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There Other Two Persons Seemed a Million Miles Away—Hold Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand and Eternity in an Hour
The air so emotionally frigid that when going to be at night, there was a feeling that no other person was in the house. I never in a thousand years would have imagined that would come out. Often times in human beings there is an early attachment of imprinting behavior, where people seem to follow their attachment with a similar blind fidelity. And this behavior may be made stronger by punishment or other difficulties put in their path. Some people spend a lifetime looking for someone to make up for their losses, to bring them justice for their less than pleasant childhoods or adult life. They go through life lonely, yearning for a love that will fill the large area of emptiness in their hearts. However, the struggles these individuals are engaged in is bound to be self-defeating. The first and fundamental challenge is to confront one’s fate as it is, reconcile one’s self to the fact that one did receive a bad deal, know that justice is irrelevant, no one will ever make up for the emptiness and the pain of those years. The past cannot be changed—it can only be acknowledged and learned from. It is one’s destiny. It can be absorbed and mitigated by new experiences, but it cannot be changed or erased. An individual only adds insult to injury by going on the rest of one’s life knocking one’s head against the same stone wall. Fortunately, psychotherapy can be a vehicle through which human beings may become more aware of and compensate for such implanted destiny. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Some people hang on to the past as a way of hanging on to someone they cared deeply about. It is an expression of the hope that someday this coveted individual will reward one, someday one will find the Holy Grail. Now one will get the original care one was missing; now one will get that restored! However, there is no way to restore it, no matter how much of a loss it is. Bad fate, yes. Yet, that is just the way it is. The lost idol image, the lost change, the great emptiness within one—they are all going to remain there. These things are the past; there is no way of changing them. You can change your attitude toward these tragic happenings, as the ultimate freedom is a command over one’s own attitude. However, you cannot change the experiences themselves. If you hang on to an illusion of such change, always hoping for pie in the sky by and by and by you cut off your possibilities. You then become rigid. You do not let yourself take in the new possibilities. You trade your freedom for a mess of emotional pottage. And this way, as a corollary, you never use your anger constructively. You lose a tremendous amount of power, energy, and possibility. In short, you lose your freedom. However, is there no constructive value in coming to terms with one’s early fate? Yes, there is—and a value potentially greater than what one gives up. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
The struggle to come to terms with acrimonious relationships and lifestyles has much to do with the emergence of creativity. For example, a man who had an unpleasant childhood ended up developing talents which led to his high status in the World of architecture. Because he had such a disturbed family life, that the creativity was compensation for such an early trauma. We know that creative people often come out of such unfortunate family backgrounds. Why and how they do is still one of the mysteries the answer to which the Sphinx of creativity has not revealed. We do know that some people have been unfortunate and never have been able to take life lightly. They learn from the hour of birth that it is best to take life easily, as many may. They cannot coast along or rest on their laurels. This exceptional achievement following a disturbed childhood or adulthood had been documented in many cases. Such freedom of the artist is not born. It is made in the pain of adolescent loneliness, the isolation of physical disability, or, perhaps, the smug superiority of inherited title. The freedom that permits generation of possibilities is the beginning of a creative product. Many of our most valuable people have come from the most calamitous situations. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
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. Whether in spite of or because of these conditions, it is clear that these children not only survived, but reached great heights of achievements, many after having experienced the most deplorable traumatic childhoods. The tension in these personalities between high aspiration and disappointment may well be the necessary matrix out of which creativity—and, later, civilization—is born. This type cannot slide into any well-adjusted syndrome. There is the outstanding exception of J.S. Bach, but his contentment—if it was that—seems to have been a combination of fortunate social conditions. The well-adjusted person rarely make great painters, sculptors, writers, architects, musicians. Coming out of such a confused early childhood allows the creative capacity to be considered a later compensation. The question is: Can a person seize these possibilities—these new reaches of freedom not without cruel fate, but despite fate—and weld them into a significant building, house, a statue, a painting, or some other creative product? #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
If one can accept the deprivation of the care one rightfully expected, if one can engage this loneness face to face, one will have achieved a strength and a power that will be a foundation more solid than one ever could have achieved otherwise. If one can accept this aspect of one’s destiny, the fates will work rather than against one. In this way one lives with the Universe rater than against it. One must learn to engage and accept these cruel things in one’s background. It is, therefore, inevitable that the questions “Is there a need for self-control” arises when a way of life is being espoused that encourages freedom of thought and action. And it is vital that no glib, easy answer be given, for it is an important question. Situations do exist where it can be said without equivocation “Yes, do exercise self-control.” Wen, for example, individuals have the desire to destroy the life or property of others or when they have the urge to take their own lives or act in obviously self-destructive ways, it is important that they control these impulses. Society has found it necessary and desirable, when it has the opportunity, to impose control on such persons by limiting their freedom by restraining them. One of the most painful tragedies in American life today is the suicides that occur among high school and college students—frequently those of great promise. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
It could be said those planning to end their own lives to please, please, hold on! Life may seem painful and meaningless. Perhaps you feel suddenly and terribly disillusioned. However, at least bear with the struggles and give yourselves the perspective of a few more years before you make such an irrevocable decision. It is not enough simply to develop self-control, even though we may need to use it to curb destructive impulses. The ultimately satisfying answer is to deal effectively with problems that underlie our destructive impulses so that we can move beyond the need for self-control. The basic problem is self-hate, for self-destructiveness and destructiveness directed toward others go hand and hand. The nation, for example, that sets out to destroy other nations is bent on a self-destructive course. The personal who assaults another person and follows one’s impulses is not benefiting one’s self. And, of course, one’s self-hate is evident in the obvious lack of confidence on one’s ability to relate to individuals in other ways that would be more pleasant. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
So let us be clear about one thing. The violent or destructive acts we are so often afraid we will do if we do not control ourselves are not the result of true freedom or spontaneity. The murderer is not free. One is an enslaved, tormented person who is driven by pent-up feelings of self-hate that have been projected outward onto other individuals or onto society at large. The superheated steam of this hatred builds up in one’s internal pressure cooker until whatever self-control one possesses is bypassed in an explosion of violence. To exhort such a person to control one’s self may be a necessary stop-gap measure, although it is likely to be futile. Any thorough-going help must deal with the mortal’s self-hate. Most of us may feel some impulses within ourselves to be destructive to others or to ourselves, which we sense the seen to curb by self-control. Often the inner pressure is not too great and we can be successful in this control if we choose to go that route, but the more such self-control we need to impose on ourselves the less able we will be to be carefree and spontaneous. And spontaneity is a deliciously desirable way of living. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
If we can discover why we feel destructive and through this exploration reduce the self-hate to the point where we have relatively little need for self-control, it will be a far more freeing experience. A professional therapist can often be very helpful here, for one can provide a relatively secure environment where hatreds (both toward the self and others) can be expressed and explored with a minimum of danger. Often in therapy people discover that they are not nearly as dangerous to themselves or others as the feared. They find they had been so frightened of freedom that they had imagined themselves far more potentially harmful than they were as a way of keeping themselves rigidly controlled. However, some people like to deceive themselves. To be rejected makes a better excuse—to tell everyone how misunderstood they are, and how they triumphed over great odds. The misunderstood genius, nobody to help them, and so on. We all live in the old state of things. We belong to the Old Creation, and the demand made upon us by Christianity is that we also participate in the New Creation. We have known ourselves in our old being, and we shall ask ourselves in this hour whether we also have experiences something of a New Being in ourselves. The union with God is when the New Reality is present. God is the ultimate truth and demands complete devotion. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
It is important to experience the birth in consciousness of a new—though old—part of the self. One may consider it a dawning of awareness of new possibilities which have in effect been there all the time. This is a giant step toward personal freedom. This New Creation is manifest in Jesus who is called Christ. And it is actually the beginning of accepting acceptance, the uniting of one’s self with that early self that one had had to lock up in a dungeon in order to survive when life was not happy but threatening. Although this does not alter the original lack of basic trust, it does surmount it in the literal meaning of that term. We hear about the psychology of anger and how it clouds our vision, causes us to misunderstand each other, and in general interferes with the calm necessary for a rational, clear view of life. People point out that their anger curtails one’s freedom. All this is true. However, it is one-sided; it omits the constructive side to anger. In our society, we confuse anger with resentment, a form of repressed anger that eats steadily away at our innards. In resentment we store up ammunition to get even with our fellows, but we never communicate directly in a way that might resolve the problem. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
This transformation of anger into resentment is the sickness of the middle class. It corrodes our stature as human beings. Or we confuse anger with temper, which is generally an explosion of repressed anger; with rage, which may be a pathological anger; with petulance, which is immature resentment; or with hostility, which is anger absorbed into our character structure until it infects every act of ours. I am not referring to these kinds of hostility or resentment. I am speaking, rather, of the anger that pulls the diverse parts of the self together, that integrates the self, keeps the whole self alive and present, energizes us, sharpens our vision, and stimulates us to think more clearly. This kind of anger brings with it an experience of self-esteem and self-worth. It is the healthy anger that makes freedom possible, the anger that cuts one loose from the unnecessary baggage in living. However, people who are romantically involved with others that do not share their values will find there is a conflict of two different value systems, and it will feel like a red hot poker being shoved into your heart. Some people take their issues they have with their absentee parents out on their partner or a family member of the same gender as the parent they have an issue with. They take revenge by punishing innocent people as a whole. The individual being targeted has to admit one’s own cruelty—cruelty to one’s self most of all for allowing someone like that to be in one’s life. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
Do not cover up what you really feel and become deceitful just to survive. Do not surrender your freedom. Many people always try to foresee that the other person’s reaction will be before they speak. These types of individual hide behind such laudable words as responsibility, dutiful, noble member of society, and so on. However, one must hate these roles they play with people who are taking advantage of them. Occasionally being honest with people and venting your anger will give you partial freedom. At least one starts to know one can say what one feels. However, it may still be a freedom within a jail. There is the lacking surge of anger that leads to a changing of one’s life, the willingness to cut loose all the barges one is pulling, to throw aside all one’s luggage and one’s overscrupulous cares. It is not a good idea to always prefer to be hurt rather than to take care of yourself even if it hurts someone else. Another vital question remains to be discussed in regard to living spontaneously. Can we be deeply involved in a love relationship and still be free to be spontaneous? A great many people act as though love and spontaneity are incompatible. There are two frequent feelings that contribute to this reaction that love and freedom cannot coexist. And, of course, they help to make love that much more frightening to us. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
One of these feelings has to do with the idea that the revealing of ourselves, which intimacy involves, gives the other person power over us, thereby limiting our freedom to do what we want to do. Have you noticed that when you talk to people sometimes it is like you have an invisible wall between your eyes and theirs—a wall that has never been absent in all the time you have know them? Well, some of us are always on guard. There is the feeling that one can never let anyone see one completely—know all about who we are. That is because it would give the other person too many strings on one. It would allow one to become their puppet. Many develop these defenses of withdrawing into one’s self and permitting others to see as few of one’s real feelings as possible as a way of avoiding manipulation by them. This is because some feel if one allows others to really know one, one will be helpless to avoid being manipulated. The other feeling that leads us to shy away from love because it appears to threaten our freedom is probably even more common. This is the idea that love is inescapably tied up with obligation and responsibility. Among other ways in which this duty theme operates is the idea that if we really love another we will cease doing what we want to do and concentrate on pleasing the one we love. Such feelings often strike a death blow to the experience and expression of love. Men and women talk about their lack of freedom to do what they would like to do because of the necessity of providing adequately for their families. So work becomes noxious, tolerated duty. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
We also hear could saying their partner would not like it if they did this or that and that they would like to go out, but the children have to come first, you know. So all of life become hedged about with responsibilities and the necessity of pleasing others brought about by love. And virtually everything in life, from daily work, fidelity, pleasures of the flesh, and second honeymoons to family picnics, walking in the park, and holding hands in the movie, becomes a dutiful and essentially joyless act that we do in hope that spouse and children will be pleased. When approached this way, it is no wonder that love seems like slavery and many splendored things! When so many people view love this way, it is not surprising that a playboy (and playgirl) philosophy would develop in our culture in which physical intimacy without emotional intimacy would become very attractive to us as a way of life. The essential message of the philosophy seems to be, “As long as I can remain indifferent to my pleasures of the flesh partners I can retain my freedom and individuality. Once I begin to allow myself to care for someone, I have had it! I am on my way to becoming a slave.” The joker in this deck is that the moment we embrace this philosophy we have walked out on the freedom to have the most deeply satisfying fun of all—a love relationship freely experienced and expressed. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
The basic problem underlying our feeling that love and freedom are incompatible is our old nemesis, self-hate. If we act freely and do what we want to do, we assume, and often we have been taught to assume, that we will destroy relationships that are important to us. However, this involves a colossal distrust of ourselves. We are, in effect, saying to ourselves, “If you do not watch yourself carefully, you are such a miserable creature and so self-destructive that you will alienate everyone you care for and end up all alone.” The reality is that one of the quickest ways of alienating another person is to put every effort into pleasing them. When we try to put their wishes foremost, we are likely to become a nonentity in their eyes. It is not particularly pleasing to attempt to relate to a person who has no apparent desires of one’s own, who always bends to accommodate our wishes, and who makes an uncomplaining doormat of one’s self for us to walk upon. Furthermore, when we deny our own desires, we quickly come to resent that person for talking advantage of us. That resentment will then likely be expressed in any number of ways. Perhaps we begin to take on martyr posture and express by word or attitude the feelings: “After all I have done for you, the least you could do would be to try to please me once in a while.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
