. You never had to run round any public house for her. My son still goes and puts flowers on her grave. You cannot tell how you miss someone until they go. Death is a terrible thing, to lose someone you love.” One of the major consequences of a wife’s death was that the man saw less of his children. He acknowledged it was the mother who held the family together. “When my missus was alive, I had to come and have tea in the bedroom because there was not room in here. The place was crowded out with them (married children and their families on Saturdays and Sundays).” “My daughter used to come round often when my wife was alive, but I do not see so much of them now. But they like to know I am comfortable and being looed after.” Widowers in fact saw less of their children, particularly of their sons, than married men and married or widowed women, as judged by average frequency of contact. However, this falling-off did not apply to all a widower’s children. A close relationship with one child was usually maintained. Several lived with a single or married daughter, or visited a married daughter daily, and then described the pleasure grandchildren gave them. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

“My young granddaughter likes swinging and I pick her up and she swings between my legs. And then she climbs up on me. Playing with my grandchildren is my greatest pleasure.” They found some consolation here. “I am a grandfather,” said one man, “and that is the only goodness I get out of life.” The loss of the marriage partner was not quite such a disaster for women. They had always depended less on husbands than husbands on them, and they found it easier to console themselves wit their families. Nevertheless, many of them were lonely, particularly if their husbands had died recently and particularly if infirmity or shortage of relatives prevented them from finding comfort readily in companionship of others. One woman’s husband had died eight years previously. She had no children. “I get so lonely I could fill up the teapot with tears.” Mrs. Pridy was very infirm and her husband had died only a year previously, when she was 80. She lived with a daughter and grandchildren. “I sit here for hours and hours and sometimes thinking about it. I get depressed and I start crying. We was always together. I can remember even his laughing. “Come on, girl,” he’s say, “don’t get sitting about. Let’s liven ‘em up.” They say what is to be will be. I never thought he would…But we have all got to go. A good many of them do not even know he is gone (neighbors). I sit here for hours thinking about him. I cannot get over it.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

We cannot all have the strength to live like a Christ. However, something worthwhile is within reach of all of us. Let us therefore aim at the immediately practicable, which in its turn will lead to something more. It is foolish to waste time and strength unavailingly grasping for what is out of reach. Almost every man and woman whose husband or wife has died within the previous five years, compared with half between five and ten years and a quarter over that limit, felt lonely. The shorter the period since the death the more likely were people to complain of loneliness. Although practically everyone felt lonely at first after about five or six years the presence or not of an affectionate family seemed to determine how long such feelings persisted. Four people had lost a child and not a husband recently. Three were women widowed in the war who said a son had died in the previous few years. One had lost two sons in the war and another three years previously. “I could cry my heart out sometimes when I sit here.” There was also a married woman who son had been killed at Arnhem. “He is never out of my mind. I always see him in my mind and they are still talking about wars.” In speaking of the loss of children and other relatives it was notable how long people felt grief and how indelible was the memory of these people. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

There is a point in our lives in which our minds must fall back baffled by the great mystery which surrounds us. Reflect and reason, search and probe as much as one can, one can go no farther. However, this does not mean that life is meaningless or that the Universe is meaningless. Only a being superior to humans might possibly penetrate this mystery. The “In Memoriam” column of a local East London newspaper provides many examples of the feelings of relatives for those who had died, some of them several years previously. In the following three illustrations, printed in the newspaper, only the names have been changed. Howard—To the beautiful memory of my beloved daughter, Alice, who feel asleep June 17^th. Time takes away the edge of grief, but memories turn back every leaf. Ever in our thoughts—Mum and all. Talewill—In treasured memory of our dear Mum, who fell asleep June 7^th. Not a day do we forget you, Mum, in our hearts you are ever near, loved, remembered, longed for always, brining many a silent tear. Sadly missed—Loving sons and daughters. Huggins—In loving memory of our dear nephew who passed away June 6^th. Sad and sudden was the call, to one so dearly loved by all, this month of June comes with regret, it brings back a tragedy we shall never forget. –From Aunt Caroline, Uncle Bill, Uncle Herbert, Uncle Steve and cousins Mary, Alice, and children. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

After bereavement, recent separation from children and grandchildren was the most important reason for loneliness, affecting 17 of the 56 people. Eleven of the 17 had no contact with a child living in the district although recently at least one child had been there. What happened was that, if the last child to get married moved out of the district or was unable to find a home in it and there were no other children living nearby, the senior greatly missed their daily companionship, particularly if widowed. A further three seniors had a son living nearby but the daughters had recently moved away. And three widows who had been living with married children now lived alone, although some of their children still lived in the same district. We must work within our own inescapable limits. It is futile to nurture wild ambitions which one is not qualified to realize. In short, let one know oneself. One may then have a key to better knowledge of other things, especially of the meaning of one’s own life. If needs be in the hope of attainting truth, it is only the few, after all, who have the inborn inclination to sacrifice everything. What of the lesser souls who have no such passport, whose temperament, environment, family, or position forbids them from aspiring heroically to the highest goal? #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

Can we hold no hope for lesser soul who are blocked from obtaining the highest goal? It is to be a cause of all or nothing? The answer is that nobody is asked to undertake more than lies within one’s strength or circumstances. There is room here for those with humble aims who do not feel equal to more than the slightest philosophic effort. This is not possible let them accept these teachings on simple faith alone. Let them absorb a few leading tenets which makes special appeal to them or which are more easily understandable by them than others. If they do not have time or tendency to practise more, let the practise a few minutes’ prayer only once or twice weekly. Let them keep in only occasional touch by letter or otherwise with someone who represents in oneself a definite personal attainment which, although beyond their own reach, is not beyond their own veneration. Thus they take the first step to establish right tendencies. If however they are unable to do any of these things, let them not despair. There still remains the path of occasional service. Let individual give from time to time, as suits their capacity or convenience, a little help in kind or toil or coin to those who are themselves struggling against great odds to enlighten a World sorrow-struck through ignorance. For thus they will earn a gift of glad remembrance and internal notice whose unique value will be out of all proportion of that is offered. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

The karmic benefit of such offering will return to them, and even if it be long deferred they will have the intangible satisfaction which comes from all service placed on the Overself’s altar. If one is unable to gather enough strength to seek the Truth, then let one seek it for the sake of the services it can render to one. Although hardly any seeker can perfect oneself in the quest’s varied requirements, all seekers can develop something of each needed quality. If the regeneration sought is to be that also, the change in thinking and living habits must theoretically be a total one. However, the compulsions of earning a livelihood, fitting into the local community, and adjusting to family opposition make this impossible in all but exceptional cases. Beings who have to take these actualities into their consideration in practice attempt to compromise with hard necessity and present environment. This does not mean that they discard the truth—they must indeed keep it loyally as the Ideal—but that they relate it to the prevailing conditions and somehow arrive at some kind of a reconciliation between the two. Nor does it mean that the teaching is impractical, for the few exceptions already mentioned are able to put it into practice a hundred percent simply because they are willing and able to pay the heavy price of isolation for doing so. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

It means that although the teaching is adequate to all circumstances, its devotees are unwilling to court the extra suffering and struggle involved in fighting the insanity and tension of those existing circumstances. The latter tend to promote materialism and are best suited to a materialistic way of thinking and living. Those who, while reading its true character aright, submit to it and refuse to withdraw from it, are entitled to do so—if at the same time they have the clear understanding that the higher illuminations, as well as the permanent one, will have to remain inaccessible to them. Is there not enough to do in climbing to the lesser one, and are they not sufficiently glorious rewarding? There are many who are not seeking for the quickest attainment of the highest goal. They feel, quite pardonably, that the demands of training for it are too great for their modest equipment. However, they are seeking for occasional inspiration and they would be content with just a few glimpses during their lifetime. Although these people are not fully committed to the Quest, they are in general sympathetic with it. If one feels that rising to a higher level of consciousness would be too much for one, then one could simple try to become a better being. If one has to live within one’s limitations, it is some kind of a victory over self for beings to be willing to live without distress. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

However, suppose on the other hand, that instead of giving way to the nightmare view you cling to it that the World is not the ultimatum. Suppose you find yourself a very well spring, of zeal and the virtue of exiting by truth faith as soldiers live by courage; as by strength of heart, the sailor sights with roaring seas. Supposed, however thickly evils crown upon you, that your unconquerable subjectivity proves to be their match, and that you find more wonderful joy than any passive pleasure can bring int trusting on these terms? What sort of a thing would life really be, with your qualities ready for a tussle with it, if not it only brought fair weather and gave these higher faculties of yours no scope? Please remember that optimism and pessimism are definitions of the World, and that our own reactions on the World, small as they are in bulk, are integral parts of the whole thing, and necessarily help to determine the definition. They may even be decisive help to determine the definition. A large mass can have its unstable equilibrium overturned by the addition of a feather’s weight; a long phrase may have its sense reversed by the addition of the three letters n-o-t. This life is worth living, we can say, since it is what we make it, from the moral point of view; and we are determined to make it from that point of view, so far as we have anything to do with it, a success. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

Now, in this description of faiths that verify themselves, I have assumed that our faith in an invisible order is what inspires those efforts and that patience which makes this visible order good for moral beings. Our faith in the seen World’s goodness (goodness now meaning fitness for successful moral and religious life) has verified itself by leaning on our faith in the unseen World. However, will our faith in the unseen World similarly verify itself? Who knows? Once more it is a case of maybe; and once more maybes are the essence of the situation. I confess that I do not see why the very existence of an invisible World may not in part depend on their personal response which any one of us may make to the religious appeal. God himself, in short, may draw vital strength and increase of very being from our fidelity. If they mean anything, for my own part, I do not know what the sweat and blood and tragedy of this life mean. If this life be not a real fight, in which something is eternally gained for the Universe by success, it is no better than a game of private theatricals from which one may withdraw at will. However, it feels like a real fight—as if there were something really wild in the Universe which we, with all our idealities and faithfulnesses, are needed to redeem; and first of all to redeem our own hearts from atheisms and fears. For such a half-wild, half-saved Universe our nature is adapted. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

The deepest thing in our name is this Binnenleben (as a German doctor lately has called it), this dumb region of the heart in which we dwell alone with our willingnesses and unwillingnesses, our faiths and fears. As through the cracks and crannies of caverns those waters exude from the Earth’s bosom which then form the fountain-heads of springs, so in these crepuscular depths of personality the sources of all our outer deeds and decisions take their rise. Here is our deepest organ of communication with the nature of things; and compared with these concrete movements of our soul all abstract statements and scientific arguments—the veto, for example which the strict positivist pronounced upon our faith—sound to us like mere chatterings of teeth. For here possibilities, not finished facts, are the realities with which we have actively to deal; as the essence of courage is to stake one’s life on a possibility, so the essence of faith is to believe that the possibility exists. These, then are my last words to you: Be not afraid of life. Believe that life is worth living, and your belief will help create the fact. The scientific proof that you are right may not be clear before the day of judgment (or some stage of being which that expression may serve to symbolize) is reached. However, the faithful fighter of this hour, or the beings that then and there will represent them, may then turn to the faint-hearted, who here decline to go on, with. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