It is much more straightforward and ultimately satisfying to be what we want to be and do what we want to do. As we learn that we can value ourselves and respond to our own desires, it is unlikely we will act in ways that destroy relationships with those for whom we care—because this will be destructive toward ourselves, too. It is true that more flare-ups of disagreements and anger may occur, because our wishes and those of others will not always agree, but two individuals in this situation are likely to respect each other for being sufficiently independent to express feelings openly, and the way is then clear to battle through to some agreements. If we do find ourselves acting in ways that constantly hurt those we love and destroy our relationships with them it would be advisable to seek professional help, for it would be an indication that we have so much self-hate that we have a need to hurt ourselves, since hurting others is self-destructive. Love God and do as you please. This is a profound idea, but it can be carried an additional step and be developed into a philosophical phrase which is more complete. If you truly value yourself, love yourself and do as you please for you will not hurt people unnecessarily. To do so would be to hurt yourself. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
This seems too good to be true to most of us. We are so connived that to live spontaneously is to live dangerously toward others and ourselves, but if we can begin, perhaps a little at a time, to be more responsive to our inner selves, we will discover that living spontaneously is exciting and rewarding to ourselves and to those we care for. Once having made that discovery we will not be content with less than an ever-increasingly spontaneous life. Moving toward the right attitude is passionate and infinite longing. The New Being is not something at simply takes the place of the Old Being. However, it is a renewal of the Old which has been corrupted, distorted, split and almost destroyed. Yet, not wholly destroyed. Salvation does not destroy creation; but it transforms the Old Creation into a New one. Therefore we can speak of the New in terms of a re-newal: The threefold “re,” namely, re-condilation, re-union, re-surrection. The message of reconciliation is: Be reconciled to God. Crease to be hostile to the Lord, for God is never hostile to you. The message of reconciliation is not that Good needs to be reconciled. How could he be? Since God is the source and power of reconciliation, who could reconcile the Lord? The sacred is here and now. God is present in all elements. Hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
All I Do to My Disciples is to Free them from their Own Bondage by Any Means their Case May Need
Try always to treat humanity, in our person as well as that of others, as an end and never only as a means. Even when you treat me only as a means I do not always mind. A genuine encounter can be quite exhausting, even when it is exhilarating, and I do not always want to give myself. Even when you treat me only as a means because you want some information, I may feel delighted that I have the answer and can help. However, mortal’s attitudes are manifold, and there are many ways of threatening others as ends also. There are many modes of I-You. You may be polite when asking; you may show respect, affection, admiration, or one of the countless attitudes that mortals call love. Or you may not ask but seek without the benefit of words. Or you may speak but not ask, possibly responding to my wordless question. We may do something together. You may write me. You may think of writing me. And there are others ways. There are many modes of I-You. The total encounter in which You is spoken with one’s whole being is but one mode of I-You. Obscurity is fascinating. One tries to puzzle out details, is stumped, and becomes increasingly concerned with meaning—unless one feels put off and gives up altogether. We pay a price of all the activities in our lives. When it is Life loses much of its color, its adventure, and its satisfaction in relationships wen it is lived in these terms. Take legalism, for example. Thus church, though it has to exclusive domain on legalism, provides many examples of people who are essentially legalists. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
A certain Mrs. Rice gained considerable prestige and power in her denomination. This was largely because she was a tireless and efficient worker for the church since her husband, a successful businessman, had died and left her financially independent while she still had many active years left. She devoted them mainly to the church. She was also, of course, in a position to make large donations to her favorite projects in the denomination, which did not diminish her influence among denominational leaders. Mrs. Rice wore her increasing stature in the church well. Correctness in behavior was important to her, and she was every inch the gracious lady. She was charming and friendly. She did not throw her weight around in any obvious fashion. If she has any secret sins they were well hidden, and everyone would have been greatly surprised had any come to light. In spite of her friendliness and her habit of befriending many younger people, however, it would have been hard to have imagined her to be very close to anyone. She was the patroness of many, the confidante of none. Not too long after the death of her husband, a minister came to the local church of which she was a member. She appeared to develop a deep respect, perhaps even affection, for this man, who had great talents. Toward the end of his ministry in that perish the relationship between Mrs. Rice and the minister, while still cordial, seemed perceptibly more distant, a fact that was puzzling to the minister. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
When the minister had been in another church in the denomination for some time, his name began to appear as a candidate for various positions of importance within the church on the basis of his demonstrated abilities. However, it also became apparent that his name was being dropped from consideration each time it came up. It eventually came to him through friends that there was a persistent rumor for a reliable source that he had had a sexual affair with one of the women of his former parish. With characteristic directness he traced the rumor to its source, the church’s wealthy benefactress. When he confronted her, Mrs. Rice admitted that she was responsible for the rumor, although, as she said, “There may have been one or two others who thought the same thing.” She said she was convinced that what she had reported was true and that she felt it was her duty to prevent such a person from achieving eminence in the church. Even if he were innocent, she felt, the fact that he could bring on such suspicious by his actions indicated he was a person of questionable judgement. The minister had traced the rumor, he was only able in a small way to lessen its harmful effect on his career. It seems almost irrelevant to report that he had not be sexually involved with the woman in question though it had been a deeply significant relationship for him and filled a need for emotional intimacy he had not experienced elsewhere. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The wealthy widow serves as an example of the essential barrenness of the legalistic approach to life. True intimacy was unquestionably frightening to Mrs. Rice, and living by the rules protected her from it. In a very practiced and not unpleasing way she was proper and friendly. Always the friendliness was within bounds. To have revealed enough to herself to have been emotionally close to another would probably have seemed like an impropriety to her. It is probable that her adherence to the rules made it difficult, if not impossible, to see herself clearly. No doubt she was sexually attracted to the minister, but this would be so untenable a thought that she would not allow herself to feel it. When faced with the decision as to whether or not to betray her friend, perhaps she was faced with some brief doubts. However, this was no doubt quickly, if sadly, resolved by her dedication to the rules. So it became her Christian duty to pass on her knowledge to others, and she willingly became judge, jury, and executioner. Is there no place for rules in life? Yes, of course there is. Society provides many examples. We agree that we will drive on one side of the street rather than on the other and thus eliminate mass chaos. In a complex society we need such rules. And no doubt we have a responsibility to ourselves to see that helpful ones are enacted and that destructive or overly restrictive laws are not enacted, or, if they have been enacted, to see that they are repealed. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
However, when rules become a way of life, they become a problem. When we constantly judge ourselves and other people good or bad, the rules become distancing devices. We tend to classify people, including ourselves; and we give up our freedom to accept, enjoy, and respond to people, including ourselves, as they are. Almost always in rule-dominated lives, a hierarchy of sins tends to develop, and those sins we tend to find most frighteningly desirable but unacceptable in ourselves tend to head the list. We are likely to be most condemning of sins of passion—expressions of anger, pleasures of the flesh, unrestrained expressions of love and warmth, unconfined creative thinking that threatens changes in the established order. Far down on the list and sometimes the subject of polite discussion but never accorded the passionate condemnation given the fist order of sins are such things as indifference, coldness, prejudice, unscrupulous business practices, hypocrisy, judgmentalism, and the like. Of these we tend to be tolerant, for this, as we say, is “just the way people are”! Becoming less legalistic helps us to love more spontaneously. If we move beyond self-control into a more creative relationship with ourselves, it will also help us. If we allow ourselves to be responsive to our impulses and desires, many of us have deep-seated fears that we will in one way or another run amuck and be destructive to those about us and perhaps ultimately to ourselves. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Because of this pervasive mistrust of ourselves, we feel it necessary to clamp lids of self-control on our lives. We set up a kind of inner boarder of censorship through which most of our impulses to act or speak must pass and be voted upon before action can be permitted. Obviously, much of our potential spontaneity is lost in the process. In one of Grimm’s stories there is a competition between a giant and a little tailor to see which is the stronger. The giant throws a stone so high that it takes a very long time before it comes down again. The little tailor lets a bird fly and it does not come down at all. Anything without wings always comes down again in the end. It is because the will has no power to bring about salvation that the idea of secular morality is an absurdity. What is called morality only depends on the will in what is, so to speak, its most muscular aspect. Religion on the contrary corresponds to desire, and it is desire that saves. The Roman caricature of Stoicism also appears to the muscular will. However, true Stoicism, the Stoicism of the Greek, from which Saint John, or perhaps Christ, borrowed the terms Logos and Pneuma, is purely desire, piety, and love. It is fully of humility. The Christianity of today has let itself become contaminated by its adversaries, on this point as on many others. The metaphor of a search for Go is suggestive of efforts of muscular will. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
It is true that Pascal contributed to the spread of this metaphor of the search for God. He made several mistakes, notably that of confusing faith and autosuggestion to a certain extent. In the great symbols of mythology and folklore, in the parables of the Gospel, it is God who seeks mortals. “Quaevens me sedisti lassus.” Nowhere in the Gospel is there question of a search undertake by mortals. Mortals do not take a step unless one receives some pressure or is definitely called. The role of the future wife is to wait. The slaves waits and watches while one’s master is at a festival. The passer-by does not invite oneself to the marriage feast, one does not ask for an invitation; one is brought in almost by surprise; one’s part is only to put on the appropriate garment. The mortal has found a pearl in a field sells all one’s goods to buy the field; one does not need to excavate the entire field with a spade in order to unearth the pearl; it is enough for one to sell all one possesses. To long for God and to renounce all the rest, that alone can save us. The conditions of modern civilized society are not helpful to the Christian self-culture, although they will serve intellectual self-culture. What is first needed is a recognition of the value of retreat, of times and places where every many and woman may periodically and temporarily isolate oneself or whilst withdrawing attention from Worldly affairs and giving it wholly to spiritual ones. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
The attitude that brings about salvation is not like any forms of activity. It is the waiting or attentive and faithful immobility that lasts indefinitely and cannot be shaken. The slave, who waits near the door so as to open it immediately when the master knocks, is the best image of it. One must be ready to die of hunger and exhaustion rather than to change one’s attitude. It must be possible for one’s companion to call one, talk to one, hit one, without one even turning one’s head. Even if one is told that the master is dead, and even if one believes it, one will not move. If one is told that the master is angry with one and will beat one when he returns, and if one believes it, one will not move. Active searching is prejudicial, not only to love, but also to the intelligence, whose laws are the same as those of love. We just have to wait for the solution of a geometrical problem or the meaning of a Latin or Greek sentence to some into our mind. Still more must we wait for any new scientific truth or for a beautiful line of poetry. Seeking leads us astray. This is the case with every form of what is truly good. Mortals should do nothing but wait for the good and keep evil away. One should make no muscular effort except in order not to be shaken by evil. In the constant turning and returning of which our human condition is made up, true virtue in every domain is negative, at least in appearance. This waiting for goodness and truth is, however, something more intense than any searching. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
These words will make no appeal to the materialist mentality which still regards all spiritual experiences as the outcome of pathological conditions. Such an attitude, fortunately, has become less sure of itself than it was when first I embarked on these studies and experiments, now more than in the past. The Christian who sits in an hour-long prayer session is not wasting one’s time, even though one is indulging in something which to the sceptic seems meaningless. On the contrary, one’s prayer is of vital significance. The Father is aware of us, knows our needs, and will help us perfectly. One aspect of that perfect love is our Heavenly Father’s involvement in the details of our lives, even when we may not be aware of it or understand it. We seek the Father’s divine guidance and help through heartfelt, earnest prayer. When we honor our covenants and strive to be more like our Savior, we are entitled to a constant stream of divine guidance through the influence and inspiration of the Holy Ghost. The notion of grace, as opposed to virtue depending on the will, and that of inspiration, as opposed to intellectual or artistic work, these two notions, if they are well understood, show the efficacy of desire and of waiting. Attention animated by desire is the whole foundation of religious practices. That is why no system of mortality can take their place. The mediocre part of the soul has, however, a great many lies in its arsenal that are capable of protecting it, even during prayer or the participation of the sacraments. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
The soul outs veils between our eyes and the presence of perfect purity, and it is clever enough to call them God—such veils, for instance, as states of the soul, sources of sensible joy, of hope, of comfort, of soothing consolation, or else a combination of habits, or one or several human beings, or perhaps a social circle. It is difficult to avoid the pitfall of striving to imagine the divine perfection religion invites us to love. Never in any case can we imagine something more perfect than ourselves. This effort renders useless the marvel of the Eucharist. A certain formation of intelligence is necessary in order to be able to contemplate the Eucharist only what by definition it enshrines, that is to say, something which is totally outside our experience, something of which we only know that it exists and that noting else can ever be desires expect in error. The trap of traps, the almost inevitable trap, is the social one. Everywhere, always, in everything, the social feeling produces a perfect imitation of faith, that is to say perfectly deceptive. This imitation has the great advantage of satisfying every part of the soul. That which longs for goodness believes it is fed. That which is mediocre is not hurt by the light; it is quite at its ease. Thus everyone is in agreement. The soul is at peace. However, Christ said that he did not come to bring peace. He brought a sword, the sword that serves in two. It is almost impossible to distinguish faith from its social imitation. All the more so because the soul can contain one part of true faith and one of imitation faith. It is almost but not quite impossible. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Under present circumstances, it is perhaps a question of life of death for faith that the social imitation should be repudiated. The necessity for a perfectly pure presence to take away defilement is not restricted to churches. People come with their stains to the churches, and that is all very well. It would, however, be more in conformity with the spirit of Christianity if, besides that, Christ went to bring his presence into those places most polluted wit shame, misery, crime, and affliction, into prisons and law courts, into workhouses and shelters for the wretched and the outcast. Every session of bench or courts should begin and end with a prayer, in which the magistrates, the police, and the accused, and the public shared. Christ should not be absent from the places where work or study is going on. All human beings, whatever they are doing and wherever they are, should be able to have their eyes fixed, during the whole of each day, upon the service of bronze. Is should also be publicly and officially recognized that religion is nothing else but a looking. In so far as it claims to be anything else, it is inevitable that it should either be shut up inside churches, or that it should stifle everything in every other place where it is found. Religion should not claim to occupy a place in society other than that which rightly belongs to supernatural love in the soul. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Moreover it is true also that many people degrade charity in themselves because they want to make it occupy too large and too visible a place in their soul. Our Father lives only in secret. Love should always be accompanied by modesty. True faith implies great discretion, even with regard to itself. It is a secret between God and us in which we ourselves have scarcely any part. The love of our neighbor, the love of the beauty of the World, and the love of religion are in a sense quite impersonal loves. This could easily not be so in the last case, because religion is connected with a certain section of society. The very nature of religion is connected with a certain section of society. The very nature of religious practices must remedy this. At the center of the Catholic religion a little formless matter is found, a little piece of bread. The love directed toward this particle of matter is necessarily impersonal. It is not the human person of Christ such as we picture him; it is not the divine person of the Father, likewise subject to all the errors of our imagination; it is outwardly only a fragment of matter, yet it is at the center of the Catholic religion. Herein is possessed the great scandal and yet the most wonderful virtue of this religion. It all authentic forms of religious life alike, there is something that guarantees their impersonal character. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
The love of God ought to be impersonal as long as there has not been any direct and personal contact; otherwise it is an imaginary love. Afterward it ought to be both personal and impersonal again, but this time in a higher sense. There is however a personal and human love which is pure and which enshrines an intimation and a reflection of divine love. This is friendship, provided we keep strictly to the true meaning of the word. And keep in mind that God is at this moment aware of you, your feelings, and the spiritual and temporal needs of everyone around you. This great and comforting truth can be found in daily life. The closer we draw to our Heavenly Father, the more his light and joy will shine from within us. Others will notice that there is something unique and special about us. And they will ask about it. We have to try to fill our hearts with love for others and truly see everyone around us as a child of God. Laugh with them, rejoice with them, weep with them, respect them, heal, life and strengthen them. Strive to emulate the love of Christ and have compassion for others—even to those who are unkind, who mock and wish to cause harm. Love them and treat them as fellow children of Heavenly Father. As our love for God and his children deepens, so does our commitment to follow Jesus Christ. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Christ Taught Us that the Supernatural Love of Our Neighbor is the Exchange of Compassion and Gratitude
My gentlemen parents are forever reluctant to illuminate such simple matters. One would think it would be bad taste to dwell on such subjects Louis looks puzzled, then miserable, before he returns to the evening paper. And Lestat, he smiles and plays a little Mozart for me, then answers with a shrug: “It was the day you were born to us.” Just as some people live primarily in the past, others avoid the present by living in the future. Some of us spend most of our time getting ready to do something. Perhaps we say, “Someday I am going to spend a whole Summer traveling through Europe.” However, always we manage to find good and sufficient reasons why now is not the time to do it. Perhaps we manage this by making “The Plan” so grandiose and unrealistic that excuses for postponing its fulfillment will always seem overwhelming. One single, elementary professor had the dream, as she put it, of going to Ireland to find a leprechaun. She sold her Cresleigh home at Rocklin Trails and, at the expressed dismay of a number of friends and relatives, took part of the proceeds and went one Summer to Ireland. She reported on her return that she had not completely found her leprechaun. She discovered, for example, that she could sometimes be lonely and depressed even in that exquisitely beautiful and mystical country, but she missed her Cresleigh home so much. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
However, at least she did not live out her years in the frustrated thought that she could be happy if she could just get to the promised land, and maybe one day she can buy another Cresleigh home. If the Christian life were nothing more than a way of forgetting the dark sorrows of Earthly life, a means of escaping the hard problems of Earthly life, it would still be worthwhile. If its emotional raptures were nothing more than make-believe, it would still be worthwhile. We do not disdain theatres and books, films, and music merely because the World into which they lead us is only one of glorious unreality. However, the fact is that mysticism does seek reality, albeit an inner one. We are not only actors giving a performance on the World-stage. We are also people who must learn to live in the still centre of our being. This is the higher purpose of life; to this mortals must in the end dedicate themselves: for this they must work, study, and pray. Our whole life on Earth is in the end nothing else than a kind of preparation for this quest. Often time people reflect on their families as they grow and evolve. One man describes his father as a sometime guy. “His whole life revolved around this word of his,” says the son. “When I was a child he started to add a room to the house, and he is still living in that house with the skeleton of a room attached, which he is going to finish sometime.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
As we advance on our quest, our values may change. This is partly because we learn by experience what every mortal has to learn, quester or not, that all is passing and nothing is absolute, that the fruits of desire may turn to truth, and every day brings us closer to reaching our goals. Probably all of us lives in the future to some extent. Often it takes the form of doing more planning and more organizing than we need to do. We spend the time now planning the things we will do for the coming week. When the time comes to do what we planned we no longer feel free to let ourselves be aware of whether that is really what we want to do at that moment. So we keep ourselves in a constant state of planning or fulfilling plans and leave ourselves little room to be open and responsive to our feelings of the moment. When we work so hard at it, it is no wonder we sometimes feel trapped. So to live in the present—not in the past, not in the future is very important. It means being sensitive and responsive to our own selves. However, for many people any movement in the direction of spontaneity must be preceded by a rediscovery of the capacity to be self-aware, since many of us have become virtually unaware of the self. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
One man, Armand, who grew up in a Christian household where he gained the impression that he must always be totally unselfish and subjugate any of his desires to those of everyone around him, tells how he woke up the morning after his first visit to a psychotherapist and broke into tears, sobbing for forty-five minutes or an hour. In describing the feeling that he had that mornings, he says, “Somehow that therapist got through to me the fact that I have a self—a self that is separate from anyone else. And it was such a new and reassuring idea to me that I could not stop crying from the relief I felt.” It is not surprising that Armand, like many others, had to go through a considerable retraining effort to become sensitively aware of his feelings. All of his childhood training had been in the other direction. He has been taught to be sensitively aware of and responsive to the needs and desires of others and to turn off any awareness of one’s own desires, which would automatically be regarded as selfish and therefore sinful. The lack of self-awareness often takes the form of being disconnected to the feelings that are unacceptable and frightening to us. This would probably account, for example, for the almost total absence of enjoyable relationships for some men and women. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
The same would be true of the individual whose anger never some into focus, or the one whose anger has a long fuse, so that awareness always comes some time later when the anger producing situation, along with the opportunity for expressing the anger, has become past history. It is not mental slowness but emotion slowness that presents us from thinking until it is too late of just the right angry words we would have liked to have been able to say at the right moment. And now let us look once more at those whom we have described as the righteous ones. They are really righteous, but since little is forgiven them, they love little. And this is their unrighteousness. It is not possessed on the moral level, just as the unrighteousness of Job was not possessed on the moral level where his friends sought for it in vain. It is possessed on the level of the encounter with ultimate reality, with the God who vindicates Job’s righteousness against the attacks of his friends, with the God who defends himself against the attacks of Job and his ultimate unrighteousness. The righteousness of the righteous ones is hard and self-assured. They, too, want forgiveness, but they believe that they do not need much of it. And so their righteous actions are warmed by very little love. They could not have some people seeking forgiveness and acceptance, and they cannot help us, even if we admire them. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
Why do children turn from their righteous parts and husbands from their righteous wives, and vice versa? Why do Christians turn away from their righteous pastors? Why do people turn away from righteous neighborhoods? Why do many turn away from righteous Christianity and from the Jesus it paints and the God it proclaims? Why do they turn to those who are not considered to be the righteous ones? Often, certainly, it is because they want to escape judgment. However, more often it is because they seek a love which is rooted in forgiveness, and this righteous ones cannot give. Many of those to whom they turn cannot give it either. Jesus gave it to the woman who was utterly unacceptable. The Church would be more the Church of Christ than it is now if it did the same, if it joined Jesus and not Simon in its encounter with those who are rightly judged unacceptable. If more were forgiven one, if one loved more and if one could better resist the temptation to present oneself as acceptable to God by one’s own righteousness, each of us who strives for righteousness would be more Christian. Helping individuals recapture self-awareness is often one of the most useful services the competent therapist can provide. It seems likely, however, that the person who is not seriously emotionally damaged can make considerable progress without such help. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
This growth involves learning to listen to one’s self—not shutting out those signals we have become accustomed to ignoring. Often a good way to start is to allow the simplest physical feelings to come through. When we do not let our minds perceive, our bodies may be aware. In an awkward social situation, for example, when we are frightened and want to run even though we have suppressed the fear from conscious awareness, our legs may tense up. Here again a group of intimates can be invaluable. If there are those with whom we can develop sufficient confidence that we can increasingly be ourselves, it will be surprising to us how quickly we can learn to be aware of a wealthy of various feelings we have hitherto suppressed. This is one of the values of group psychotherapy in the professional setting, but the experience need not be limited to therapy groups. Increasing self-awareness opens the door to the possibility of living more spontaneously, but the result is by no means automatically achieved. As we have seen, the possibility of freedom is frightening to us and we build many defenses against the natural life. We may bust ourselves compulsively and develop meaningless rituals to occupy our hours and limit our opportunity for spontaneity; or we may live by rules and put more emphasis than is necessary on the need for self-control; or we may make love seem like slavery. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
To begin to give up these defenses is frightening, because they take mist of the ambiguity out of life and help us keep life cut and dried and our response to life’s situations predictable. We know pretty much what we will do. Our lives are full of activity, the rules are laid out, and we are in tight control of ourselves most of the time. If it were something other than a convention, it would be at least practically human and not totally divine. A real convention is a supernatural harmony, taking the word harmony in the Pythagorean sense. Only a convention can be the perfection of purity here below, for all nonconventional purity is more of less imperfect. That a convention should be real, that is a miracle of divine mercy. We are all conscious of evil within ourselves; we all have a horror of it and want to get rid of it. Outside ourselves we see evil under two distinct forms, suffering and sin. However, in our feeling about our own nature the distinction no longer appears, except abstractly or through reflection. We feel in ourselves something which is neither suffering nor sin, which is the two of them at once, the root common to both, defilement and pain at the same time. This is the presence of evil in us. It is the unattractiveness in us, the uneducated aspect of our being. The more we feel it, the more it fills us with horror. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
The soul rejects evil in the same way we experience emesis. By a process of transference we pass it on to the things that surround us. These things, however, thus becoming blemished and unattractive in our eyes, send us back the evil that we had put into them. They send it back after adding to it. It this exchange the evil in us increases. It seems to us then that they very places where we are living and the things that surround us imprison us in evil, and that it becomes daily worse. This is a terrible anguish. Jesus Christ experienced what he did because no mortal could bare it. When the soul, worn out with this anguish, ceases to feel it any more, there is little hope of its salvation. It is thus that an invalid conceives hatred and disgust for one’s room and surroundings, a prisoner for one’s cell, and only often a worker for one’s factory. It is useless to provide people in this state with beautiful things, for there is nothing which does not eventually become spoiled and sullied by the process of transference, until it ends up as an object of horror. Perfect purity alone cannot be defiled. If at the moment when the soul is invaded by evil the attention can be turned toward a thing of perfect purity, so that a part of the evil is transferred to it, this thing will be in no way tarnished by it, nor will it send it back. Thus each minute of such attention really destroys a part of the evil. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
What the Hebrews tried to accomplish, by means of a kind of magic, in their rite of scapegoat, can only be carried out here on Earth by perfect purity. The true scapegoat is the Lamb. The day when a perfect being was to be found here below in human form, the greatest possible amount of evil scattered around one was automatically concentrated upon one in form of suffering. At that time, throughout the Roman Empire, the greatest misfortune and the greatest crime among mortals was slavery. That is why one suffered the death which was the extremity of affliction possible for a slave. In a mysterious manner this transference constitutes the Redemption. It is the same when a human being turns one’s eyes and one’s attention toward the Lamb of God present in the consecrated bread, a part of the evil which one bears within one is directed toward perfect purity, and there suffers destruction. It is a transmutation rather than a destruction. The contact with perfect purity dissociates the suffering and sin which has been mixed together so indissolubly. The part of evil in the soul is burned by the fire of this contact and becomes only suffering, and the suffering is impregnated with love. In the same way when all the evil diffused throughout the Roman Empire was concentrated on Christ it became only suffering to one. If there were not perfect and infinite purity here below, if there were only finite purity, which contact with evil eventually exhausts, we could never be saved. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
Penal justice affords a frightful illustration of this truth. In principle it is something pure which has goodness for its object. It is, however, an imperfect, finite, human purity. Therefore, uninterrupted contact with a mixture of crimes and affliction wears away this purity and outs in its place a defilement about equal to the totality of crimes, a defilement far exceeding that of any particular criminal. Mortals fail to drink from the source of purity. If this spring did not well up wherever there is crime and affliction, creation would however be an act of cruelty. If there had been no crime in affliction in the centuries further back than two thousand years, and in the countries untouched by missions, we might think that the Church had the monopoly of Christ and the sacraments. How can we bear the thought of a single crucified slave twenty-two centuries ago, how can we help accusing God, if we think that at that time Christ was absent and every kind of sacrament unknown? It is true that we hardly think at all about slaves crucified twenty-two centuries ago. When we have learned to look at perfect purity, the shortness of human life is the only thing to prevent us from being sure that unless we play false we can attain perfection even here on Earth. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