Those who feel that there are too many evils in the cotemporary ways of living and of earning a livelihood, who sincerely deplore these evils, nevertheless often feel also that there is little of nothing they can do about it until society as a whole develops new and better ways. However, this is only a first look at their situation; it reveals the appearance of it but not the reality. Do they really need to wait until the unlikely event of wholesale and voluntary amendment takes place all around them? For the challenge today, as will be made more clear as time goes on, is not a social but an individual one. More beings are free to take the first steps towards their own liberation from these evils than they usually realize. When their caution becomes excessive, it also becomes a vice. It may prevent them from making mistakes, but it also prevents them from doing anything at all—leading, in fact, to a kind of inertia. Even if they cannot do more, they can make a start to apply new ideals and then see what happens. Will yourself to being down the dense veil of illusion and limitation. The false light and energy of creation will be consumed by the power of truth. This will enable one to become a perceiver of spiritual vision and insight found outside of this World of gross limitation and stasis. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

Remember that in theory reality cannot exist outside of the observer. Therefore, to erase it from perception is to weaken it and make it more malleable. The more people do this exercise the less hold the limits of this World may have upon us as a collective. It is a powerful dynamic. One can perform this by itself throughout the day, and over times you will be surprised at the results attained. We are using the limits of matter to our benefit making it bow to us and serve our purpose by expanding possibility within this World. Feel God’s eternal grace begin to close in on you until you begin to feel it touch you. Feel it devouring any weaknesses in the soul. Feel it healing any spiritual wounds that may be effecting the power and expansion of self. If one has yet to develop their psychic faculties enough to directly perceive and hear God being conjured, observing the many blessings in your life will begin to open up doorways within the mind for more direct communication. It must be understood that when a force is stirred it does indeed answer. It does indeed respond and it is a great mistake to not come to this realization. The trick is in learning to observe and perceive the spirit or force by training the mind to do so. The adept must learn to listen. “Wherefore, having this perfect knowledge of God, he could not be kept from within the veil; therefore he saw Jesus; and he did minister unto him” reports #Ether 3.20. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

It is Well to Remember that the Revealing God is Also the Concealing God for One!

October 15, 2019 11:56 pm

Visibility, significance, recognition! All that I had ever wanted when I took to the architectural design studio, all that I had ever wanted as a boy heading to Paris with a head full of dreams, all I had ever wanted I now had right here with my brothers and sisters! I had all that I have ever hoped for, and I had it here and now in this place and amongst my own people. The old human story simply did not matter. I had this, I had this moment, I had this recognition, and this visibility and this significance. And how could I ask for anything more? How could I look from right t left, at immortals who had witnessed all the epochs of recorded history, and want more than this? How could I gaze at immortals who had been drawn to this very spot by something more immense than they had ever witnessed, and long for more than the recognition they were now giving me? The victory of our own tribe to embrace one another, and let go of the hatred that had divided us for centuries, was my victory. After the house has schooled its tenants, there is still much uncertainty about the proper way to behave in this new and unique environment. What the house does not do, the neighbors finish off. By their example they indicate the code to be followed. Hence, if one person has a refrigerator, next-door thinks she should have one; if A has a BMW M5, B wants one too. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23

“If,” says Mrs. Abbot, “you make your garden one way, they will knock theirs to pieces to make theirs like it. It is the same with the curtains—if you put up new curtains, they have new curtains in a couple of months. And if someone buys a new Persian rug they have to hang it on the line so you can see it.” The struggles for possessions is one in which comparisons with other people are constantly made. Some of those who have achieved a more complete respectability look down on the others; those with less money resent the more successful and keep as far away from them as they can. “The whole answer—the whole trouble is, many men cannot earn enough. They have to hide in the closet or behind the curtains. They have got a certain amount of pride.” Resentment may also produce an aggressive spirit. “This place is all right for middle-class people, people with a bit of money. It is no good for less affluent people—I think they have all got money troubles, that is why they are so spiteful to each other.” We have been arguing that, the possession of a new house having sharpened the desire for other material goods, the striving for them becomes a competitive affair. The house is a major part of the explanation. However, there is more to it than that. In Bethnal Green people, as we said earlier, commonly belong to a close network of personal relationship. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23

These people know intimately dozens of other local people living near at hand, their school-friends, their work-mates, their pub-friends, and above all their relatives. They know them well because they have known them over a long period of time. Common family residence since childhood is the matrix of friendship. In this situation, Bethnal Greeners are not, as we see it, concerned to any marked extent with what is usually thought of as “status.” It is true, of course, that people have different incomes, different kinds of jobs, different kinds of houses—in this respect there is much less uniformity than at Greenleigh—even different standards of education. However, these attributes are not so important in evaluating others. It is personal characteristics which matter. The first thing they think of about William is not that he has a “fridge” and a BMW M5 sports sedan. They see him as a bad-tempered, or a real good sport, or the man with a way with women, or one of the best boxers of the Repton Club, or the person who got married to Ava last year. In a community of long-standing, status, in so far as it is determined by job and income and education, is more or less irrelevant to a person’s worth. He is judged instead, if he is judged at all, more in the round, as person with the usual mixture of all kinds of qualities, some good, some bad, many indefinable. He is more of a life-portrait than a figure on a scale. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23

People in Bethnal Green are less concerned with “getting on.” Naturally they want to have more money and a better education for their children. The borough belongs to the same society as the estate, one in which standards and aspirations are moving upward together. However, the urge is less compulsive. They stand well with plenty of other people whether or not they have net curtains and fine pram. Their credit with others does not depend so much on their “success” as on the subtleties of behavior in their many face-to-face relationships. They have the security of belonging to a series of small and overlapping groups, and from their fellows they get the respect they need. How different is Greenleigh we have already seen. Where nearly everyone is a stranger, there is no means of uncovering personality. People cannot be judged by their personal characteristics: a person can certainly see that his or her neighbor works in one’s back garden in one’s short sleeves and one’s wife goes down to the shops in a blue coat, with two canvas bags: but that is not much of a guide to character. Judgment must therefore rest on the trappings of the being rather than on the being oneself. If people have nothing else to go by, they judge from one’s appearance, one’s house, or even one’s Minimotor. One is evaluated accordingly. Once the accepted standards are few, and mostly to do with wealth, they become the standards by which “status” is judged. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23

In Bethnal Green it is not easy to give a man a single status, because he has so many; he has, in addition to the status of citizen, a low status as a scholar, high as a darts-player, low as a bargainer, and high as a story-teller. In Greenleigh, he has something much more nearly approaching one status because something much more nearly approaching one criterion is used his possessions. Or rather we should say that the family has one status. The small group which lives inside the same house hangs together, and where people are known as “from No. 22” or “37,” their identity being traced to the house which is the fixed entity, each one of them affect the credit of the other. The children, in particular, must be well dressed so that neighbors, and even more school friends and teachers, will think well of them, and of the parents. “We always see that the children look smart. At these new schools, you like them to go to school respectable. We like to keep them up to the standard out here.” The status is that of the family of marriage much more sharply than it is in Bethnal Green. In Bethnal Green the number of relatives who influence a person’s standing is much larger, and they are varied in their attributes. From a prominent local personality, a street-trader, say, a councilor, or a publican, a person can borrow prestige; but through another relative one may be associated with less enviable reputation. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23

One connection confers high status, another lone. It is therefore all the more difficult to give a person a single rating. On the other hand, the comparative isolation of the family at Greenleigh encourages the kind of simplified judgment of which we have been speaking. People at Greenleigh want to get on in the light of these simple standards, and they are liable to be more anxious about it just because they no loner belong to small local groups. Their relationships are window-to-window, not face-to-face. Their need for respect is just as strong as it ever was, but instead of being able to find satisfaction in actual living relationships, through the personal respect that accompanies almost any kind of respect is just as strong as it ever was, but instead of being able to find satisfaction in actual living relationships, through the personal respect that accompanies almost any steady human interaction, they have to turn the other kind of respect which is awarded, by some strange sort of common understanding, for the quantity and quality of possessions with which the person surrounds oneself. Those are the rules of the game and they are, under strong pressure from the neighbors, almost universally observed. Indeed, one of the most striking things about Greenleigh is the great influence the neighbors have, all the greater because they are anonymous. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23

Though people stay in their houses, they do in a sense belong to a strong compelling group. They do not now their judge personally but her influence is continuously felt. One might even suggest, to generalize, that the less the personal respect received in small group relations, the greater is the striving for the kind of impersonal respect embodied in a status judgment. The lonely man, fearing he is looked down on, becomes the acquisitive man; possession the balm to anxiety; anxiety the spur to unfriendliness. We took as out starting point people’s remarks—so frequent and vehement as to demand discussion—about the unfriendliness of their fellow residents. We have suggested two main explanation. Negatively, people are without the old relatives. Positively, they have a new house. In a life now house-centered instead of kinship centered, competition for status takes the form of a struggle for material acquisition. In the absence of small groups which join one family to another, in the absence of strong personal associations which extend from one household to another, people think that they are judged, and judge others, by the material standards which are the outward and visible mark of respectability. One may work toward enlightenment and inner freedom, to the aspiration which draws one most. Whatever helps consciousness come nearer to high moods is a useful spiritual path to someone. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23

One should take any approach which appeals to one, if it is morally worthy, and try to use what one can of it. Several different methods of spiritual development have been offered to humanity. Some have more merit than others and some are more effective than others. However, so much depends on the particular needs and status of each person, that the value of a method cannot be generalized with fairness. It is misleading to pick out any one way to the Overself and label it the best, or worse still, the only way. It is unfair to compare the merits of different ways. For the truth is that firstly each has a contribution to make, and finally each individual aspirant has one’s own special way. The claims that these simpler paths like devotion or repeating a declaration can lead to the goal, are neither true nor untrue. For they lead to the philosophic path which, in its own turn, leads directly to the goal. Is there a single teacher, prophet, messenger, or stain who has been universally acclaimed and universally followed? For that to be, all humankind would need the same outer background and inner status. Great or small there are certain differences between all persons. They cannot pursue the same ways, therefore we should let others take a different view in religion from ourselves. They very widely that it is an adventure for society if there exists as greater a diversity of approaches as possible—they are thus better able to suit particular needs. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23

Why should anyone be afraid of diversity in religious views, of variety in religious practices? Let heresies multiply! Let the sects flourish! For out of all this free competition, the seeker has a better chance to find truth. The modern seeker is fortunate in this: that one has a wealth of teachings to choose from—or by which to be bewildered. We must not only acknowledge the differences between beings but respect them. Consequently we must accept the fact of variations in responsive capacity and not demand that all should think alike, believe alike, behave alike. What is too much for one individual is too little for another. No universally applicable prescription can be given to suit everyone alike. All these paths should converge towards one another, as all must merge in the central point in the end. However different personal reactions will necessarily be with every individual seeker, there will still remain certain experiences, requirements, and conditions—and these are the most important ones—along one’s oath which must be the same for every other seeker too. Each being’s approach must inevitably be individualistic yet each will also share in common all the essential which constitute the Quest. Whether a being is a Zionist or a Zennist, whether one seeks the Christian Salvation or the Japanese Satori, the fundamental approach is more or less the same. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23