For we are finite being and the evil that is within us is finite too. As sad as it is, we are not immortal because we are not yet perfect and living thousands of years would give some people too much time to cultivate evil and too much power and the World would not be a place worth living in. As it stands now, we know our time is limited and that if we are good beings we will go to Heaven with God and experience not immortality, but eternal life. The difference is eternal life will be different, have other attributes, and we will not be vulnerable to death, starvation, lack, limitation, no more crime, no more tears, unless they are tears of joy. So knowing our years on Earth are limited is a blessing because we are constantly reminded to be good so we can receive all the things God has promised us. The purity that is offered to our eyes is infinite. However little evil we were to destroy at each look, we could be certain, if our time were unlimited, that by looking often enough, one day we should destroy it all. We should then have reached the end of evil magnificently. We should have destroyed evil for the Lord of Truth and we should bring one truth, as the Egyptian Book of the Dead says. One of the principal truths of Christianity, a truth that goes almost unrecognized today, is that looking is what saves us. The bronze serpent was lifted up so that those who lay maimed in the depths of degradation should be saved by looking upon it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
It is at those moments when we are, as we say, in a bad mood, when we feel incapable of the elevation of soul that benefits holy things, it is then that it is most effectual to turn our eyes toward perfect purity. For it is then that evil, or rather mediocrity, comes to the surface of the soul and is in the best position for being burned by contact with the fire. It is however then that the act of looking is almost impossible. All the mediocre part of the soul, fearing death with a more violent fear than that caused by the approach of the death of the body, revolts and suggests lies to protect itself. The effort not to listen to these lies, although we cannot prevent ourselves from believing them, the effort to look upon purity at such times, has to be something very violet; yet it is absolutely different from all that is generally known as effort, such as doing violence to one’s feelings or an act of will. Other words are needed to express it, but language cannot provide them. The effort that brings a soul to salvation is like the effort of looking or of listening; it is the kind of effort by which a fiancée accepts her lover. It is an act of attention and consent; whereas what language designates as will is something suggestive of muscular effort. The will is on the level of the natural part of the soul. The right use of the will is a condition of salvation, necessary no doubt but remote, inferior, very subordinate and purely negative. The weeds are pulled up by the muscular effort of the less affluent, but only Sun and water can make the corn grow. The will cannot produce any good in the soul. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
Efforts of the will are only in the right place for carrying out definite obligations. Wherever there is no strict obligation we must follow either our natural inclination or our vocation, that is to say God’s command. Actions prompted by our inclination clearly do not involve an effort of will. In our acts of obedience to God we are passive; whatever difficulties we have to surmount, however great our activity may appear to be, there is nothing analogous to muscular effort; there is only waiting, attention, silence, immobility, constant through suffering and joy. The crucifixion of Christ is the model of all acts of obedience. Also, there is a supernatural union of opposites, harmony in the Pythagorean sense. That we have to strive after goodness with an effort of our will is one of the lies invented by the mediocre part of ourselves in its fear of being destroyed. Such an effort does not threaten it in any way, it does not even disturb its comfort—not even when it entails a great deal of fatigue and suffering. For the mediocre part of ourselves is not afraid of fatigue and suffering; it is afraid of being killed. There are people who try to raise their souls like an athlete continually taking standing jumps in the hopes that, if one jumps higher every day, a time may come when one will no longer fall back but will go right up to the sky. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
Thus occupied one cannot look at the sky. We cannot take a single step toward Heaven. It is not in our power to travel in a vertical direction. If however we look Heavenward for a long time, God comes and takes us up. He raises us easily. There is no effort in what is divine. There is an easiness in salvation which is more difficult to us than all our efforts. However, the way we busy and over-busy ourselves, whether in work, pleasure, or movement deserves attention. Few take life easily; most take it uneasily. Few go through its daily business serenely; most go through it nervously, hurriedly, and agitatedly. Our activities are so numerous they suffocate us. It is a life without emotional poise, bereft of intellectual perspective. We are intoxicated by action. We moderns give ourselves too much to activity and movement, to little passivity and stillness. If we are to find a way out of the troubles which beset us, we must find a middle way between these two attitudes. The need of silence after noise, peace after feverishness, thought after activity, is wide and deep today. Amid all the nostrums and panaceas offered to humanity there is little evidence of the realization of this need. Indeed, because so many are discouraged and oppressed by the reality of time and do not perceive its true nature, a turning toward the spiritual life is a hope for the immediate present and the near fear. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
One Understands that the Greater Love is, the Greater the Estrangement Which is Conquered By it
And something else happened, a rather small thing, yet it seemed a good omen. Many of us do not even allow ourselves to imagine what it would be like to feel free in our daily lives and in our interaction with other people. We are so accustomed to believing that there are certain things we just have to do to survive and get along reasonably well with people that we have only the vaguest notion of what it would mean to live a self-chosen or spontaneous life. We tend to make a way of life out of feeling trapped. Perhaps we need first of all, then, to take a good look at ourselves and discover that we are kidding ourselves about not being free. We are trapped. We almost invariably have alternative courses of action, much as we may try to persuade ourselves otherwise. We do things that we do because we choose to do them. And if we fee trapped, it is because we have chosen to feel that way for our own inner reasons. Perhaps the awareness that we have much more freedom than we choose to think we have is too frightening for us to face. If we could grasp, not only intellectually, but emotionally, the fact or our freedom, a considerable change might occur in our attitudes and feelings. Then we would recognize that we are making choices constantly as to what we do each moment even though we often do not allow ourselves to be aware of those decisions. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Claudia Amadeo, housewife and mother of three young children, after three rainy days of having the children in the house and underfoot continuously thinks to herself, “If I have to stay cooped up with these kids one more hour, I think I will go out of my mind!” However, she probably looks out the window, sees it is still raining, and concludes that she is trapped and can do noting other than stay right there and try to keep from going out of her mind. Nonetheless, is she really without alternatives? Not at all. She could, of course, abandon the children. She could simply take off and leave the children to whatever fate would dictate. And the objection is raised, “But she would never do that!” No, she probably would not. Yet, it is an alternative, and at a particularly exasperating moment it may enter her mind. Chances are, however, that she does not allow herself to see it as a live option. Perhaps she does not trust herself enough to allow herself to say and accept it as a possibility that she could just up and walk out. So she chooses not to recognize she has chosen not to leave. This brings us to one of the gross abuses of freedom in our day: change for its own sake, or change as a flight from reality. This abuse of freedom is most egregious in what are called growth centers. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
Let me hasten to say that impetus for the growth-center movement and the work of many individual centers I believe to be sound and admirable. This impetus is the courage to confront one’s own self and one’s problems in human relationships; it is the belief that one can take oneself in hand and establish some autonomy in one’s life. However, anyone who is paying attention can readily see the preponderance of optimistic thinking and self-delusion in its most blatant forms. We always hear motivation speakers talking about tapping your true potential and creativity, finding more and more joy, a perfect living guru is a must on the path Godward, and so on. Nowhere do we hear words dealing with common experiences of anyone living in our day—namely, anxiety, tragedy, grief, feeling trapped, or death. All is drowned out by endless joy and the fearless promises of triumph and transcendence, a mass movement toward egocentric pace, self-enclosed love, with its somnolescent denial of the realities of human life, the use of change for escapist purposes if there was one. And what a misunderstanding of the ancient religions of the East that in their name salvation is promised over the weekend! #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
The problem in these growth centers is the complete absence of any sense of destiny. They seem to believe that all of destiny is controlled by themselves. The individuals will totally determine their fate. The leaders seem not to be aware that what they are espousing is not freedom at all, but sentimentality, a condition in which the feeling alone is sought rather than reality. Such considerations as these lend urgency to our purpose to rediscover the meaning of personal freedom. The burgeoning of the growth-center movement does testify to the widespread hunger among modern people from some guidance so that life will not have passed them by. The mere existence of these centers—which could not survive were they not patronized—demonstrate that hordes of people feel there is something missing in their lives, some failure to find what they are seeking or perhaps even to know what they are seeking. Claudia was well acquainted with the situation and said, “I cannot remember what a spontaneous feeling really is.” There are many alternatives beside leaving her family that Claudia could examine and implement. Perhaps she could hire a baby-sitter and get away for a couple of hours, even if financial skimping were necessary in another area. Possibly a relative could come in for a while, or maybe she could combine children with a neighbor so they could give each other some escape. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
Perhaps Claudia could bundle up all of her children and herself and find a change of pace walking in the Sunshine. We often avoid seeing the alternative and then bemoan our helplessness and lack of choice. We are not trapped. Even the feeling of being trapped is a chosen feeling. Supposed we do allow ourselves to recognize we have more freedom than we thought. How will we use that freedom? The most satisfying answer to this appears to be that our freedom is best used when we choose to live more spontaneously. This idea has been variously described. Some have called it the inner-directed life in contrast to the outer directed life. Others speak of self-actualizing. Perhaps it can be described by saying that as we move in the direction of living spontaneously we will become more aware of and more responsive to our inner impulses, feelings, needs, and self-chosen values. While we will be even more realistically aware of those around us, our responses will not be dictated by the desires or demands of others. We will respond in the way in which we choose. One mark of the spontaneous life is that it is lived in the present time, not the past of the future. Psychotherapy in all its branches is a response to the loss on a vast scale of people’s inner mooring posts. It is symptomatic of the breakdown of freedom in our culture, the bankruptcy of our culturally inherited ways of dealing with our freedom and destiny. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
It is not an accident that Dr. Freud’s psychotherapy came at a time when personal inner freedom was becoming all but lost in the maelstrom of modernity. Confusion about human destiny and confusion about personal freedom go together, and they will be resolved, so far as resolution is possible, together. Psychoanalysis—and any good therapy—is a method of increasing one’s awareness of destiny in order to increase one’s experience of freedom. In contrast to his technical determinism, Dr. Freud struck a significant blow on a deeper level of freedom. He set out to free people from the psychological entanglements they, like Claudia, was embroiled in because of their failure to confront their own destinies. What is most remarkable about Dr. Freud is his continuous wrestling with destiny. By showing the impossibility of shortcuts and the superficial by-passes to freedom, which break down at every turn, Dr. Freud required us to search for freedom on a deeper level. If freedom is to be achieved it will not be achieved overnight. In his theory of reaction formation, for example, he pointed out that altruism is the result of repressed stinginess (which surely a great deal of it is), and that religious beliefs are an opiate and a way for people to avoid facing death (which many of them are), and that the belief in God is an expression of yearning for the all-powerful father who will take care of us (which for multitudes of people it manifestly is). #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
If we are to achieve freedom, we must do so with a daring and a profundity that refuse to flinch at engaging our destiny. Many people live largely in the past. This often takes the form of remorse, regret, or bitterness. Some who have been exposed to punitive forms of religion may become stuck at the level of feeling perpetually guilty about things that have occurred in the past. They never feel they have been forgiven, because they cannot forgive themselves. It is too good to be true to believe that others or even God could forgive them. With these unresolved, pervasive feelings of guilt he individual keeps oneself unfree to experience and enjoy the freedom to live now. All I do to my disciples is to free them from their own bondage, by any means their case may need. Whether you are bound by a gold chain or an iron one, you are in captivity. Your virtuous activities are the gold chain, your evil ones the iron. One who shakes off both the chains of good and evil that imprison one, one has attained the Supreme Truth. Another variation of living in the past is that of feeling so inexorably in the grips of past events that one is unable to be a freely choosing person in the present. Of course there is some truth in this, which makes it possible to kid ourselves in this way. We unquestionably have some limitations that come to us from the past. We have been born with varying degrees of intellectual, physical, and emotional capabilities. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
Life’s experiences up to this moment have affected us in ways. Some of our capabilities may have been dulled. However, with the possible exception of those who have been so badly damaged by hereditary or environmental factors that they can hardly be described as human, we have so much more capability in intellectual, physical, and emotional spheres than we ever choose to use that we cannot be described as trapped. In other words, despite whatever limitations to our free will we may have from a philosophical point of view, we are all surrounded by a vast territory in which we are free to move, the limits of which we never begin to explore. Psychological insights about the development of human personality provide many people with another popular way of living in the past. For example, there will surely be some people who will become bogged down in these essays in the passages that describe childhood rejection and the problems that result. They will say, “Yes, that is me. That describes what happened to me.” However, instead of following up on this potentially freeing glimpse into their lives by asking themselves “How is this affecting me right now, and what can I do about it?” they will tend to go no further than to feel bitterness toward their parents, who led them to feel rejected, and helplessness about doing anything about themselves now. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
The woman in Simon’s house comes to Jesus because she was forgiven. We do not know exactly what drove her to Jesus. And if we knew, we should certainly find that it was a mixture of motives—spiritual desire as well as natural attraction, the power of the prophet as well as the impression of the human personality. Our story does not psychoanalyze the woman, but neither does it deny human motives which could be psychoanalyzed. Human motives are always ambiguities, but it does not demand that they become unambiguous before forgiveness can be given. If this were demanded, then forgiveness would never occur. The description of the woman’s behavior shows clearly the ambiguities of her motives (reason why). Nevertheless, she is accepted. There is no condition for forgiveness. However, if we were not asking for it and receiving it, forgiveness could not come. Forgiveness is an answer, the divine answer, to the question implied in our existence. An answer only for one who has asked, who is aware of the question. This awareness cannot be fabricated. It may be in a hidden place in our souls, covered by many strata of righteousness. It may reach our consciousness in certain moments. Or, day by day, it may fill our conscious life as well as its unconscious depths and drive us to the question to which forgiveness is the answer. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