There is no cut and dried system or method which can be guaranteed to work successfully in every case. However, there are suggestions, hints, ideas which have been culled from the personal experiences of a widely varied, World-spread number of masters and aspirants. Since each being’s pat is peculiarly an individual one, no book can guide all one’s steps. A book may help one through some situations, inform one about the general course of inner development, and warn one against the probable mistake and chief pitfalls. Each being has to strive for this higher consciousness in one’s own way. Each path to it is unique. However, at the same time one may profitably avail oneself of the general instruction contained in writing like the present one. Let us now consider the innocence of the “enemy,” a typical young member of the Ohio National Guard, roughly around the age of 22. I am helped in this by a letter I received from a college girl whose brother was exactly in that position: I shall quote from this letter: “My younger brother Michael was afraid to answer the telephone in those says for fear it would be his National Guard Headquarters calling him for riot duty on one of the nearby campuses. Michael says that the rest of his group was afraid of a phone call as he. He was not at all sure the student protestors were wrong, and even if they were, the presence of the National Guard was no answer. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23

“If my brother had been called for riot duty, and if some irresponsible officer had provided him with a loaded gun, and if the confrontation had become strained, he may have shot a student…I think that both Allison Krause and the Guardsman who shot her were playing roles that did not belong to either of them.” Let us assume, with my correspondent, that Michael is mobilized and arrives on the Kent State campus. He picks up the fact that the students at Kent State had woefully neglected any real communication with the townspeople—indeed, had gone out of their way to irritate them. On Saturday nights, according to a dispatch in the New York Times, students would sit on the downtown sidewalk, making the townspeople walk around them to the accompaniment of obscenities, totally unaware, although it is hard to believe, of the degree of hatred this was engendering in the people of the town of Kent. Over a period of two days Michael sees one building burnt down, he gets only three hours sleep the night before, the students yell obscene jokes at him and pelt him with rocks as he is marched with his battalion through the taunting crowds. Shall we condemn Michael, our hypothetical young guardsman, as murderer? #RandolphHarris 11 of 23

If we do that—because he was the one who squeezed the trigger—and fold up our briefcases and go home, we are preventing ourselves from understanding a large segment of reality, and we are capitulating exactly at the point where we should press on the hardest. Michael’s sister, my correspondent, goes on to point out where she thinks the culprit is: “I think the country has evolved into a kind of massive unreality and fear…It is a kind of out-of-touchness which robes people of most of their alternative except survival.” There is no denying that this massive “unreality and fear” exists. In our day we tend to live out the state of mind that Camus predicted in his early novel, The Stranger, in which Meursault, the anti-hero, exists in a general state of semiconsciousness. He makes love to a girl as though both were half-asleep, and he finally shoots an Arab in the Sun on the desert in a condition of semiawareness that leaves us, as no doubt it left him, wondering whether he really shot the Arab or not. He is tried for murder. His crime is actually the murder of himself. What my correspondent calls this “massive unreality” and “out-of-touchness” makes every being a stranger to other beings as well as oneself. And the fact that it is the sickness of contemporary beings, who surrenders one’s consciousness in the face of the continual assaults on one’s senses, like surf in a perpetually stormy ocean, does not make our problem any easier. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23

However, you and I also make up this country which has become so filled with “massive unreality and fear.” When we think of the “country” or the “society” as at fault, we tend to posit the country as an anonymous “it” which does things to us, the people in it. It is then, in part, a convenient peg on which to hang our own projections. Thus we evade the issue on its deeper levels. I am not discounting the importance of social psychology, the study of the way groups takes on roles and use them for their various purposes of security. I am also aware of the effect of electrotechnics on the individual, of the mass impersonality of technology, and of the experience each of us undergoes as the sport of innumerable pressures operating on us in “a World we never made.” However, our society, our country, has this power because we as individuals capitulate to it; we give over our own power, as I have tried to point out earlier, and we then are offended because we are powerless. To that extent, we victimize ourselves. Our survival depends on whether human consciousness can be asserted, and with sufficient strength, to stand against the stultifying pressures of technological progress. If the country has evolved into a state of “massive unreality and fear,” it must be you and I who experience this unreality and fear. And so we must push on in our endeavor to understand the psychological uses of innocence and murder. #Randolphharris 13 of 23

The striving for power serves in the first place as a protection against helplessness, which as we have seen is one of the basic elements in anxiety. The neurotic is so averse to any remote appearance of helplessness or weakness in oneself that one sill shun situations which the normal person considers entirely commonplace, such as any acceptance of guidance, advice, or help, any kind of dependence on persons or circumstances, any giving in to or agreeing with others. This protest against helplessness does not arise in all its intensity at once, but increases gradually; the more the neurotic feels factually handicapped by one’s inhibitions, the less one is factually able to asset oneself. The weaker one factually becomes the more anxiously one has to avoid anything that has a faint resemblance to weakness. In the second place, the neurotic striving for power serves as a protection against the danger of feeling or being regarded as insignificant. The neurotic develops a rigid and irrational ideal of strength which makes one believe one should be able to master any situation, no matter how difficult, and should master it right away. This ideal becomes linked with pride, and as a consequence the neurotic considers weakness not only as a danger but also as a disgrace. One classifies people as either “strong” or “weak,” admiring the former and despising the latter. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23

One goes to extremes also in what one considers to be weakness. One has more or less contempt for all persons who agree with one or give in to one’s wishes, who have inhibitions or do not control their emotions so closely that they always show an impassive face. One despises the same qualities in oneself as well. One feels humiliated if one has to recognize the existence of anxiety or an inhibition in oneself, and thus despises oneself for having a neurosis and is anxious to keep this fact a secret. One also despises oneself for not being able to cope with it alone. The particular forms that such a striving for power will take depend upon what lack of power is most feared or despised. I shall mention a few expressions of this striving that are especially frequent. For one, the neurotic will desire to have control over others as well as over oneself. One wants nothing to happen that one has not initiated or approved of. This quest for control may take the attenuated form of consciously permitting the other to have full freedom, but insisting on knowing about everything one does, and feeling irritated if anything is kept a secret. Tendencies to control maybe repressed to such a degree that not only the person oneself, but even those about one, may be convinced of one’s greater generosity in allowing freedom to the other. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23

If a person represses one’s desire for control so completely one may, however, become depressed or have severe headaches or stomach upsets every time the other has an appointment with other friends or unexpectedly comes home late. Not knowing the cause of the disturbances one may accredit them to weather conditions, to an error in diet or similar irrelevant conditions. Much of what appears as curiosity is determined by a secret wish to control the situation. Also persons of this type are inclined to want to be right all the tie, and are irritated at being proved wrong, even if only in an insignificant detail. They have to know everything better than anyone else, an attitude which may at times be embarrassingly conspicuous. Persons who are otherwise serious and dependable, when confronted with a question to which they do not know the answer, may pretend to know, or may invent something, even if ignorance in this particular instance would not discredit them. Sometimes the emphasis is on the need to know in advance what will happen, to anticipate and predict every possibility. This attitude may go with a distaste for any situation involving uncontrollable factors. No risk should be taken. The emphasis on self-control shows in an aversion to being carried away by any feelings. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23

If he falls into love with her, the attraction which a neurotic woman feels for a man may suddenly turn into contempt. Patients of this type find it hard to allow themselves much drift in free associations, because that would mean losing control and letting themselves be carried away into unknow territory. I am going to talk with you tonight about something that is very close to my own thoughts—this something I have been thinking about for years in my own hear, and in the period when I spent two years in bed with tuberculosis up in the Adirondack mountains before there were any drugs for this disease—all of these things come together in these ideas I have been sharing with you tonight. They came, particularly, when I was interviewing, in New York City, student candidates to be trained in analytic institutions. I was on the committee for two groups, and so I interviewed for these two different groups. What I asked myself was, “What makes a good psychotherapist? What is there in a particular person that would tell us that here is somebody that can genuinely help other people in the fairly long training of the psychoanalyst?” It was quite clear to me that it was not adjustment—adjustment that we talked of so fondly when I was Ph.D. student, and so ignorantly. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23

I knew that the well-adjusted person who came in and sat down to be interviewed would not make a good psychotherapist. Adjustment is exactly what a neurosis is; and that is one’s trouble. It is an adjustment to nonbeing in order that some little being maybe preserved. An adjustment always flounders on the question—adjustment to what? Adjustment to a psychotic World, which we certainly live in? Adjustment so societies that are Faustian and insensitive? And then I looked further. We know very little about the effect of punishment on learning, because almost no truly scientific studies have been made of it on human beings. For instance, we do not know how much punishment is best for learning—and we do not know how much difference it makes as to who is giving the punishment, whether an adult learns best from a younger or an older person than oneself—or any things of that sort. Harry Stack Sullivan, who was the only psychiatrist born in America to contribute a new system that was powerful enough to have an influence, not only on psychiatry, but on psychology, sociology, and a number of other professions, was one of my teachers. We all revered him greatly. Dr. Sullivan was an alcoholic, and he was latently homosexual—he once proposed to Clara Thompson when he was drunk and got up very early the next morning to take it back. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23

Dr. Sullivan never could get along with any groups with more than two of three people. It dawned on me that mental problems are problems that always had their beginnings, and their cures, in interpersonal relationships. Consider Abe Maslow. He was not a therapist, but one of the great psychologists. Dr. Maslow had a miserable time of it. He came from an immigrant family in the slums; he was alienated from his mother and afraid of his father. In New York, groups often lived in ghettos, and Abe was beaten up by Italian and Irish boys in the vicinity (he was Jewish); he was underweight, and yet, this man, the man who had so many hellish experiences—was the one who introduced the system of peak experiences into psychology. Dr. Freud and Dr. Maslow are two of the most important people in the development of psychology. I want to propose a theory to you, and this is the theory of the wounded healer. I want to propose that we heal other people by virtue of our own wounds. Psychologists who become psychotherapist, psychiatrists, too, as far as that goes, are people who had, as babies and children, to be therapists for their own families. This is pretty well established by various studies. And I propose to carry that idea further and to propose that it is the insight that comes to us by virtue of our own struggle with our problems that lead us to develop empathy and creativity with human beings—and compassion. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23

There was a study made in England, at the University of Cambridge, of geniuses—great writers, great artists, and so on—and of the forty-seven that this woman took as her sample, eighteen had been hospitalized—in a mental hospital—or had been treated with lithium, or had electric shock. These were people that you know. Handel—his music came out of great suffering. Byron—you would think he did everything but suffer, but he was a manic depressive. Anne Sexton, who, I believe, later committed suicide, was a manic-depressive. Virginia Woolf, who I know committed suicide, was also troubled by depression. Robert Lowell, the American poet, was manic depressive. Now, what I enlarge that to say that there are positive aspects to all diseases, to all illness, whether it is mental or physical. We may say that some form of struggle is necessary to carry us to the depth out of which creativity comes. Therefore a certain amount of discipline and personal power must be accumulated to prevent physical, mental, and spiritual catabolism. One must develop a self-devotion which will instill self-love, self-respect, and beneficial thinking that will empower you to shatter obstacles as the God of your World. If you can work through the test of your own demons and your imaginations own worst fears all else will seem rudimentary and insignificant. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23

Just remember, you must be honest with yourself and work hard as hell (pun intended) to become something great. Indeed, we sometimes see obstacles as locked doors which keep us from uniting the various levels of our consciousness. However, awareness just moves around and the filter of perception changes. Operating from a higher state of awareness is not to be mistaken for uniting the isolated levels of consciousness. Consciousness cannot expand until it is first made whole and this is to oppose creation and all its limitations. It is a force which acts as the very key which unlocks the cages of imprisonment so that we can reach liberation by stepping into outer darkness which reunited the isolated frequencies of the light spectrum. Through this we not only better perceive reality but we are also better able to counter create though personal alchemical transmutation and spirituality. Feel your soul absorbing the isolated colors of the light spectrum and reuniting the consciousness which has been torn through creation. Jerome Kagan, a professor up at Harvard, made a long and intensive study of creativity, and what he concluded is that the artist’s main capacity, what he calls “his creative freedom” is not born within him. The creativity is made in the pain of adolescent loneliness, the isolation of physical disability. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23

We often expect people who experience the ultimate in horror in their background to be broken people. When we hear of what people have been through, we doubt they will survive. However, some not only survive, they become exceedingly creative and productive human beings. Individuals who have suffered calamitous events in the past can, and do, function later at average levels and may even function at higher-than-average levels. Relevant coping mechanisms may avert the potentially detrimental effects of calamitous experiences, but they may also transform these experiences into growth-producing experiences. Inmates who have had poor, unpampered childhoods adapted best to the concentration camps, whereas most of those who had been reared by permissive, wealthy parents were the first to die. Many of our most valuable people have come from the most calamitous early-childhood situations. Investigations of the childhoods of eminent people expose the fact that they did not receive anything like the kind of child rearing that a person in our culture is led to believe is healthy for children. Now, whether in spite of or because of these conditions, these children not only survived, but reached great heights of achievement, many after having experiences the most deplorable and traumatic childhoods. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23

There was a study also done right here in Berkeley of the long-term development of human beings. A group of psychologists followed people through from birth to 30 years of age. They followed 166 men and women through adulthood, and they were shocked by the inaccuracies of their expectations. They were wrong in about 66 percent of the cases, mainly because they had overestimated the damaging effects of early troubles. They had also not foreseen—this sentence is interesting to all of us—they also had not foreseen the negative effect of a smooth and successful childhood, that a degree of stress and challenge seemed to spur psychological strength and competence. The goal here is to allow the essence of God to flow through and operate within each level of our being or consciousness. In this way we can become fully open to gateways to his powers. As we build our faith the Holy Ghost will serve as our foundation. It will align us and our temple with the frequency of the Godhead to be employed and serve to raise your own level of spiritual power. This will further unite physical and spiritual discipline in order to create a dynamic synergy which will assist in tearing the veil between physical and spiritual realms. Powerful changes will begin to take place within you and your life experience as you begin to integrate and merge with these spiritual forces. “And a portion of that Spirit dwelleth in me, which giveth me knowledge, and also power according to my faith and desires which are in God,” reports Alma 18.35. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23

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Closer to the Hearts Desire–Be Still My Soul, Be Still; the Arms You Bear are Strong!

October 10, 2019 12:50 am

They brought me into the house. It was bright and magnificent. They showed me the sunny double parlor with its craved archway and shining floors and they took me through the handsome dining room with its murals of the Winchester Mansion. People in Graystone Hills, in general, are inconsistent in the way they talk and act with reference to the idea of classes. If they are asked bluntly, “Do you believe there are ‘classes’ in the community?” they are very likely to say, “No.” Yet, they will tell you the Hiltons are “a leading family here,” or the “Hearsts are like the Hiltons, and Rothschild, and Winchesters. These families are different from the rest of us; they are exclusive. I guess you would call them our aristocracy.” During the course of the conversation, the same speaker will say that there are several different “types of families” in the community and, justifying one’s judgment by describing the “way they live,” place them in different categories. The democratic tradition that there are no classes in American society is the reason for this type of behavior. Therefore, the people in Graystone Hills deny the existence of class directly but act as if classes exist. However, many beings in Graystone Hills openly say that there are three classes in the community—“upper,” “middle,” and “less affluent”—but when they are requested to name persons in, let us say the “less affluent class” they generally divide the class into the “good” lower class people and the “worthless, ne’er-do-wells.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

The same kind of break appears in the “middle class.” Separation of the “middle class” into “upper middle” and “lower middle” is quite conventional. Even though people in Graystone Hills are inconsistent in their designations of a particular class, the systematic analysis of selected cultural traits associated with each of the five classes, based upon data collected from the 535 families of the adolescents, supplemented by interviews and observations, reveal that the possession of a constellation of differentially evaluated social symbols—functional, pecuniary, religious, educational, reputational, power, lineage, proper associates, memberships in associations—are relied up by Graystone Hills to “hang people on the peg they belong on,” to determine “their place in the community” or “their standing in life.” Class V occupies the lowest-ranking stations in the prestige structure. It is looked upon as the scum of the city by the higher classes. It is believed generally that nothing beyond charity can be done for these people, and only a minimum of that is justified since they show little or no inclination to help themselves. It is the opinion of the upper classes that: “They have no respect for themselves. They enjoy their shacks and huts along the river or across the tracks and love their dirty, smoky, low-class dives and taverns. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

“Whole families—children, in-laws, mistresses, and all—live in one shack. This is the crime class that produces the delinquency and sexual promiscuity that fills the paper. Their interests lie in pleasures of the flesh and its perversion. The girls are always with child; the families are huge; incestual relations occur frequently. They are not inspired by education, and only a few are able to make any attainments along this line. They are loud in their speech, vulgar in their actions, sloppy in their dress, and indifferent toward their plight. Their vocabulary develops as profanity is learned. If they work, the work at very menial jobs. Their life experiences are purely physical, and even these are on a low plane. They have no interests in health and medical care. Then men are too lazy to work or do odd jobs around town. They support the Democratic party because of the relief obtained during the depression. This groups lives for a Saturday of drinking or fighting. They are of low character and breed and have a criminal record for a pedigree.” Class V persons, passive and fatalistic, realize that they are “on the bottom” and believe that they can do nothing to improve their position. They desire money, possessions, education, and favorable prestige, but they do not know how these are achieved. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

When a class V persons attempts to improve one’s position, one is discriminated against by the higher classes, and by many members of one’s own class who think one is trying to “put on airs.” One woman with considerable insight into her class position summarized it thus: “Survival for us depends on staying on good terms with the rich people and the law. Whenever I think about myself and the kids, I am reminded what my father used to say, ‘We are the ones who are told what to do, when and how’ around here. This town takes us for granted. Most people think the people down here [the tannery flats] are too ignorant to do anything and do not care; I guess they are right.” To generalize a little more, class V persons give the impression of being resigned to a life of frustration and defeat in a community that despises them for their disregard of morals, lack of “success” goals, and dire poverty. Family support comes from many sources. The father is the chief breadwinner in three families out of five, but his earnings are meager. Ninety-two percent are unskilled and semi-skilled laborers or machine operators. Not one is a farm owner, and only 8 are farm tenants; 2 are notions salesmen; and 8 operate very small businesses, such as hauling coal from local mines, ash and trash hauling, repair and sales of old cars. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

Fifty-five percent of the mothers in class V “work out” part time or full time as waitresses, dishwashers, cooks, washwomen, janitresses, cleaning women, and unskilled domestic workers. Many younger women and girls work on the production line of a local manufacturer who is reputed to give them preference in his shops because they can be hired for lower wages than class IV workers. Income from wages provides them with enough money to obtain the most meager necessities of life; however, in many cases it is inadequate even for his, and they rely upon private charity and public relief. Annual family income ranges from $15,365 to high of $24,934. The modal income fell in the $18,572 to $18,958 bracket. (Whereas the median income in Rocklin, California is $84,121 and the median income in Oak Park, California is $121,721). Income varies from year to year, depending upon your work conditions and wages. Between 2017 and 2019, the private earnings of 53 percent of these families were supplemented by township relief during at least one-fourth of each year. This figure does not take into consideration federal subsidies, such as Works Progress Administration (WPA) and National Youth Administration (NYA), which prevailed in that period; neither does it include private charity in the form of “outfitting the children” with clothes. Gifts of partially worn-out clothing, linens, bedding, old furniture, dishes, and food are a regular part of the private relief and indirect wage system supported by the two highest classes and to some extent by class III. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

These gifts are given informally to persons who preform domestic service for donors. Begging by class V’s is frowned upon strongly; consequently, needy families do not solicit things in an overt manner, but any class V persons knows how to make his or her wants known to an employer in a humble, discreet manner that generally brings the desired results. Semipublic charity is dispensed through sewing circles, guilds, and clubs that make clothing for infants. The ever-popular rummage sale, one of which is held almost every Saturday by some “middle-class” organization, may be viewed as another form of charity to the lower classes. Many class V women regularly buy their family’s best clothes from these sales. As one class II woman said, “This year, Mrs. Gordon Sweitzer [class I] will have a striking dress, next year you will see it on Mrs. Luke Jenkins [class IV] in the Baptist choir, and three years from now Pearl Soper [class V] will be trying to catch some loafer’s eye with it.” Bank credit is non-existent, and even the small-loan broker has learned through experience to be careful with class V: “Before I loan one of them a cent, I investigate carefully and make sure they own what they put up for security. There is not a person in that class who has not been in here one time of another for a loan. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

“If they have a job and can give me good evidence they can pay back a loan, I will give them from $100 to $250 at first. If they pay it back, just as they agree to, I will let them have a little more next time. Eighty percent of the loans I have written off were made to the class represented by the names you have there. [A group of class V’s we were checking for loans.] Exactly one-half of the class V families studied have procured small personal loans, none over $500; this is the limit the broker will loan to persons he or she does not believe to be “good risks.” Repeated loans to the class V’s are discouraged; the mean is eight loans per family for those who manage to obtain them. On the other hand, the broker encourages class IV’s to borrow time after time, since one considers them “good risks.” The uncertain nature of their employment results in long periods of idleness, you often see them sitting on the front porch or on a bench as if they are waiting for a ride or a bus that never comes; also illness, real or imagined, may result in a voluntary layoff for a few days that, to persons in the higher classes, appears to be laziness. Whatever conditioning factors, these people are far more irregular in their employment than the class IV’s. They will leave a job casually, often without notice, and for flimsy reasons. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