It is well to recognize that psychotherapists have sometimes unwittingly contributed to the problem of living in the past by focusing too much on ancient experiences in one’s personal life, and World history. One of the legitimate criticisms of classical psychoanalysis, for example, is that it encourages the individual in analysis to dredge up every possible childhood memory and whenever feasible to see a causal relationship between those experiences and the individual’s problems. While many people have undoubtedly been helped in analysis, this method of therapy is not only unnecessarily time-consuming, but it encourages the individual to focus on the past rather than on the present. Some clients of this and similar approaches to therapy have unquestionably capitalized on this opportunity to make a way of life out of constantly analyzing their past. Thus they manage to avoid dealing fully with their awareness of themselves and those around them in the present moment of their existence. A more useful approach to therapy appears to be one in which the therapist, by means of one’s alertness to what is going on each moment within oneself, confronts one’s clients with these awarenesses and thereby enables them to become more self-aware. When memories of significant past experience or past feelings intrude into this process of becoming self-aware, then these feelings can be taken as indications of unfinished business and can be dealt with as part of the current experience. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
When Aaron Lightner, for example, in one session expressed some anger toward his therapist for seeming to be indifferent toward him, almost immediately Aaron expressed the feeling that the therapist was condemning him for getting angry, “just as my father would have.” The therapist knew that he felt neither indifferent nor condemning, so he encouraged Aaron to talk to his father as though he were present in the room. In the “conversation” that followed, in which Aaron alternately took the role of himself and his father, some of his still present feelings of anger and frustration—unfinished business of the past—were experiences and expressed. Out of many such moments in therapy Aaron was able to gradually deal more directly and realistically in the present moment with his encounters with others (including the therapist), having less need to distort the present reality to make it conform with unresolved experiences from the past. A discussion of living in the past cannot be concluded without mentioning the tendency of some to avoid the present by looking back to some glorious moment or period of the past. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
The middle-aged former high school or college football star may still be cutting off tackle for long gainers in his fantasy. The maturing beauty queen may be trying to dress twenty-two rather than experiencing her potential beauty and more mature fashions in the present moment. The evangelist may constantly relive and retell the experience of that moment when he was saved from a life of sin twenty years ago. The Vietnam war veteran may dwell on the danger, excitement, and adventure he experienced in some far-off place and completely dull himself to the potential adventure available now. In the minds of many people the word forgiveness has connotations which completely contradict the way people think Jesus deals with people. Many of us think of solemn acts of pardon, of release from punishment, in other words, of another act of righteousness by the righteous ones. However, genuine forgiveness is participation, reunion overcoming the powers of estrangement. And only because this is so, does forgiveness make love possible. We cannot love unless we have accepted forgiveness, and the deeper our experience of forgiveness is, the greater is our love. We cannot love where we feel rejected, even if the rejection is done in righteousness. We are hostile towards that to which we belong and by which we feel judged, even if the judgment is not expressed in words. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
As long as we feel rejected by God, we cannot love God. As we make God appear to us as an oppressive power, as the Lord who gives laws according to his pleasure, who judges according to his commandments, who condemns according to his wrath. However, if we have received and accepted the message that God is reconciled, everything changes. Like a fiery stream God’s healing power enters into us; we can affirm him and with him our own being and the others from who we were estranged, and life as a whole. Then we realize that God’s love is the law of our own being, and that is the law of reuniting love. And we understand that what we have experienced as oppression and judgment and wrath is in reality the working of love, which tries to destroy within us everything which is against love. To love this is to love God. Theologians have questioned whether mortals are able to have love towards God; they have placed love by obedience. However, they are refuted by our story. They teach a theology for the righteous one but not a theology for sinners. One who is forgiven knows what it means to love God. And one who loves God is also able to accept life and to love it. This is not the same as to love God. For many pious people in all generations the love of God is the other side of the hatred for life. And there is much hostility towards life in all of us, even in those who have completely surrendered to life. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
Our hostility towards life is manifested in cynicism and disgust, in bitterness and continuous accusations against life. We feel rejected by life, not so much because of its objective darkness and threats and horrors, but because of our estrangement from its power and meaning. One who is reunited with God, the creative Ground of life, the power of life in everything that lives, is reunited with life. One feels accepted by it and one can love it. One understands that the greater love is, the greater the estrangement which is conquered by it. In metaphorical language I should like to say to those who feel deeply their hostility towards life: Life accepts you; life loves you as a separated part of itself; life wants to reunite you with itself, even when it seems to destroy you. There is a section of life which is nearer to us than any other and often the most estranged from us: other human beings. We all know about the regions of the human soul which things look quite different from the way they look on its benevolent surface. In these regions we can find hidden hostilities against those with whom we are in love. We can find envy and torturing doubt about whether we are really accepted by them. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
And this hostility and anxiety about being rejected by those who are nearest to us can hide itself under the various forms of love: friendship, sensual love, conjugal love and family love. However, if we have experiences ultimate acceptance this anxiety is conquered, though not removed. We can love without being sure of the answering love of the other one. For we know that one is longing for our acceptance as we are longing for theirs, and that in the light of ultimate acceptance we are united. Being forgiven and being able to accept oneself are one and the same thing. No one can accept oneself who does not feel that one is accepted by the power of acceptance which is greater than one, greater than one’s friends and counselors and psychological helpers. They may point to the power of acceptance, and it is the function of the minister to do so. However, one and the others also need the power of acceptance which is greater than they. One can never overcome one’s disgust at one’s own being without finding this power working through Jesus, who tells people with authority, “You are forgiven.” Thus, one experienced, at least in one ecstatic moment of one’s life, the power which reunited one with oneself and gave one the possibility of loving even one’s own destiny. This happened to one in one great moment. And in this one is no exception. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
Decisive spiritual experiences have the character of a break-through. In the midst of our futile attempts to make ourselves worthy, in our despair about the inescapable failure of these attempts, we are suddenly grasped by the certainty that we are forgiven, and the fire of love begins to burn. That is the greatest experience anyone can have. It may not happen often, but when it does happen, it decides and transforms everything. Thus the conventional character of the divine presence is evident. Christ can be present in such an object only be convention. For this very reason one can be perfectly present in it. God can only be present in secret here below. One’s presence in the Eucharist is truly secret since no part of our thought can reach the secret. Thus it is total. No one dreams of being surprised that reasoning worked out from nonexistent perfect lines and perfect circles should be effectively applied to engineering. Yet that is incomprehensible. The reality of the divine presence in the Eucharist is more marvelous but not more incomprehensible. One might in a sense say by analogy that Christ is present in the consecrated host by hypothesis, in the same way that a geometrician says by hypothesis that there are two equal angles in a certain triangle. It is because it has to do with a convention that only the form of these consecration matters, not the spiritual state of one who consecrates. Deep lasting happiness comes by intentionally and carefully living the gospel of Jesus Christ. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
If they Do Not Even Know Why they are Standing Upon it at All, What is the Use of their Running from Point to Point on this Earth?
Your faith touches me as always, but do not be my acolyte just now. They were already legends—filled with love for all they saw around them, beings who understood the word joy. How can we learn to love ourselves? Perhaps we can start by admitting that it is impossible! It is not possible in the same sense that we will never become completely self-accepting (not in this life anyway!). Like others values worth wanting, loving one’s self is an ideal never fully realized. However, moving in that direction is a fascinating and worthwhile, lifelong adventure. If we can become more self-aware, it will help us to become more loving toward ourselves. It is not possible to love someone profoundly whom one does not know, and many of us are virtually strangers to ourselves, so deadened have we become to any awareness of our deeper feelings. And since we have spent many years cutting ourselves off from awareness of hated parts of ourselves, the recovery of awareness is usually not easily accomplished. We are frightened of what we may find and resist awareness in multitudes of ways. Frequently, the help of a professional therapist is needed to help us overcomes these resistances. Often in the early stages of recovering self-awareness it will seem as though we are learning to hate ourselves, not love ourselves. This happens because one of the first things we become aware of is our hidden self-hate, which has been building up over the years and of which we have likely had only vague intimations, and feelings that have been too unacceptable for us to allow ourselves to experience some to the surface. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
We may begin to feel more hate then we thought it was possible for us to feel. Self-loathing, deeply experienced hurt, disgust about pleasures of the flesh, and other frightening feelings may burst into awareness. This is a crisis in personal growth, but it is often a necessary crisis. Advocates of self-actuating thinking approach mental health frequently do a disservice at this point. Too often they short-circuit this process by encouraging individuals to think optimistically about themselves without taking into account their need to first experience their self-hatred. Under the influence of this advice individuals are likely to cover up something bad about apparent self-acceptance and self-affirmation over the tomb of their inner deadness to themselves and their self-hate. In this way they may talk themselves into being more successful insurance salesmen or less disagreeable husbands, while they have only cut themselves off even farther from contact with themselves and the ultimate possibility of genuine self-acceptance and self-affirmation. Gradually, when we allow ourselves to experience self-hate, this crisis will pass. We discover that it is not so bad after all to have very human feelings. A young woman who has been shocked and scandalized by accounts of promiscuity feels profound disgust as she becomes aware that she, too, has desires for pleasures of the flesh that are not limited to one man. However, she begins to enjoy and cherish her feelings for pleasures of the flesh. As is usually the case, he disgust masked an unaccepted appetite. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
Khayman was a young man addicted to working long and hard hours and he was considerably bugged by his father’s lack of ambition. He could not understand how his father could go off for a day of fishing when he was having business difficulties and financial pressures. When the young man examined his feelings more closely, it became evident that he did not allow himself to experience his own desire to take off and get away from it all occasionally. He was afraid he would like it too much and become a drifter. So he drove himself constantly, no allowing himself the pleasure of relaxation. And it is not surprising that once Khayman was able to experience this desire to loaf within himself, he not only moved in the direction of greater self-acceptance but was able to experience more love for his father. If we can keep our goals realistic, it will also help us in our efforts to learn to love ourselves. Many of us make severe demands on ourselves. We think we ought to be perfect, and we think we ought to achieve that perfection immediately. When we fail to do so, as we certainly must, we are burdened with unproductive feelings of guilt and worthlessness. With this kind of perfectionist cycle operating we might easily make even the search for self-acceptance a new vehicle for feelings of worthlessness! #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
Perhaps the secret is possessed in learning to relax and enjoy what we are right now—every feeling, every urge, every idiosyncrasy that is a part of us. Then if we really want to be what we have always told ourselves we ought to be, we may be freer to move in that direction. In other words, we dare not wait until we are perfect to start loving ourselves. We would wait forever. Let us learn to love ourselves in our imperfections. This attitude toward ourselves might be compared to the attitude of a warmly affectionate father toward his son. When the boy makes mistakes, he does not stop loving his son. He recognizes that failures and probably will express his concerns and perhaps may even become angry. However, somehow, there is communication from father to son of steadfast love and encouragement that is no destroyed or even threatened by these occasional crises. A similar attitude toward ourselves is very desirable. There will, of course, be times when we feel we have goofed. We may be angry and say to ourselves, “Oh, you meathead, you have done it again.” However, if there is a basic underlying sense of personal worth that is not shaken by the recognition that we have made a mistake, we can be much more effective about doing what we want to do in the future; for we will not be wasting the days of our lives in self-recrimination. Often this self-accepting attitude involves a sense of humor in which we can laugh at ourselves in our errors, give ourselves a good kick in the britches, and move on to the next moment of living. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
Ideally, religious faiths might play an important part in helping their believers to learn to love themselves. Perhaps they do, but frequently they tend to create self-hate. Often religion says, “You are unworthy and condemnable in God’s sight. However, if you confess your unworthiness, God is willing to forgive you. You will then be a new creature, and God will give you strength to feel and act in more acceptable ways.” It cannot be denied that individuals who accept such a belief in God often experience a profound relief as they feel released from the burden of self-hate. And often they live greatly changed lives. However, the question remains whether the basic problem of self-hate has been adequately dealt with or whether a veneer of self-acceptance has simply been laid over the self-condemnation. It would appear that a new and better repressive technique is often acquired whereby the individual can somewhat better avoid dealing with the desires and feelings that are still felt to be so condemnable in God’s eyes. On the other hand, religion sometimes says, “God knows how often you get into messes you regret. He also knows how ugly and brutal you can sometimes seem. However, he also knows how frightened you are and understands why you do the things you do. He loves and accepts you as you are. Because God loves you, he really wants you to enjoy life and the experience of love to the fullest. He enjoys being a partner in your quest.” It seems likely that faith in this kind of God would add to the experience of love for one’s self. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
Millions of humans come into the World and after a relatively short existence disappear. No of us are an exception, our turn to vanish will also come. Thought, confronted with this fact, must either despair, take refuge in the hopes of religion, or resolve to find out the truth behind the tremendous cosmic drama. It is better to accept the loneliness of the quester than the complacency of the Worldling who lives without any understanding of life’s inner purpose. Men and women try various ways to overcome their innate loneliness and with various results in the end. So long as the expedient used is something or someone outside themselves, their victories turn out to be illusions. There is no final way other than the Way which everyone has had to tread at last who ever succeeded in this objective, and which leads inwards to the Overself. In their search for satisfaction outside of and apart from the Overself, men and women are really fugitives from it. The response provoked in you by the entry of these ideas will determine your future. We suffering from stagnation and imagine that existence in the intellect and body is enough; it is not. The primary emphasis must be laid on the living principle of our being, the central self which creates both body and intellect. Here it is, the human creature put upon this round planet and left to make nothing from life, merely survive, or to make something out of it, and hold the great vision of the World-Idea, in company with the gods. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