Even then the class V’s are placed in the simplest menial jobs. The work history of a father or mother is generally known to employers, and one acts in the light of it when a son or daughter of one of these families asks one for employment. Therefore, prepare your journey and its integration with your soul. Know that the only comfort you will find is that which you have the strength to create and perceive yourself. This work will pour outward from within. Take record of the journey and examine it closely for it is the mirror reflecting the knowledge of your true self, along with all of its power and glory. It is very easy to cause self-destruction along the journey for there are many noses which seek to hang you. Even if you are in a place of eternal darkness, understand that you have a light within which cannot be dimmed. A light which is unlike any light perceived by those of lower consciousness. This light is the power of your own spirit, developed by your own intellect, spoken words, and chosen deeds within the realm of limitation. What we see as finite never is. Nothing is finite for the same exact reason nothing is infinite. Infinite existence would mean stasis and lack of consciousness, never moving forward in thought or maturity and never growing to expand in influence and in the responsibility of action. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

The only difference between us and those of the more mundane nature is that we choose to consciously guide the process and flux of the chaos of darkness eternal. At this point we see the inadequacy of the concept commonly used in psychoanalytic circles to explain creativity—regression in the service of the ego. In my own endeavors to understand creative people in psychoanalysis and to understand the creative act in general, I find this theory unsatisfactory. This is not only because of its negative character, but chiefly because it proposes a partial solution that diverts us from the center of the creative act and therefore away from any full understanding of creativity. In supporting the theory of regression in the service of ego, creativity often seems to be a regressive phenomenon, and does bring out archaic, infantile, unconscious psychic contents in the artist. The rest—or regression—only serves to release the person from his or her intense efforts and the accompanying inhibitions, so that the creative impulse can have free rein to express itself. When the archaic elements in a poem or a picture or a film have genuine power to move others, and when they have a universality of meaning—that is, when they are genuine symbols—it is because some encounter is occurring on a more basic comprehensive level. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

Eventually the Lord of Darkness will perish because this is the will of the Lord of Darkness. They are as weapons to be put away after the turmoil of war. When the greater work is complete and humanity, they will perish and he like human vessels will be liberated, and humanity will then be able to come to terms with their own power by taking responsibility for the nature of their existence. Civil disobedience does not serve our potential to thrive. Therefore, you will find yourself viewing news reports and the lies being told to you by the media, but instead of consuming it without question, you will directly perceive the agenda that hides behind them. Things fall apart; the center cannot hold; mere anarchy is loosed upon the World. What tremendous power this is. It is a new revelation, with beauty and how we will learn to resolve this terrible situation in which we modern human beings find ourselves. The reason some people have such power is that they come from a place of intensity of consciousness that includes archaic elements because they are part of them, as they are of every person, and will emerge in any intensely ware moment. However, the symbol has its power precisely from the fact that it is an encounter that also includes the most dedicated and passionate intellectual effort. It is important for us to be receptive, but by no stretch of the imagination passive. We cannot wait until the cry gathers of itself in one’s own throat. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

Obviously, creative insights of all sorts come to us in moments of relaxation. They come not haphazardly, however, but come only in those areas in which we are intensively committed and on which we concentrate in our waking, conscious experience. It may be, as we have said, that the insights can break through only in moments of relaxation; but to say this is to describe how they come rather than to explain their genesis. Choose the moments in which you are capable of your highest, most intense consciousness. Bless be the Lord God of our father, which hath put such a thing as this in the king’s heart, to beautify the house of the Lord which is in Jerusalem. What must be understood here is that the principle of the dual nature of good and evil cease to exist altogether when the forces are applied in their proper context. All possible actions serve a great purpose under the right circumstances and within the proper context and so there are no absolutes such as good and evil. The nature of symbols and myths do bring into awareness infantile, archaic dreads, unconscious longings, and similar primitive psychic content. This is their regressive aspect. However, they also bring out new meaning, new forms, and disclose a reality that was literally not present before, a reality that is not merely subjective but has a second pole which is outside. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

In other words it is the occult. It is human power and potential that is the crux of that which is hidden. This is the progressive side of symbol and myth. This aspect points ahead. It is integrative. It is progressive revealing of structure in our relation to nature and our own existence. Most will say that language was designed for the sole purpose of expressing the religious doctrine. The power of sound is what created the Universe according to the basis of most religions, and the priests knew the secrets of this power—power that syncs accumulated vibrational intentions of good speech. Language was used to worship energy accumulated (which is why people make “high energy” music like), controlled, and manipulated to shift the vibrational frequency of the environment. Languages are simply an ancient method of brain entertainment. This might seem outright foolish, however, this is a stone age application of the concepts used within the science of binaural beats and isochoric tones that are used today. We know that by the manipulation of sound frequencies, through measuring brainwaves our state of mind, including how receptive we are to ideas. Ideas can be planted directly into the mind as displayed through the craft of science of hypnotism which also depends upon the manipulation of brainswaves and this is why sirens like Aaliyah, Paris Hilton, Britney Spears, Emma Hewitt and Beyonce are so popular, their soft and seductive voices can put the audience in a state of trance. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

Humankind is an emanation of raw, unadulterated and primal divine power that has been reduced to impotence because we are programmed to believe we must search for this power outside of self. This makes the power impotent because it is analogous to taking the fuel out of a care before starting the engine. We are programmed to believe in, and therefore sustain and fuel the limitation of our power to evolve and become something great. We are sovereign entities with unimaginable power and potential who have been enslaved by spiritual shackles. Seemingly casual words are vibrational emanations of our own dormant divine power. They vibrate according to our own individual level of personal will. Today our words lack power because they are used so frivolously without purpose or intent other than to take part in rather random conversations. It is not that conversation is bad. In fact, effectively relating to others is an important part of our life experience if the goal is to reunite with our eternal soul. This heightened consciousness, which we have identified as a characteristic of the encounter, the state in which the dichotomy between subjective experience and objective reality is overcome and symbols which reveal new meaning are born, is historically termed ecstasy. Like passion, ecstasy is a quality of emotion (or, more accurately, a quality of relationship one side of which is emotional) rather than a quantity. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

Ecstasy is a temporary transcending of the subject-object dichotomy. It is interesting that is psychology we dodge that problem, Maslow’s work on the peak experience being a notable exception. Or, when we do speak of ecstasy we are implicitly pejorative or assume that it is neurotic. The experience of the encounter also brings with it anxiety. I need not remind you of the fear and trembling of artists and creative people in their moments of creative encounter. If not approached in the correct way, prayers, hymns, and devotions will create a very spiritually destructive atmosphere, and chance one’s vibration in a very destructive way if the chaos is not harnessed according to will with proper understanding of the principle of evil speech. Do not hide the agenda to simple mask the intent and power to enslave humankind behind the guise of an imposed definition of what is to be considered good by the herd. The subconscious mind can cause chaos within one’s reality by inverting these concepts due to predispositions and symbolic mental associations. I am impressed by Frank Barron’s studies of creative persons in art and science, for he shows them directly confronting their anxiety. Barron designated his “creative persons” as those who were recognized by their peers as having made distinguished contributions to their field. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

Frank Barron showed them as well as a control group of “normal” people a series of Rorschachlike cards, some of which had orderly, systematic designs on them and others disorderly, unsymmetrical, and chaotic designs. The “normal” people selected the orderly, symmetrical cards as the designs they liked the most—they liked their Universe to be “in shape.” However, the creative persons selected the chaotic, disorderly cards—they found these more challenging and interesting. They could be like God in the Book of Genesis, creating order out of chaos. They chose the “broken” Universe; they got joy out of encountering it and forming it into order. They could accept the anxiety and use it in molding their disorderly Universe “closer to the heart’s desire.” According to the theory proposed here, anxiety is understandably a concomitant of the shaking of the self-World relationship that occurs in the encounter. Our sense of identity is threatened; the World is not as we experienced it before, and since self and World are always correlated, we no longer are what we were before. The anxiety we feel is temporary rootlessness, disorientation; it is the anxiety of nothingness. When these sonic spells are inverted you must keep in mind that it does not have to usher in sickness or anything of that sort, though it can be used that way to wield powers of baneful intent toward enemies. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

Instead, understand that it is rather your right as a human being to seek out and develop good healthy through your actions and choices within the World. This is simple cause and effect which is at the root of the Universe. The obtainment of this logic then leads to empowerment to manifest change within your reality. Creative people, as I seem them, are distinguished by the fact that they can live with anxiety, even though a high price may be paid in terms of insecurity, sensitivity, and defenselessness for the gift of the “divine madness,” to borrow the terms used by the classical Greeks. They do not run away from non-being, but by encountering and wrestling with it, force it to produce being. They knock on silence for an answering music; they pursue meaninglessness until they can force it to mean. I am impelled by chaos to seek order, to struggle with it until I can find a deeper, underlying form. I am then struggling wit the meaninglessness and silence of the World until I can force it to mean, until I can make the silence answer and the non-being be. I can these use this peace for its authentic purpose—namely a deep relaxation of mind and body. Take your time with it, put forth effort to master it. You will find your own individual rhythm and hook into deep currents of power running through the deepest depths of self. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

Channel your mental faculties to recite or memorize the words of power—such as love, joy, friendship, success, accomplish, blessing, advanced, balanced, beneficial, developed efficient, enhanced, innovated, excelled, promoted, refined, recovered, sustained, skilled, secured, saved, taught, trained. valued, validated, and so forth. It will eventually produce great power in the atmosphere of the temple area. These harmonic vibrations will break up the supposed natural order and so you must focus your intent to rebuild the reality you wish. Once your field of energy has been erased you may impose beauty upon the slate. The average human has an estimated 70,000 thoughts per day. Do you know how many of those thoughts are swayed by external forces? What if you were in control of each one of those thoughts? What would your reality be like at that point? To seek control of those thoughts is the premise and purpose of enlightenment. Learn to observe, question, and deconstruct your reality to come to your own personal conclusions. In the way you will start to engage higher spiritual consciousness. “Yea, we have reason to praise him forever, for his is the Most High God, and has loosed our brethren from the chains of hell. Yes, they were encircled about with everlasting darkness and destruction; but behold, he has brought them into his everlasting light, yea, into everlasting salvation; and they are encircled about with the matchless bounty of his love; yea, and we have been instruments in his hands of doing this great and marvelous work,” reports Alma 26.14-15. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

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Not Only is Everything Subject to Change but Everything Also Exists in Relation to Something Else—Thus Change and Relativity Dominate the World Scene!