The making of money, the earning of a livelihood, and the attainment of professional or business success have their proper place in life and should be accorded it but—in comparison with the fulfilment of spiritual aspiration—out to be regarded as having quite a secondary place. Some people throw their clothes away after they wear them, they rent million-dollar apartments and forget where they are. No scientific technological advance, buy sports and luxury cars and cannot remember where they parked them. These individuals have an endless parade of sports coats, pants, robes, silk foulards. mink-lined raincoats, and dinner jackets for Monte Carlo, and jeweled cuff links. When they awake, their clothes are already laid out for them. Heaven help them if they were to change a single time, from the linen handkerchief to the black silk socks. Breakfast awaits them in the immense kitchen with its beautiful windows. The Greeks as always were a splendid people, gentle and trusting though they were darker of hair and skin now on account of their Turkish blood. The power to communicate varies. To listen to the thoughts of others is often to be heard oneself. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
They are sane, but they are so busy, and have so much money, and travel so much that it is like finding a tree in the forest without a map of which one you are looking for. Gold watch on his wrist, one of those high-tech numbers he so adored. Think of that thing flashing its digits inside his office. No scientific technological advance, no political gain, no economic improvement will ever be enough in and of itself to provide a proper goal for human endeavour. It is easy to forget this in certain favourable periods, and if we do we come close to disaster in the end. We use every possible moment to cultivate the uncertain fields of commerce or to grow the perishing flowers of pleasure, but we are unable to spare one moment to cultivate the certain fields of the spirit within ourselves or to grow the enduring asphodels of divine devotion. The goals of progress are but imagined ones. There is only one goal which is undeniably real, completely certain, and authentically true—and that is an unchanging one, an eternal one. Yet it is also the one that has escaped humankind! #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
Our self-hate is developed primarily from experiences of feelings of rejection by others. Learning to love ourselves also involves relationships with people. We need the experience of emotional intimacy with others so that we can learn that we can be accepted as we are and thus can grow in self-acceptance. A very real predicament faces us at this point. We are desperately afraid of intimacy because we assume that deep involvement with another person will lead only to further rejection and hurt, and further confirmation of our feelings of worthlessness and unlovableness. Yet the experience of intimacy is almost a prerequisite for moving in the direction of the greater self-acceptance that would free us to enter into intimate relationships. The only solution to this dilemma seems to be to move gradually into increasing intimacy in spite of our fear. We will probably act somewhat like a wild deer leading to trust a would-be human friend. Because of our fear, our seeking of intimacy will undoubtedly proceed slowly and cautiously and our forward progress will include many frightened strategic withdrawals. However, if we can overcome our fear sufficiently to begin to talk about our inner feelings with another human being we will begin to learn that we are not unique. And out of the mutual acceptance will begin to assert itself. When we feel hurt, angered, misunderstood, and above all else, frightened, of course such a relationship will have its difficult moments, both for ourselves, and the other person. This will happen because we are both so frightened of self-disclosure that we constantly seek to avoid it. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
If we can persist in spite of our fears, the rewards in satisfaction and growing self-acceptance will be great. If we are sufficiently motivated toward changing ourselves, if we have not been so emotionally damaged that we cannot make a start, the suggestions described above for breaking through the cycle of rejection and our self-hatred and learning to love ourselves will probably be helpful. Here in this country, mortals are more eager to better their manufactures than themselves. They will accept their own imperfections quite smugly and contentedly, but the imperfections of their automobiles—never! Yet, if they do not even know why they are standing upon it at all what is the use of their running from point to point on this Earth? Mortals as scientists have put under observation countless objects on Earth, in sea and sky. They have thoroughly examined them. However, mortal as mortal has put oneself under a shallower observation. One has limited one’s scrutiny first to the body, second to what thinking can find. Yet a deeper level exists, where a deeper hidden self can be found. One will discover that it is not enough to regard as good only that which is favourable to one’s physical life. One must complete the definition and sometimes even contradict it by adding that which is favourable to one’s spiritual life. There is nothing more important in life than the Quest, and the time will come when the student discovers that there is nothing more enjoyable as well. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
This is inevitable in a Quest whose essential nature is one of infinite harmony and unbroken peace. No Worldly object, person, or pleasure can ever bestow the satisfaction experienced in uniting with the Overself. It is not the primal needs and their gratification but the realization of our divine possibilities which is the hidden justification of our presence in this World. The ceaseless longing for person happiness which exists in every human being is a right one, but is generally mistake in the direction along which satisfaction is sought. For all outward objects and beings can yield only a transient and imperfect delight that can never be equivalent to the uninterrupted happiness of life in the Overself. An existence which has no higher aims than purely physical ones, no nobler activities than merely personal ones, no inner references to a spiritual purpose, has to depend only on its own small resources. It has failed to benefit by its connection with the power behind the Universe. That the truth of life must be deeper than what we see and hear and touch, is suspected by intuitive persons, believed or felt by pious persons, and directly known by wise persons. What the surface story tells us is not the whole of it, they say. The love of institutional religion, although the name of God necessarily comes into it, is not in itself an explicit, but an implicit love of God, for it does not involve direct, immediate contact with him. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
When they are pure, God is present in religious practices, just as he is present in our neighbor and in the beauty of the World; in the same way and not any more. The form that the love of religion takes in the soul differs a great deal according to the circumstances of our lives. Some circumstances prevent the very birth of this love; others kill it before it has been able to grow very strong. In affliction some mortals, in spite of themselves, develop a hatred and contempt for religion because the cruelty, pride, or corruption of certain of its ministers have made them suffer. There are others who have been reared from their earliest youth in surrounding impregnated with a spirit of this sort. If they are sufficiently strong and pure, we must conclude that in such cases, by God’s mercy, the love of our neighbor and the love of the beauty of the World will be enough to raise the soul to any height. The love of institutional religion normally has as its object the prevailing religion of the country or circle in which a mortal is brought up. As a result of an inborn habit, everyone thinks first of that each time one thinks of a religious service. The whole virtue of religious practices can be conceived of from the Christian tradition concerning the recitation of the name of the Lord. Our goal is to raise ourselves in a land of purity, and the Bible reminds of that the Lord really has the power of transforming the soul. Religion is supposed to truly be nothing else but this promise of God. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
Every religious practice, every rite, all liturgy is a form of the recitation of the name of the Lord and in principle should have a real virtue, the virtue of saving whoever devotes oneself to performing it with desire. All religions pronounce the name of God in their particular language. As a rule it is better for a mortal to name God in one’s native language rather than one that is foreign to the culture. When it has to make the slight effort of seeking for the words in a foreign language, even when this language is well known, except in special cases, the soul is not able to abandon itself utterly. A writer whose native language is poor, difficult to manipulate, and not widely known throughout the World is very strongly tempted to adopt another. There are a few like Joseph Conrad who have done so with startling success. However, they are very rare. Except in special cases such a change does harm, both thought and style suffer, the writer is always ill at ease in the adopted language and cannot rise above mediocrity. A change of religion is for the soul like a change of language for a writer. All religion, it is true, are not equally suitable for the recitation of the name of the Lord. Some, without any doubt, are very imperfect mediums. However, religion is known only from inside. Catholics say this of Catholicism, but it is true of all religions. Religion is a form of nourishment. It is difficult to appreciate the flavor and food value of something one has never eaten. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
The comparison of religions is only possible, in some measures, through the miraculous virtue of sympathy. If at the same time as we observe them from outside, we can know mortals to a certain extent, as we manage by sympathy to transport our own soul into theirs for a time. In the same way the study of different religions does not lead to a real knowledge of them unless we transport ourselves for a time by faith to the very center of whichever one we are studying. Here, moreover, this word faith is used in its strongest sense. This scarcely ever happens, for some have no faith, and the others have faith exclusively in one religion and only bestow upon the others the sort of attention we give to strangely shaped shells. There are others again who think they are capable of impartiality because they have only a vague religiosity which they can turn indifferently in any direction, all our faith, all our love to a particular religion in order to think of any other religion with the high degree of attention, faith, and love that is proper to it. In the same way, only those who are capable of friendship can take a real heartfelt interest in the fate of an utter stranger. If we do not love our fellow travelers on this mortal journey, we cannot truly love God. We are all spirit children of our Heavenly Father and, as such, are brothers and sisters. As we keep this truth in mind, loving all of God’s children will become easier. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
You See, it is True–You Only Love Me When I Do Exactly What You Want Me to Do!
I went into the bedroom, latched the door tight, surveyed the inviting bed, dove into it and pulled the covers up over my head. No more! Down pillows, yes, Oblivion, will you please get with it! Self-hate also gets in the way of successful relationships because we do not trust ourselves to be genuine. We develop some variety of phoniness because we assume people will not like us as we really are, since we ourselves do not. Every one of us probably has one or more acquaintances who are patently phony and are rather extreme examples of this tendency. It may, for example, be a woman who grew up in less affluent surroundings than those which she now lives. She is insecure in the next experience and, whether she allows herself to be aware of it or not, feels her current social set could not accept her if she were natural, so she puts on airs and acts in ways that she feels are the way a person in her setting should act; but the performance does not come off well since it is obviously false. While most of us are not as obviously phony as such a woman, we all have some of the tendency. One way it may express itself is in an effort to be kind or helpful when we do not really feel kindly toward a person. This is a made-to-order pitfall for those who have been raised in religious families where strong emphasis has been placed on the individual’s obligation to be helpful and loving. #RandolphHarris 1 of 11
In Christian homes children become familiar with such passages as: Love is patient and kind…it is not arrogant or rude. Love does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful; it does not rejoice at wrong, but rejoices in the right. Love bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things. (I Corinthians 13.3-7.) These are beautiful words from a beautiful chapter. And when we are filled with feelings of warmth and love, they describe well some of the experiences that occur. When we are so full of feelings of caring that we could scarcely do otherwise then be loving, they are the genuine overflow toward another. Often we turn it around. We say to ourselves,” Kindness is a sign of love, so I should be kind, therefore I will be kind.” So we try to be kind to those for whom we may feel considerable unexpressed irritation or resentment. We remain emotionally distant because our kindness is phony. Our resentment is almost sure to seep through in indirect expressions, as when, for example, we seem condescending and patronizing in our kindness. Or perhaps we should be patient with our children, and so we act that way when we feel more like screaming at them. They sense our anger and yet have no way of coping with it directly since it remains unexpressed. And a wall of falseness stands between us because we have not trusted ourselves to be genuine. #RandolphHarris 2 of 11
The self-hate that makes us afraid to be ourselves gets us into very difficult binds in our relations with others because we tend to assume that we can gain affection only through acceptable performances, since we feel no one could possibly love us just because who we are. Destiny grew up in a home where great emphasis was placed on performance. Generally, she was made to feel that anything she did in the home as a child was inadequate and that she was rather worthless. The resulting feelings of self-hate made marriage a difficult experience for her. It was inevitable that she would assume that her husband, Marius, could not possibly love her for herself, so she constantly assumed that she would have to perform well or he would abandon her. Yet she seethed with anger, because he did not love her (so she self) without regard to her performance. The way in which Destiny kept the house became one of the focal points of this predicament. She has some tendency to let it become quite cluttered. Whenever this happened Marius became angry. He said that since there were no children and since she was not working the least she could do was to keep a reasonably picked up house. And since he himself was frightened and full of doubts about his own lovableness, he felt—and expressed the feeling—that when she failed to keep the house uncluttered she care nothing at all for him. #RandolphHarris 3 of 11
Marius’s reaction added fuel to the fire as far as the dilemma that Destiny felt. Anything that she did at that point was certain to be unsatisfying to her. If, in response to his anger, she busied herself and cleaned the place up, he praised her, and yet this only increased her anger, because she would say to herself, “Only when I perform well for him, he expresses affection.” I am not free to do as I please because he will leave me if I want him to stay with me.” If, on the other hand, she rebelled, as she often did, against the feeling of having to please him and let the house become more and more cluttered, Marius became more frustrated and angry, and she would use this to confirm her feelings of self-hate, for she could say, “You see, it is true. You only love me when I do exactly what you want me to do.” Perhaps the most damaging result of Destiny’s preoccupation with this bind was that she became virtually emotionally paralyzed. She became unable to know what she wanted, so concerned was she with what he wanted. She could not really tell whether it was more satisfying to herself to live in a clutter or an uncluttered house. Everything she did tended to be a reaction to Marius, rather than the act of a person doing what she wanted to do. Even the suggestion by Marius that they hire somebody to some in regularly and clean up was very frightening, for she told herself, “When someone is coming in and cleaning up, he will no longer need me. Then he will get rid of me!” #RandolphHarris 4 of 11
Destiny never learned to love herself, and so it was difficult for her to believe that Marius could be staying with her because he loved her and wanted her for reasons other than efficiency. If we hope to grow in emotional maturity and in the capacity to experience and express love, one must believe self-hate continually gets in the way of the experience of love, and it becomes evident that learning to love ourselves is a crucial and necessary experience. Since we will be more able and willing to disclose ourselves, a solid, deep rooted sense of one’s worth as a person is the foundation, we can become independent individuals, who know ourselves and thus have a self for others to discover and love. And out of this foundation of self-acceptance comes the capacity to accept others as they are, for we will find nothing in them that we have not found and accepted in one form or another in ourselves. Beauty is the form which reaches most deeply into the human heart and mind. It is the language which translates all the moods of humanity into feelings and insights and sensual experiences that we can understand. In beauty there are no foreigners: the deeper we penetrate into the human soul, be it of ourselves or our neighbors, the more we find ourselves at one with people of all nations, even those people behind iron curtains. It is by beauty that we feel the pulse of all humankind. #RandolphHarris 5 of 11