September 26, 2019 11:57 pm

Like Nature, the World, I myself, all existence is subject to change. It is inevitable. What can we do except accommodate ourselves to this inexorable law? Of course I want to lay eyes upon you. I want to talk to you. I want to be received, if such a thing is possible, into the Coven of the Articulate. I want you, the great breaker of rules, to forgive me that I have broke yours. “My days have passed away, my thoughts are dissipated, tormenting my heart. They have turned night into day, and after darkness I hope for light again. If I wait hell is my house, and I have made my bed in darkness. I have said to rottenness: thou art my father; to worms, my mother and my sister. Where is now then my expectation, and who considereth my patience? All that I have shall go down into the deepest pit: thinkest thou that there at least I shall have rest?” reports Job 17.16. A remarkable example of the creative encounter is given in the small book written by James Lord in recounting his experience of posing for Alberto Giacometti. Having been friends for some time, these two men could be entirely open with each other. Lord often made notes directly after the posing session of what Giacometti had said and done, and out of them he has put together this valuable monograph about the experience of encounter occurs in creativity. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

He reveals, first, the great degree of anxiety and agony that the encounter generated in Giacometti. When Lord would arrive at the studio for his sitting, Giacometti would often disconsolately occupy himself half an hour or more doing odds and ends with his sculpture, literally afraid to start on the painting. When he did bring himself to get into painting, the anxiety became overt. At one point, writes Lord, Giacometti started gasping and stamping his foot: “Your head is going away!” he exclaimed. “It’s going away completely!” “It will come back again,” I said. He shook his head. “Not necessarily. Maybe the canvas will become completely empty. And then what will become of me? I’ll die of it!” He reached into his pocket, pulled out his handkerchief, stared at it for a moment, as though he did not know what it was, then with a moan threw it onto the floor. Suddenly he shouted very loudly, “I shriek! I Scream!” Lord goes on at another point: To talk to his model while he is working distracts him, I think, from the constant anxiety which is a result of his conviction that he cannot hope to represent on the canvas what he sees before him. This anxiety often bursts forth in the form of melancholy gasps, furious expletives, and occasional loud cries of rage and/or distress. He suffers. There is no doubt about it. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

Giacometti is committed to his work in a particularly intense and total way. The creative compulsion is never wholly absent from him, never leaves him a moment of complete peace. So intense is the encounter that he often identifies the painting on the easel with the actual flesh-and-blood person posing. One day his foot accidentally struck the catch that holds the easel shelf at the proper level, which caused the canvas to fall abruptly for a foot or two. “Oh, excuse me!” he said. I laughed and observed that he had excused himself as though he had not caused me to fall instead of the painting. “That’s exactly what I did feel,” he answered. In Giacometti this anxiety was associated, as it was in his revered Cezanne, with a great deal of self-doubt. In order to go on, to hope, to believe that there is some chance of his actually creating what he ideally visualized, he is obliged to feel that it is necessary to start his entire career over again every day, as it were, from scratch….he often feels that the particular sculpture or painting on which he happened to be working at the moment is that one which will for the very first time express what he subjectively experiences in response to an objective reality. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Lord correctly assumes that the anxiety is related to the gap between the ideal vision that the artist is trying to paint and the objective results. Here he discusses the contradiction that every artist experiences: This fundamental contradiction, arising from the hopeless discrepancy between conception and realization, is at the root of all artistic creation, and it helps explain the anguish which seems to be an unavoidable component of that experience. Even as “happy” an artist as Renior was not immune to it. What meant something, what alone existed with a life of its own was his [Giacometti’s] indefatigable, interminable struggle via the act of painting to express in visual terms a perception of reality that had happened to coincide momentarily with my head [which Giacometti was then trying to paint]. To achieve this was of course impossible, because what is essentially abstract can never be made concrete without altering its essence. However, he was committed, he was, in fact condemned to the attempt, which at times seemed rather like the task of Sisyphus. One day Lord happened to see Giacometti in a café. And, indeed, miserable was he did seem to be. This, I thought, was the true Giacometti, sitting alone at the back of a café, oblivious to the admiration and recognition of the World, staring into a void from which no solace could come, tormented by the hopeless dichotomy of his ideal yet condemned by that helplessness to struggle as long as he lived to try to overcome it. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

What consolation was it that the newspapers of many countries spoke of him, that museums everywhere exhibited his work, that people he would never know knew and admired him. None. None at all. When we see the intimate feelings and inner experiences of an eminent artist like Giacometti, we smile at the absurd talk in some psychotherapeutic circles of “adjusting” people, making people “happy,” or training out of them by simple behavior modification techniques all pain and grief and conflict and anxiety. How hard for humankind to absorb the deeper meaning of the myth of Sisyphus!—to see that “success” and “applause” are the (expletive) goddess we always secretly knew they were. Too see that the purpose of human existence in a man like Giacometti has nothing whatever to do with reassurance or conflict-free adjustment. Giacometti was rather devoted—“condemned,” to use Lord’s fitting term—to the struggle to perceive and reproduce the World around him through his own vision of being human. He knew there was no others alternative for him. His challenge gave his life meaning. He and his kind seek to bring their own visions of what it means to be human, and to see through that vision to a World of reality, however ephemeral, however consistently that reality vanishes each time you concentrate on it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

How absurd are the rationalistic assumptions that all one has to do is to remove from the World its curtains of superstition and ignorance and there suddenly will be reality, pristine and pure! Giacometti sought to see reality through his ideal vision. He sought to find the ground forms, the basic structure of reality, below the strewn surface of the arena where (expletive) goddesses cavort. He could not escape devoting himself unstintingly to the question: Is there some place where reality speaks our language, where it answers us if we but understand the hieroglyphics? He knew the rest of us would be no more successful than he was in finding the answer; but we have his contribution to work with, and this we are helped. Each being is unique so each quest must be too. Everyone must find, in the end, one’s own path through one’s own life. All attempts to copy someone else, however reputed, will fail to lead one to self-realization although they may advance one to a certain point. Each seeker must find out one’s own path, one’s own technique for one’s self. Who else has the right or the capacity to do this for an individual? We prefer to follow the creative rather than the compulsive way, to help beings find their own way rather than force them to travel our way. And this can only be done by starting with the roots, with the ideas they hold, and the attitudes which dominate them. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

There are too many differences in individual aspirants to allow a broad general technique to suit them all. A guide who can give a personal prescription is helpful, but even in one’s absence the aspirant can intelligently put together the fragments which will best help one. Let one walk forward slowly or quickly, as suits one best, and also in one’s own way, again as suits one’s individuality which one has fashioned through the reincarnations to its present image and from which one has to begin and proceed farther. There are not only widely different stages of evolutionary growth for every human being but also widely different types of human beings within each stage. Hence a single technique cannot possibly cover the spiritual needs of all humanity. The seeker should find the one that suits one’s natural aptitude as one should find the teacher who is most in inward affinity with one. Let one take up whatever path is most convenient to one’s personal circumstances and individual character and not force one’s self into one utterly unsuited to both, merely because it has proven right for other people. There is no single universal rule for all beings: their outer circumstances and inner conditions, their historical background and geographical locality, their karmic destiny and evolutionary need, their differences in competence, render it unwise, unfair, and impracticable to write a single prescription for them. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

Many European existentialist are largely reacting to Nietzsche’s conclusion that God is dead, and perhaps to the fact that Marx also is dead. The Americans have learned that political democracy and economic prosperity do not in themselves solve any of the basic value problems. There is no pace else to turn but inward, to the self, as the locus of values. Paradoxically, even some of the religious existentialist will go along with this conclusion part of the way. It is extremely important for psychologist that the existentialists may supply psychology with the underlying philosophy which it now lacks. Logical positivism has been a failure, especially for clinical and personality psychologists. At any rate, the basic philosophical problems will surely be opened up for discussion again and perhaps psychologists will stop relying on pseudo-solutions or on unconscious, unexamined philosophies they picked up as children. An alternative phrasing of the core (for us Americans) of European existentialism is that it deals radically with that human predicament presented by the gaps between human aspirations and human limitations (between what the human being is, and what one would like to be, and what one could be). This is not so far off from the identity problem as it might sound at first. A person is both actuality and potentiality. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

That serious concern with this discrepancy could revolutionize psychology, there is no doubt in my mind. Various literatures already support such a conclusion, for example, projective testing, self-actualization, the various peak-experiences (in which this gap is bridged), the Jungian psychologies, various theological thinkers, and so forth. Not only this, but they raise also the problems and techniques of integration of this twofold nature of beings, one’s lower and one’s higher, one’s creatureliness and one’s Godlikeness. On the whole, most philosophies and religions, Eastern as well as Western, have dichotomized them, teaching that the way to become “higher” is to renounce and master “the lower.” The existentialists, however, teach that both are simultaneously defining characteristics of human nature. Neither can be repudiated; they can only be integrated. However, we already know something of these integration techniques—of insight, of intellect in the broader sense, of love, of creativeness, of humor and tragedy, of play, of art. I suspect we will focus our studies on these integrative techniques more than we have in the past. Another consequence for my think of this stress on the twofold nature of beings is the realization that some problems must remain eternally insoluble. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

From this flows naturally a concern with the ideal, authentic, or perfect or Godlike human being, a study of human potentialities as now existing in certain sense, as current knowable reality. This, too, may sound merely literary but it is not. I remind you that this is just a fancy way of asking the old, unanswered questions, “What are the goals of therapy, of education, of bringing up children?” It also implies another truth and another problem which calls urgently for attention. Practically every serious description of the “authentic person” extant implies that such a person, by virtue of what one has become, assumes a new relation to one’s society and indeed, to society in general. One not only transcends oneself in various ways; one also transcends one’s culture. One resists enculturation. One becomes more detached from one’s culture and from one’s society. One becomes a little more a member of one’s species and a little less a member of one’s local group. My feeling is that most sociologists and anthropologists will take this hard. I therefore confidently expect controversy in this area. However, this is clearly a basis for “universalism.” From the European writers, we can and should pick up their greater emphasis on what they call “philosophical anthropology,” that is, the attempt to define beings, and the differences between beings and any other species, between human beings and objects, and between human beings and robots. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

What are human being’s unique and defining characteristics? What is so essential to beings that without it one would no longer be defined as a human being? On the whole this is a task from which American psychology has abdicated. The various behaviorisms do not generate any such definition, at least none that can be taken seriously (what would an S-R (Stimulus-response) human being be like? And who would like to be one? S-R model of human behavior suggest that the behavior is caused by certain reasons. A particular stimulus triggers a particular response. Dr. Freud’s picture of human beings was clearly unsuitable, leaving out as it did one’s aspirations, one’s realizable hopes, one’s Godlike qualities. The fact that Dr. Freud suppled us with most comprehensive systems of psychopathology and psychotherapy is beside the point as the contemporary ego-psychologist are finding out. Aggression and violence are rightly linked in the public mind—one speaks of aggression and violence. Aggression is to violence as anxiety is to panic. When aggression builds up in us, it feels, at a certain point, as though a switch has been thrown, and we become violent. The aggression is object-related—that is, we know at whom and what we are angry. However, in violence, the object-relation disintegrates, and we wing wildly, hitting whoever is within range. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

One’s mind becomes foggy, and perception of the enemy becomes unclear; one loses awareness of the environment and wants to act out this inner compulsion to do violence, come what it may. Humans are the creatures who can think in abstraction and who can transcend the concrete situation. The violence being’s capacity to abstract has disintegrated, and this accounts for one’s crazy behavior. The suddenness with which most violent episodes erupt suggest some questions. In violence, is there a direct connection between the input stimuli and the output muscles (for instance, the muscle that suddenly tend to strike back)? And is this connection subcortical, which would be related to the fact that it happens so quickly that the person does not think until after the episode has passed? Such discussions of the pathways by which the excitation travels are only analogies to the experience itself, but as analogies they may be useful in our understanding the process. Specifically, they may help us see why a person is possessed by violence rather than possessing it. Every since Walter B. Cannon’s classical work in the Harvard psychology laboratory, it has been generally agreed that there are three responses of the organism to threat: fight, flight, and delay response. Cannon demonstrated for example, that when somebody suddenly shoves me roughly on the lightrail, adrenalin is poured into my bloodstream, my blood pressure rises to give my muscles more strength, my heartbeat becomes more rapid—all ofwhich prepares me to fight the offending person or to flee out of range. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

The “flight” is what occurs in anxiety and fear; the “fight” in aggression and violence. With these physiological changes, the experience of violence gives great energy to the person. One feels a kind of transcendent power that one did not realize one had; and one may fight much more effectively in this mood. This fact can act like a drug, tempting the person to give oneself over again and again to violence. The third possibility is that I can delay my response. This is what most people actually do. The lower down the scale of education and status a person is, the more apt one is to react directly; the higher on the scale, the more apt one is to delay reaction until one has had a chance to think and assess the prospects of fighting or fleeing. The capacity for delayed response is a gift—or burden—of civilization: we wait to absorb the event into consciousness and then decide what is the best response. This gives us culture, but it also gives us neurosis. The typical neurotic may spend one’s whole life trying to fight with new acquaintances the old battles that never got worked out in one’s childhood. However, is it not true that on the crowded lightrail I am in a “readiness” to respond hostilely? I am much more apt to have a counterurge of the violet type in that situation than, say, when someone jostles me on a dance floor. So there must be some symbolic scanning process going on. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

How I interpret the situation will determine my readiness to strike back in hostility, making it causa belli, or to simply smile and accept an apology, if one is offered. Interpretation takes in unconscious as well as conscious factors: I give a certain meaning to it; I see the World as being hostile or friendly. Here enters the symbol, the means we have as human beings of uniting conscious and unconscious, historical and present, individual and group. This is why the organic processes are subsumed under the symbolic process. It is the symbolic process that determines the individual’s intentionality. How a person sees and interprets the World about one is thus crucial to one’s violence. This is what gives the readiness to fight to a man or woman quietly sitting in one’s car who becomes enraged when a police officer asks one for one’s identification. This also underlies the “machismo” of a police officer who is driven by one’s own power needs to humiliate an innocent individual. Whether the interpretation is pathological or merely imagined, illusory or downright false, it does not change the situation: it is one’s interpretation that will be decisive as to how one reacts. Trouble is easy to get into, but hard to get out of. The paranoid shoots other persons because one believes they exercise a magic power and will kill one; thus one’s shooting in self-defense. Calling this “paranoid” does not help unless we are able thereby to get behind the symbolic interpretation and see the World, at least temporarily, as the murderer see it. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

Even in international relations symbolic interpretation of the movements of other nations is crucial to the understanding of violence and war. Violence has its roots in impotence, we have said. This is true in individuals and in ethic groups. However, in nations violence comes from the threat of impotence. Nations seem to find it necessary to protect themselves n a periphery father out; they must be aware, precariously balanced as they are on the seesaw of armaments, of whether another country is building up power to gain an advantage over them. If a nation becomes genuinely impotent, it is no longer a nation. Senator J. William Fulbright has pointed out how important out interpretation of the behavior of other nations is. Ever since Yalta, American administrations have interpreted Russia’s behavior—for instance, the Cuban missile episode and the USSR’s reaction to the U-2 flight—as motivated by Russian aggression toward the United States of America. These events Fulbright indicates, could as well have been interpreted as motivated by fear on the part of Russia. More specifically, he proposes that the bellicose posture of these events were sops thrown to the Russian generals, who needed to be placated by Khrushchev if the latter were to succeed in his hope of establishing more amicable relations with the United States of America. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

Interpreting Russia’s moves as aggressive, we oppose them with a vehemence that helped the counterparty in Russia, the army, to depose Khrushchev and institute a less friendly government. Nations, in their misreading of the motives of other nations, can do what the paranoid patient does: they can work against their own interests because of their projection of hostility and aggression. No one, I am sure, wishes to develop new master-slave relationships or bend the will of the people to despotic rulers in new ways. These are patterns of control appropriate to a World without science. Are there no systems that do indeed want to bend the will of the people to dictators? And are these systems only to be found in cultures without Science? I still believe in an old-fashioned ideology of progress: the Middle Ages were dark because they had no science and science necessarily leads to the freedom of beings. The fact is that no leader or government explicitly states one’s intention of bending the will of the people any more; they are apt to use new words which sound like the opposite of the old ones. No dictator calls one’s self a dictator, and every system claims that it expressed the will of the people. In the countries of the free World, on the other hand, anonymous authority and manipulation have replaced overt authority in education, work, and politics. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

If we are worthy of our democratic heritage we shall, of course, be ready to resist any tyrannical use of science for immediate or selfish purposes. However, it we value the achievements and goals of democracy we must not refuse to apply science to the design and construction of cultural patterns, even though we may then find ourselves in some sense in the position of controllers. What is the basis of this value in neobehavioristic theory? All humans control and all humans are controlled. This is reassuring for a democratically minded person. In noticing how the master controls the slave or the employer the worker, we commonly overlook reciprocal effects and, by considering action in one direction only, are led to regard control as exploitation, or at least the gaining of a one-sided advantage; but the control is actually mutual. The slave controls the master as completely as the master controls the slave, in the sense that the techniques of punishment employed by the master have been selected by the slave’s behavior in submitting to them. This does not mean that the notion of exploitation is meaningless or that we may not appropriately ask, cui bono? In doing so, however, we go beyond the account of the social episode itself and consider the long-term effects which are clearly related to the question of value judgments. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

We are looking at the relationship between master and slave as reciprocal, and being remained the exploitation is not meaningless. However, in this social episode, only the techniques of control are important. We are looking at social life as if it were an episode in a laboratory, where all that matters is the techniques—and not the episodes themselves. Exploitation by the master is clearly related to the question of value judgments. Slave and slaveowner are in a reciprocal relationship only by the ambiguous use we are making of the word control. In the sense in which the word is used in real life, there can be no question that the slaveowner controls the slave, and that the reciprocal part of the relationship is that the slave may have a minimum of counter control—for instance, by threat of rebellion. “And it shall come to pass that the Lord God shall commence one’s work among all nations, kindreds, tongues, and people, to bring about the restoration of his people upon the Earth. And with righteousness shall the Lord God judge the poor, and reprove with equity for the meek of the Earth. And he shall smite the Earth with the rod of his mouth; and with the breath of his lips shall slay the wicked. For time speedily cometh that the Lord God shall cause a great division among the people, and the wicked will he destroy; and he will spare his people, yea, even if it so be that he must destroy the wicked by fire,” reports 2 Nephi 30.8-10. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

There is an Abyss which No Human Can Cross, a Mystery which Remains Utterly Impenetrable to One—This is Transcendent Godhead!

September 24, 2019 12:56 am

No, this is something you will never do, I thought. You will not take someone so vital out of the World. You will not disturb the destiny of one who has given others so much to love and enjoy. We have to establish the logical connection between alienation and anxiety. This is extremely difficult because the discussion of the problem of anxiety has by no means reached the clarity which would make it possible for an outsider—like myself to adopt an unambiguous position toward the various opinions. Nevertheless it seems to me that the differences in the conception of the origin of anxiety do not have a decisive significance for my analysis, although they are, of course, highly relevant in other contexts. Dr. Freud himself had originally derived anxiety from the repression of libidinous impulses, and thus has seen it as an automatic transformation of instinctual energy. This view he later modified. Others claim, on the other hand, that there is a single inborn faculty for being afraid. Dr. Rank, in his famous work, derives anxiety from the trauma of birth. And a number of analysts have tried, more or less successfully, to combine the various theories in many ways. The following propositions seem to me more or less acceptable. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

One must distinguish between true anxiety (Realangst) and neurotic anxiety. The difference is of considerable consequence especially for the understanding of the political importance of anxiety. The first—true anxiety—thus appears as a reaction to concrete danger situations; the second—neurotic anxiety—is produced by the ego, in order to avoid in advance even the remotest threat of danger. True anxiety is thus produced through the threat of an external object; neurotic anxiety, which may have a real basis, on the other hand is produced from within, through the ego. Since anxiety is produced by the ego, the seat of anxiety is in the ego, not in the id—the structure of instincts. However, from the analysis of the problem of psychological alienation it follows necessarily that anxiety, feelings of guilt, and the need for self-punishment are responses to internal threats to basic instinctual demands so that anxiety exists as a permanent condition. The external dangers which threaten a being meet the inner anxiety and are thus frequently experienced as even more dangerous than they really are. At the same time, these same external dangers intensify the inner anxiety. The painful tension which is evoked by the combination of inner anxiety and external danger can express itself in either two forms: in depressive or in persecutory anxiety. The differentiation is important because it helps us to evaluate the political function of anxiety more correctly. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

In the history of the individual there are certain typical dangers which produce anxiety. For the child, the withdrawal of love is of decisive importance. On this point there seems to be no doubt among psychologists. From the numerous phobias we may learn a great deal about the relation between anxiety and the renunciation of instinctual gratification. For inhibitions are a functional restraint of the ego; the ego renounces many activities in order to avoid a conflict with the id and the conscience. We know that the phobic symptoms are a substitute for gratifications of the instincts that have been denied or are unattainable. In other words, the ego creates anxiety through repression. If I have correctly reproduced the most important results of analytical theory concerning the origin of anxiety, several important consequences for the analysis of political behavior seem to follow immediately. Anxiety can play very different roles in the life of beings; that is, the activation of a state of anxiety through a danger can have a beneficial as well as destructive effect. We may perhaps distinguish three different consequences: Anxiety can play a warning role, a kind of mentor role, for beings. Affective anxiety may allow a presentiment of external dangers. Thus, anxiety also contains a protective function for it permits beings to take precaution in order to ward off the danger. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

Anxiety can have a destructive effect, especially when the neurotic element is strongly present; that is, it can make being incapable of collecting themselves either to escape the danger or to fight against it; it can paralyze beings and degenerate into panicky anxiety. Finally, anxiety can have a cathartic effect; beings can be strengthened inwardly when one has successfully avoided a danger or when one has prevailed against it. One may perhaps even say (although I cannot prove this) that the being who has conquered anxiety in coming to terms with a danger, may be more capable of making decisions in freedom than the one who never had to seriously wrestle with danger. This may be an important qualification of the proposition that anxiety can make free decision impossible. Our analysis of the relation of alienation to anxiety does not yet permit us to understand the political significance of these phenomena, because it is still in the realm of individual psychology. How does it happen that masses sell their souls to leaders and follow them blindly? On what does the power of attraction of leaders over masses rest? What are the historical situations in which this identification of leader and masses is successful, and what view of history do the beings have who accept leaders? #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