The love of the beauty of the World, while it is universal, involves, as a love secondary and subordinate to itself, the love of all the truly precious things that bad fortune can destroy. The truly precious things are those forming ladders reaching toward the beauty of the World, opening onto it. One who has gone farther, to the very beauty of the World itself, does not love them any less but much more deeply than before. Numbered among them are the pure and authentic achievements of art and science. In a much more general way they include everything that envelops human life with poetry through the various social strata. Every human being has at one’s roots here below a certain terrestrial poetry, a reflection of the Heavenly glory, the link, of which one is more or less vaguely conscious, with one’s universal country. Affliction is the tearing up of these roots. Human cities in particular, each one more or less according to its degree of perfection, surround the life of their inhabitants with poetry. They are images and reflections of the city of the World. Actually, the more they have the form of a nation, the more they claim to be countries themselves, the more distorted and soiled they are as images. However, to destroy cities, either materially or morally, or to exclude human beings from a city, thrusting them down to the state of social outcasts, this is to sever every bond of poetry and love between human beings and the Universe. It is to plunge them forcibly into the horror of ugliness. There can scarcely be a greater crime. We all have a share by our complicity in an almost innumerable quantity of such crimes. If only we could understand it, it should wring tears of blood from us. #RandolphHarris 6 of 11
This requires freedom, you say? Yes, freedom of the body within limits, but limits which free the mind. However, you may argue, “We have learned in our day to enslave the mind—what do you say to that?” The tyranny over the mind we need to fight, but let us make sure what kind of bondage we are fighting, and for what kind of freedom. It is not the freedom to become a millionaire, or the freedom to convince us through clever advertising to buy the million and one things we do not need, nor the things that are deleterious to us. In principle it is the freedom to be, not just to possess. Freedom is indeed an integral part of this beauty, but let it be a genuine freedom, a freedom to think and to feel, a freedom to speak and to contemplate, a freedom to appreciate and to create, a freedom to experience beauty. Let us return to the major problem of beauty versus power in our World. For the first time in all human history persons like you and me have been able literally to see the planet concentrated in exploration. Some people spend the entire night flying through the air. Flying to Boston, then Washington, then to Chicago, then back to New York City, is not unusual. Technological inventions obsess so many, one after the others. People use telephones to call long distance all over the planet, speaking with for hours with mortals in Australia or India and the internet to contact people Worlds away or order medication and shoes. #RandolphHarris 7 of 11
Television catches people up utterly, so that the house is full of blaring speakers and flickering screens. Anything with blue skies enthralls some. Many must watch the news programs, prime time series, documentaries, and every film, regardless of merit, ever taped. Many people have seen images of the planet supposedly photographed as a totality. The astronauts, and we through identifying with them and seeing the picture emblazoned in newspapers throughout the World, have been able to gaze at the World as a whirling planet in which all nations now are a part. This photograph is a symbol for a new relationship between nations. We saw the great wall of China, the Indian ocean the Russian steppes, the north and south Americas, the Atlantic and Pacific oceans, and unfortunately we all got to watch Our Lady of Paris, also known as Norte-Dame Cathedral, which is 856 years old burn to the ground. Indeed, in the photograph we were what we in our stubbornness have been trying to escape in reality: all citizens of the same World. In this photograph the Chinese wall shuts our nothing, the perpetual squabbles of the nations turn out to be absurd, the revolvers held at the heads of Russian and the United States are transcended by the spinning planet in its orbit. #RandolphHarris 8 of 11
The whole Earth turns slowly before our eyes. I do not mean to belittle our national problems at all: I mean only to present a new symbol of the Word which for the first time requires us to see that all countries are citizens of the planet. As we are all awaiting the Royal baby, most of us realize we are grasped in this photograph of World culture by how colorful is this new Earth, new in the sense that it was our first view of the whole Earth. The whirling ball is shimmering gold on the side of the Sun, dazzling and resplendent, shading into a brilliant ultramarine. The shadow then merges into inky darkness and on into the pure black of the vast empty corridors that separate us from the solar systems of light far beyond. On and on the blackness stretches to the distant stars. The photograph was a symbol which can lead us to a radical change in our way of seeing and experiencing the World. The picture reached deeply into my own soul; the nations, usually so noisy, now seemed silent and serene. It showed the nations at last formed into a peaceful co-existence, charmed by the vast spaces of the Universe. Can anyone of us let this picture penetrate into our minds and souls without realizing that we live in a new World, a planet now of a beauty we had not suspected before? #RandolphHarris 9 of 11
It is not surprising that on Christmas Eve, in the flight of Apollo 8, Captain Frank Borman and his crew of two astronauts read for all the World to hear the story of creation in the book of Genesis. “The Earth was without form and void, and darkness was upon the face of the deep….And God said, ‘Let there be light.’ And God saw that the light was good.” This word “form” from the King James translation has the same meaning as I have used it in describing the form in the work of artists. The ground forms Joseph Binder used to emphasize are now wedded to space-forms; we reach not just into our own foundations as Binder taught us, but also into infinity. One of the astronauts, Russell Schweickart, told me that he carried with him into the stratosphere a number of quotations from different authors, T.S. Eliot, Archibald MacLeish, among them, which he thought might express his experience. One that especially grasped his personal feelings while in orbit was a short poem by Robert Nathan: “So beauty passes ever out of reach, save to the heart where happiness is home; there beauty walks, wherever it may be, and paints the Sunset on a quiet sea.” However we may conceive of the intimations of infinity with which our human minds are endowed, the metaphor of God the Artist is most expressive for many people. That is the concept of the painter of the Sunset on the quiet sea in Robert Nathan’s poem, and includes the forms of the Earth as well as of infinity. #RandolphHarris 10 of 11
Form is the essence of all things on Heaven and Earth, as I have tried to show in many different ways. Its dwelling is the light of setting Suns, and the round ocean and the living air. A presence that disturbs us with the joy of elevated thoughts. When I asked Russell Schweickart which of his fellow astronauts had uttered the phrase quoted by the newspapers with the photograph of the Sun-emblazoned Earth, he replied that everyone of them had felt the same thing when they looked out from their spaceship at the whirling Earth. It came our in words that one of them suddenly exclaimed, “God, it is beautiful.” So long as a mortal is a stranger to one’s own divine soul, so long has one not even begun to live. All that one does is to exist. In this matter most mortals deceive themselves. For they take comfort in the thought that this attitude of indifference, being a common one, must also be a true one. They feel that they cannot go far wrong is they think and behave as so many other mortals think and behave. Such ideas are the grossest self-deceptions. When the hour of calamity comes, they find out how empty this comfort, how isolated they really are in their spiritual helplessness. #RandolphHarris 11 of 11
These People Who are so Significant in My Life Love Me and Consider Me to be of Value
It was peaceful here as we went through the purification. All was beauty around me. Looking at an amazing Sunset, the sky was luminous with two long streaks of light yellow clouds, lending a radiance against which the Sun sank toward the sea. The great red-orange ball, getting larger as it neared the horizon, seemed to reach out too eagerly to make passionate contact with the houses located at Cresleigh Rocklin Trails. Just as the Sun seemed ready to dip below the horizon, it hesitated a moment and spread out its radiance as though to remind us of its mastery of our Universe. Then suddenly it was gone, leaving behind a sky and a sea painted with every kind of riotous red and lustrous yellow in every combination. Yes, it is a palace fit for an Emperor. When the Lord made the World, was it not Wisdom who said the new humanity will be universal, and it will have the artist’s attitude; that is, it will recognize that the immense value and beauty of the human being is possessed precisely in the fact that one belongs to the two kingdoms of nature and the spirit. A well-dressed man stood next to me at the rail watching the Sunset. From his tiny tailored moustache and his dark complexion I imagined that he was Turkish. He said something to me I did not understand, and we both smiled a little apologetically because I could speak no Turkish and he apparently knew no English. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Nonetheless, we immediately recovered our dignity nodding toward the same Sunset which captivated us both, a bond between us as we watched nature’s brilliance overflow on to the profligate sea. On the other side of me stood a blondish woman, perhaps in her early twenties, with deep grey eyes and smooth features. I imagined her to be Scandinavian. However, when she also smiled at me and murmured, “Schon, schon,” I knew she was German. It was only later that I began to realize that these two persons, my companions in watching nature’s magnificence, knew that the quest was the most important adventure in the human experience. The strange thing about beauty is that it wipes away all boundaries and inspires us to realize our common humanity. Our destiny interweaves us with each other, and our arts make every war nowadays a civil war, a war against our brothers and sister and cousins no matter what nation they happen to belong to. Beauty overcomes distinctions between all people on this planet. In beauty we have a language common to all of us despite racial or cultural differences—and even despite national and historical enmities. For this very Egypt, to which I was then traveling, later shared with us in America the art objects found in King Tut’s tomb, and crowds of people stood in our twenty first century lines for hours for the privilege of seeing the statues in bronze and gold which had been buried with this king in ancient Egypt. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
The colorful Turkish and Persian rugs virtually all over the World, came from the same part of the World as the man standing beside me. And when we think of the contribution of German-speaking peoples—from Boehme to Beethoven to Goethe to Hegel, et al.—our words may not be fully understood. All these are our common heritage of beauty, and never has there been any doubt that they belong to all civilized people. No matter how archaic, the things of beauty from African to Alaska, from China to Australia, from New York to India are the language of all beings who call themselves human. One who stands on the threshold of this Pat is about to commence the last and greatest journey of all, one which one will continue until returning to the presence of God. Once begun, there is no turning back or deserting it, except temporarily. And since it is the most important and most glorious activity ever undertaken, its rewards are commensurate. One cannot stake too much on the outcome of such exalted strivings. Even all that the World can offer falls far below what the quest can offer. If outer sacrifices and inner renunciations are called for, the compensation will be more than just. In the end one gains immensely more than one loses. So, if the quest bids one to do so why not let go freely? #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
The meaning and the end of all such work is to arouse mortals to see certain truths: that the intuitive element is tremendously more important than the intellectual yet just as cultivable if pursued through meditation, that the mystical experience is the most valuable of all experience, and that the quest of the Overself is the most worthwhile endeavour open to human exertions. If there is anything worth studying by a human being, after the necessary preliminary studies of how to exist and survive in this World healthily and wisely, it is the study of mortal’s own consciousness—not a cataloguing of the numerous thoughts that play within it, but a deep investigation of its nature in itself, its own unadulterated pure self. This is the higher cause that is really worth working for, the spiritual purpose that makes life worth living. The discovery of the Overself, the surrender to it, mortals fulfills the highest purpose of one’s life on this Earth. Each mortal has only a limited fund of life-force, time, and ability. One may squander it on Worldly pleasures or spend it on Worldly ambitions. However, if without neglecting the duties of one’s particular situation, one realizes that these are changing and transient satisfactions and turns instead to the quest of the Overself, one begins to justify one’s incarnation. In our discussion up to now we have taken some long, hard looks at the negative aspects of family relationships and their effects on our children’s lives. We might almost despair of the possibility of having healthy families. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
And it is important to recognize that these emotionally damaging qualities are and always will be to some extent present in our families, for we are all caught up in the dilemma of our human imperfections. The business person who does not know that the true business for which one was put on Earth is to find the Overself, may make a fortune but will also squander away a lifetime. One’s work and mind have been left separate from one’s Overself’s when they might have been kept in satisfying harmony with them. Every mortal has another veiled identity. Until one finds out this mystical self of one’s essence, one has failed to fulfil the higher mission of one’s existence. However, the picture is not totally dismal by any means. Children do grow up in out families learning something about how to experience and express love, and the degree to which this occurs is not immutably fixed. It is possible to become more effective in our ability to love in spite of our fear and also possible to help our children become loving. The New Testament contains a profound psychological insight into the process by which children learn to love. The words are: “We love, because God first loved us,” reports I John 4.19. God is the first cause of love. If we pause to read: “We love, because we first experienced love,” the psychological impact becomes clear. And whether faith leads us to attribute the origin of love to God or not, we can agree that our experience of love comes to us through the imperfect channel of other persons. And the most significant persons for children are usually parents. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
This experience of learning to love by being loved is much more profound than simply seeing and imitating the behavior of loving persons. It has much more to do with the children’s emerging ideas and feelings about one’s self, which tend either to free one or inhibit one in one’s ability to experience and express love. In the discussion of the rejection cycle it was emphasized that all people experience feelings of rejection that lead to feelings of worthlessness and self-hate. The experience varies greatly in the degree of feelings of rejection, but it is universal. Now, as we look at the beneficial side of the picture, it can be shown that a cycle of acceptance is taking place in children’s lives during the same years the rejection cycle is establishing personality difficulty. The acceptance cycle, too, is a universal experience. Again it is a matter of degree. The acceptance cycle begins with the child’s earliest experiences of love and acceptance. This process, too, beings long before the child can form thoughts. In fact it probably begins within the first few hours of life. The sensation of touch plays a very important role. The gentle, loving, stroking touches of the mother when she is enjoying the baby are undoubtedly enjoyable to the baby. And when the infant, as it nurses from the nourishment of the mother or feeds from the bottle, is cuddled and cooed over, the physical and emotional warmth communicates itself. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
When these experiences are contrast with those that sometimes occur when the woman is very frightened of emotional closeness, it becomes very apparent that even these early experiences tend toward a sense of acceptance or rejection. Consider the effect on the child, for example, of the mother who is in strong conflict about her feminine roles, who forces herself to naturally nourish her child because she feels she should do so, although doing it makes experience unpleasant feelings because of her conflicting emotions about it. Her feelings are certain to be reflected in the way she handles the child. Or another woman may be so frightened of the emotional involvement that she cannot permit herself to satisfy her own desires to cuddle the child. So she tends to withdraw and handle the child as little as possible. Still another woman may have a great deal of psychological conflict with eliminative functions and communicate her disgust in the way she changes and cleans the baby. As the child grows older the avenues by which one senses acceptance and love (or rejection) from one’s parents become more numerous and more subtle. When parents enjoy the child, trust the child, and listen to the child, respond to the youth as a human being worthy of respect, and encourages the child to accept increasing responsibly for one’s self without pushing one, one feels acceptance. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