Thus, the question concerning the essence of identification of masses and a leader stands in the center of group-psychological analysis. Without it the problem of the integration or collectivization of the individual in a mass cannot be understood. I assume that the history of the theories of group psychology is familiar. The extraordinary difficulty in the comprehension of group-psychological phenomena is possessed first of all in our own prejudices; for the experiences of the last decades have instilled in us all more or less strong prejudices against the masses, and we associate with masses the epithet mob, a group of beings who are capable of every atrocity. In fact the science group psychology began with this aristocratic prejudice in the work of the Italian, Scipio Sighele; and Le Bon’s famous book is completely in this tradition. His these are familiar. Beings in the mass descends; one is, as it were, hypnotized by the leader (operateur) and in this condition is capable of committing acts which one would never commit as an individual. As the slave of the unconscious—for instance, for Le Bon, regressive—sentiments, beings in the mass are degraded into a barbarian: “Isolated, one may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, one is a barbarian—that is a creature acting by instinct. One possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

Critics of Le Bon, among them Dr. Freud, have pointed out that his theory, which rests on Sighele and Tarde, is inadequate in two aspects: the answer to the question, What hold the masses together? is inadequate, for the existence of a radical soul is unproved. In addition, in Le Bon the decisive problem—the role of the leader—hypnotist—remains unclarified. As is frequently true in social-psychological studies, the descriptions of psychological states are adequate, the theoretical analyses, the answers to “Why?,” are inadequate. From the outset, Dr. Freud sees the problem in the way which we have put it, namely, as that of the identification of masses with a leader—an identification which becomes of decisive significance particularly in an anxiety situation. And he sees in the libido the cement which holds leader and masses together, whereby, as is known, the concept of libido is to be taken in a very broad sense, to include the instinctual activities which in relations between the genders force their way toward the union in pleasures of the flesh, as well as those which in other circumstances are diverted from this aim or are prevented from reaching it, though always preserving enough of their original nature to keep their identity recognizable (as in such features as the longings for proximity, and self-sacrifice. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

The cement which holds the mass together bonds them to the leader is thus a sum of instincts that are inhibited in their aims. In this manner, I believe, the logical connection between alienation and mass behavior has been established. Since the identification of masses with the leader is an alienation of the individual member, identification always constitutes a regression, and a twofold one. On the one hand, the history of a being is the history of one’s emergency from the primal horde and of one’s progressive individualization; thus the identification with a leader in a mass is a kind of a historical regression. This identification is also a substitute for a libidinal object bond, thus a psychological regression, a damaging of the ego, perhaps even the loss of the ego. However, this judgment is valid only for the libido-charged, for instance, affective, identification of an individual in a mass with a leader; and not as a matter of course (and perhaps not all) for that of lovers and of small groups. Non-affective identification too, cannot be simply considered as regressive. For identification with organizations (church, army) is not always libidinally charged. MacDougall’s emphasis on the significance of organization must therefore be taken seriously. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

It is thus necessary to make distinctions. There are non-affective identifications, in which coercion or common material interest play an essential role, either in bureaucratic-hierarchic, or in cooperative form. It seems to me to be incorrect, above all for recent history, to see in the identification of the soldier with the army, for instance, in the loyalty to an organization, an actual identification of the soldier with the commander-in-chief. Surely these are example of this: Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Wallenstien, Napoleon. However, the commander-in-chief of the twenty first century is much more the technician of war than the leader of beings, and the libidinal bond of the soldier is, if I may coin the phrase, essentially cooperative, namely, with the smallest groups of comrades with whom one shares dangers. Thus I would like to establish two fundamental types of identification: a libido-charged (affective) and a libido-free (non-affective); and maintain generally (as it follows from MacDougall’s psychology) that non-affective identification with organization is less regressive than the affective identification with a leader. Non-affective loyalty is transferable; personal loyalty, on the other hand, is not. The former always contains strong rationalist elements, elements of calculability between organizations and individual, and thus prevents the total extinction of the ego. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

However, I believe that one must also distinguish two types within affective identification. One may call them cooperative and caesaristic. It is conceivable (and it has probably happened in short periods in history) that many equals identify themselves cooperatively with one another in such a manner that their egos are merged in the collective ego. However, this cooperative form is rare, limited to short periods or in any case operative only for small groups. The decisive affective identification is that of masses with leaders. It is—as I have said—the most regressive form, for it is built upon a nearly total ego-shrinkage. It is the form which is od decisive significance for us. We call it caesaristic identiciation. Caesaristic identification may play a role in history when the situation of masses is objectively endangered, when the masses are incapable of understanding the historical process, and when the anxiety activated by the danger become neurotic persecutory (aggressive) anxiety through manipulation. From this follows, first of all, that not every situation dangerous to masses must lead to a caesartic movement; it allows, further, that not every mass movement is based on anxiety, and thus not every mass movement need be caesaristic. Thus it is a question of determining the historical conditions in which a regressive movement under a Caesar tried to win political power. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

However, before we describe these historical situations, I may perhaps point to a clue which will frequently permit us an early diagnosis of the regressive character of such a mass movement. This clue is the view of history which the masses and the leaders employ. It may be called the conspiracy theory of history, a theory of history characterized by false concreteness. The connection between Caesarism and this view of history is quite evident. Just as the masses hope for their deliverance from distress into the World through a conspiracy. The historical process is personified in this manner. Hated, resentment, dread created by great upheavals, are concentrated on certain persons who are denounced as devilish conspirators. Nothing would be more incorrect than to characterize the enemies as scapegoats (as often happens in the literature), for they appear as genuine enemies who one must extirpate and not as substitutes whom one only needs to send into the wilderness. It is a false concreteness and therefore an especially dangerous view of history. Indeed, the danger consists in the fact that this view of history is never completely false, but always contains a kernel of truth and, indeed, must contain it, if it is to have a convincing effect. The truer it is one might say, the less regressive the movement; the falser, the more regressive. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

It is my thesis that whatever affective (for instance, caesaristic) leader-identifications occur in politics, masses and leaders have this view of history: that the distress which has befallen the masses has been brought about exclusively by a conspiracy of certain persons or groups against the people. With this view of history, true anxiety, which had been produced by war, want, hunger, anarchy, is to be transformed into neurotic anxiety and is to be overcome by means of identification with the leader-demagogue through total ego-renunciation, to the advantage of the leader and one’s clique, whose true interests do not necessarily have to correspond to those of the masses. Of course, I cannot provide conclusive proof, but I believe that by pointing to certain historical events I can make clear the connection between this view of history and Caesarism. What being will set out on a task which one can never hope to accomplish? It is too much to expect the average seeker to become a President Lincoln, or Martin Luther King, Jr. We portray the nature of this quest not because we hold such vain expectation but because we believe in the value of right direction and in the creative power of the Ideal. The general direction of one’s thoughts and deeds—rather than those thoughts and deeds themselves—as well as the ideal one mist habitually contemplates, is what is most important and most significant in one’s life. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

One first need is to choose a general goal, not necessarily an exact point but enough to orient oneself, to give one a direction. 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. Let us not pretend to the Perfect or the hope of its attainment. However, we can have the Ideal and follow it. It is a truth which one must bring to life by one’s own personal experience. If there were no possibility of finding one’s way from this body-prisoned, time-encased condition, then no one would ever have become self-realized, and all preaching of religion and teaching of philosophy would have been futile. However, we know from history and biography that such achievement has been experienced in all parts of the World and in all centuries, so that no should give up hope. Are the quest’s goals worth what one has to pay for them? It is even worth embarking on if one remembers how few seem to reach those goals? Time alone can show one that no price is too high and that right direction is itself sufficient reward. The ultimate goal is for us to live from the Overself not from the ego. When Glenn gray went back to Europe in 1955 to interview his comrades-in-arms and his friends in the resistance of fifteen years ago, a French woman living in her comfortable bourgeois home with her husband and son, confessed earnestly: “My life is so unutterably boring nowadays! Anything is better than to have nothing at all happen day after day. You know that I do not love war or want it to return. But at least it made me feel alive, as I have no felt before or since.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

Relating to the experience of listening to a German comrade-in-arms, Gray continues: Overweight, and with an expensive cigar in his mouth, he spoke of our earlier days together at the close of the way when he was shivering and hungry and harried with anxieties about keeping his wife and children from too great wants. “Sometimes I think that those were happier times for us than these.” And there was something like despair in his eyes. Neither one of these people was longing for the old day in sentimental nostalgia; they were confessing their disillusionment with a sterile present. Peace exposed a void in them that war’s excitement has enabled them to keep covered up. This void is that from which the ecstasy of violence is an escape. Some of the sterility is due to the inescapable conditions of civilized existence that remove much of the risk and challenge from life—risk and challenge that seem to be more important for many, if not most, people, than out much touted affluence. Violence puts the risk and challenge back, whatever we may think about its destructiveness; and no longer is life empty. We are going to have upheavals of violence for as long as experiences of significance are denied people. Everyone has a need for some sense of significance; and if we cannot make that possible, or even probable, in our society, then it will be obtained in destructive ways. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

The challenge before us is to find ways that people can achieve significance and recognition so that destructive violence will not be necessary. Thinking which is fact-grounded, experience-based, and correct; living which is wise, balanced, and good; prayer which goes deeper and deeper—these are some of our basic needs. Peace of mind can be enjoyed in this World: there is no need to wait for passage to the next one. Different terms can be used to label this unique attainment. It is insight, awakening, enlightenment. It is Being, Truth, Consciousness. It is Discrimination between the Seer and the Seen. It is awareness of That Which Is. It is the Practice of the Presence of God. It is the Discovery of Timelessness. All these words tell us something but they all fall short and do not tell us enough. In fact they are only hints for farther they cannot go: it is not on their level at all since it is the Touch of the Untouchable. However, nevermind; just pay with such ideas if you care too. Ruminate and move among them. Out your heart as well as head into the game. Who knows one day what may happen? Perhaps if you become still enough you too may know—as the Bible suggests. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

That life will reach some higher end and thus justify all the fret and toil is more than a comforting belief: it is also an offering of the highest Reason, the revelation of highest experience. A surgeon we know once wrote us that the goals seemed so distant, the way so long, the labour so arduous, that he felt inclined to abandon the quest altogether as something beyond ordinary human reach. Our reply to him was that because a position could not be capture in its entirety that was no reason for hesitating to make a start to capture some of it. ”And it came to pass that there was not one soul, except it were little children, who had entered the covenant (with God to keep his commandments) and had taken upon them the name of Christ,” reports Mosiah 6.2. It is a blessed historic fact that divine life and light came to the World through living beings. However, not what is more important is that it shall come to us today. Great historic prophets, sages, and teachers were not the first discoverers of this secret consciousness, nor will they be the last. Such a circle, with its esoteric doctrines and exclusive membership, cannot be understood properly by those who stand outside it and who therefore do not know its informing spirit. This is the wordless and pictureless discovery that insight reveals and intelligence confirms. This is the beautiful source of all life and unfailing sustainer of all beings. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

Randolph Harris II International Institute

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