The sense of touch remains important. And sometimes it becomes more difficult. Some parents who found it relatively easy to enjoy expressing physical affection to their babies find themselves becoming less spontaneously affectionate to them as they grow older. The most important reason for this is probably the growing sense of vulnerability. The risk of being hurt by a baby seems rather remote, apart from the chance passing or catastrophic infirmary. However, as the child grows older and is able to express harsh feelings, we are put on notice in a multitude of ways that the age of innocence is past and that the possibility of emotional hurt is ever present. It is then that physical affection may not seem as natural. One mother, Alice reported it was difficult for her to express affection for her tends by directly hugging them. It is easy for her to smile at them and say nice words. This was probably because it was a relatively safe was of expressing affection. Because of her fears of being hurt and rejected by anyone she feels close, Alice finds this type of contact with her children more comfortable. She satisfies her need for closeness by saying, “I love you,” or “Have a great day.” And if Alice were more free to express affection directly, while it would be more helpful, the nice comments communicates some acceptance to the children and some desire to maintain their well being. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
To the degree that the child experiences the security of parents who are able to communicate their love and acceptance in a relatively open and direct manner, one is likely to react with beneficial feelings towards oneself. The emotional logic of the child must be something like this: “These people who are so significant in my life love me and consider me to be of value. Therefore I must be worthwhile.” The beauty of the World is the co-operation of divine wisdom in creation. This perfecting is the creation of beauty; God created the Universe, and his son, our first-born brother, created the beauty of its for us. The beauty of the World is Christ’s tender smile for us coming through matter. He is really present in the universal beauty. The love of this beauty proceeds from God dwelling in our souls and goes out to God present in the Universe. It also is like a sacrament. This is true only of universal beauty. With the exception of God, nothing short of the Universe as a whole can with complete accuracy be called beautiful. All that is in the Universe and is less than the Universe can be called beautiful only if we extend the word beyond its strict limits and apply it to things that share indirectly in beauty, things that are imitations of it. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
All these secondary kinds of beauty are of infinite value as openings to universal beauty. However, if we stop short at them, they are, on the contrary, veils; then they corrupt. They all have in them more or less of this temptation, but in very different degrees. There are also a number of seductive factors which have nothing whatever to do with beauty but which cause the things in which they are preset to be called beautiful through lack of discernment; for these things attract love by fraud, and all mortals, even the most ignorant, even the vilest of them, know that beauty alone has a right to our love. The most truly great know it too. No mortal is below or above beauty. The words which express beauty come to the lips as soon as they want to praise what they love. Only some are more and some less able to discern it. Beauty is the only finality here below. It is a finality which involves no objective. A beautiful thing involves no good except itself, in its totality, as it appears to us. We are drawn toward it without knowing wat to ask of it. It offers us its own existence. We do not desire anything else, we possess it, and yet we still desire something. We do not in the least know what it is. We want to get behind beauty, but it is only a surface. It is like a mirror that sends us back our own desire for goodness. It is a sphinx, and enigma, a mystery which is painfully tantalizing and titillating. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
We should like to feed upon beauty, but it is merely something to look at; it appears only from a certain distance. The great trouble in human life is that looking and eating are two different operations. Only beyond the sky, in the country inhabited by God, are they one and the same operation. When they look at a cake for a long time almost regretting that it should have to be eaten and yet are unable to help eating it, children feel this trouble already. It may be that nice, depravity, and crime are nearly always, or even perhaps always, in their essence, attempts to eat beauty, to eat what we should only look at. Eve began it. If she caused humanity to be lost by eating it, should be what is required to save it. Two winged companions, to Angels are on the branch of a tree. One eats the fruit, the other looks at it. These two Angels are the two parts of our soul. A great light will shine to the ends of the Earth, and many nations will come to you from afar, the peoples of all the Earth, to dwell near to the name of the Lord, bearing in their hands gifts for the King of Heaven. I saw the light in my mind, and I grew sleepy in a beautiful soft sleep in which I could hear the words of the prayer as I lay on my bed, with my arm under my pillow. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
No one is in Eden. There is no one there. No one is in Eden writing down the deeds of the World. However, some people say it is Enoch, but Eden is empty until the Lord should say that all the World will be Eden once again. The Lord does not break his covenants. God will come and his house will last forever. It is because beauty has no end in view that it constitutes the only finality here below. For here below there are no ends. All the things that we take for ends are means. That is an obvious truth. Money is the means of buying, power is the means of commanding. It is more or less the same for all the things that we call good. Only beauty is not the means to anything else. It alone is good in itself, but without our finding any particular good or advantage in it. It seems itself to be a promise and not a good. However, beauty only gives itself; it never gives anything else. Nevertheless, as it is the only finality, it is present in all human pursuits. Although they are all concerned with means, for everything that exists here below is only a means, beauty sheds a luster upon them which colors them with finality. Otherwise there could neither be desire, nor, in consequence, energy in the pursuit. For a miser after the style of Harpagon (a character in Moliere’s L’Avare), all the beauty of the World is enshrined in gold. And it is true that gold, as a pure and shinning substance, has something beautiful about it. The disappearance of gold from our currency seems to have made this form of avarice disappear too. Today those who heap up money without spending it are desirous of power. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
The same crisis of freedom is present in psychotherapy, this curious profession which burgeoned so fantastically in American during the past century. The crisis can best be seen when we ask: What is the purpose of therapy? To be sure, to help people. And the specific purpose differs with the particular condition with which the person is suffering. However, what is the overall purpose that underlies the development of this profession of psychological helpers? Several decades ago, the purpose of the mental-health movement was clear: mental health is living free from anxiety. However, this motto son became suspect. Living free from anxiety in a World of hydrogen bombs and nuclear radiation and food and water shortages, housing crises, lack of funding for education, and rapidly decreasing numbers of high pay jobs? Without anxiety in a World in which death may strike at any moment you cross the street? Without anxiety in a World in which two-thirds of the people are malnourished or starving? The mental health movement, in promising a freedom from anxiety that is not possible, may have had a significant role in the current belief that it is a right to feel good, thus contributing to the burgeoning consumption of alcohol and the and the almost universal prescription of the tranquilizer by physicians. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
The mental health movement has emphasized freedom from anxiety as the definition of health. However, finding that is not possible in the general run of life, people have assumed that the quickest way to achieve the freedom is through alcohol and tranquilizing drugs. Furthermore, if we did achieve freedom from all anxiety, we would find ourselves robbed of the most constructive stimulant for life and for simple survival. After many a therapeutic hour which I would call successful, the client leaves with more anxiety than one had when one came in; only now the anxiety is conscious rather than unconscious, constructive rather than destructive. The definition of mental healthy needs to be changed to living without paralyzing anxiety, but living with normal anxiety as a stimulant to a vital existence, as a source of energy, and as life enhancing. Is adjustment the purpose of therapy—that is, should therapy help people adjust to their society? Many people wonder who the psychotic is—the persons to whom the title is given or the society itself? Is the purpose of the therapist to give people relief and comfort? If so, this can also be done more efficiently and economically by drugs. Is the purpose of the therapist to help people to be happy? Happy in a World in which unemployment and inflation burgeon at the same time? #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
Such happiness can be purchased only at the price of repressing and denying too many of the facts of life, a denial that works directly against what most of us believe is the optimum state of mental health. I propose that the purpose of the psychotherapy is to set people free. Free, as far as possible, from symptoms, whether they be psychosomatic symptoms like ulcers or psychological symptoms like acute shyness. Free from compulsions, again as far as possible, to be workaholics, compulsions to repeat self-defeating habits they have learned in early childhood, or compulsions perpetually to choose partners of the opposite gender who cause continual unhappiness and continual punishment. However, most of all, I believe that the therapist’s function should be to help people become free to be aware of and to experience their possibilities. A psychological problem, I have pointed out elsewhere, is like fever; it indicates that something is wrong with the structure of the person and that struggles is going on for survival. This, in turn, is a proof to us that some other way of behaving is possible. Our old way of thinking—that problems are to be gotten rid of as soon as possible—overlooks the most important thing of all: that problems are a normal aspect of living and are basic to human creativity. This is true whether one is constructing things or reconstructing oneself. Problems are the outward signs of unused inner possibilities. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
People rightly come to the therapist because they have become inwardly enslaved and they yearn to be set free. The crucial question is: how is that freedom to be attained? Surely not by a miraculous charming away of all conflicts. The soul that is prevented by circumstances from feeling anything of the beauty of the World, even confusedly, even through what is false, is invaded to its very center by a kind of horror. If you want to know the purpose of life, read Acts 17.2: “God made man [and women] to the end that one should seek the Lord.” It comes to this: Are we to worship mortals or God? Life offers mortals a variety of meanings, but in the end one meaning comes to the top of all the others and that is the meaning which shall reveal the truth about one’s relation to God. When one sees life whole and therefore sees it right, one will understand why Jesus declared, “Seek ye first the kingdom of Heaven and all these things shall be added unto you,” and why, if one is to insist upon any single renovation in human life, it must be its own self-spiritualization. If one is to put emphasis anywhere, it must be upon the rediscovery of the divine purpose of one’s Earthly life. If mortals only knew how glorious, how rich, how satisfying this inner life really is, they would not hesitate for a moment to forsake all those things which car their way to it. “The Lord hath made bare his holy arm in the eyes of all the nations; and all the ends of the Earth shall see the salvation of God,” reports 2 Nephi 16.20. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Focus on the Imaginative Part of the Soul and Awaken What is Real and Eternal to See the True Light and Hear the True Silence
Very well. I am going to lay down the law to you. If I am to remain with you, I am the Master here. And I refuse to prove myself to you. I will not spend my tenure with you being constantly questioned as to the virtue of my authority! For most people giving affection and receiving affection are very difficult matters. Many people feel that they are unlovable and that any gestures of affection or admiration are extremely hard for them to accept. If a person knows one is unlovable, how can one believe it when someone professes love? Well, many people have deep within themselves a special significant sense of deprivation of affection and the consequent feelings make them feel unlovable. When they are able to go inside of themselves and reflect on this strong need for affection, it will help the individual readjust. One will begin to turn away from the inability to feel affection—there will actually be a massive escape from one’s longing—and one will gradually look toward the problem itself. Most of the times, the issue is an unresolved problem with one’s parental situation and once that is identified, an individual can work toward a resolution of those feelings with a possible increase in self-esteem. Sometimes it is important to figure out what each person wants and what you want to give. This will allow one to understand better some difficulties one has to on one’s life where people tend not to treat one as a sufficiently significant individual. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
Other people are here to teach us lessons, and sometimes people have pseudo personalities, which become unmasked later in life, especially after changes in the family dynamics. However, as you are maturing, you can see where people are coming from, so it is no big surprise when they show you who they really are. Some people are so busy trying to gratify others regardless of one’s own wishes. The important thing to remember is no matter how good you are or how much you try to please and impress others, in many cases it is a failed effort because they do not care. The central issues of affection is trusting the feelings of others. The other side of this trust is the ability to gratify and give pleasure to someone who trusts. As the brain matures, the feelings of trust of distrust are usually felt very clearly in any situation. Successful experiences can greatly restructure a person’s self-concept in the direction of helping one feel more loving and loveable. Even in your family or people you grew up with, you may find later in life that you have different values than them and that is why they do not totally accept you, and that is find. Unfortunately, cultural and organizational forces are often powerful deterrents to joyful feelings. It is always good to see where people are coming from and you do not have to express any feelings of hurt or anger toward them, just be civil, but understand they may not have your best interests at heart. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
We have already seen how the tendencies to condemn, so prevalent in the church, are frequently incorporated into the life of religious families. To the child of such a family, religion often becomes a strong additional force in one’s feeling of rejection and one’s increasing hatred of oneself. One is taught that one is inherently evil and that it is only through God’s gracious mercy that one can be saved from oneself. And although it made clear to one that god behavior will not be of sufficient merit to win God’s acceptance of a naturally sinful person like oneself, one is nevertheless subjected to strong emphasis on various rules of conduct. It is no surprise that one feels that one is under constant surveillance by one’s family, one’s religious group, and God, and that they are all judging one’s worth by one’s actions. Feeling condemned on all sides, one attempts some form of escape from one’s growing self-hate. However, as we have seen, such efforts lead only to further feelings of rejection. Many people whose lives are deeply intertwined with a religious group find it difficult to experience and express love because they have a tendency to suppress or repress many of their feelings. It is within many of these groups that people are most forcefully confronted with the idea that they are committing a sin if they feel angry, covetous, jealous, or are involved in pleasures of the flesh with others. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
Many churches are so condemning toward these feelings that their members are likely to avoid expressing them and may deny even to themselves that they exist. And as we have seen in the discussions of anger and pleasures of the flesh, when we are full of unexpressed and unrecognized feelings that create barriers between ourselves and others, it is difficult to experience our love. In this context of life, as in others where we are so adept at creating barriers to love, it begins to look as though we are so frightened of love that we need the hindrances we create. No doubt it would be an oversimplification to see fear of love as the only factor in churches’ apparent need to codify behavior and judge people accordingly, but it is at least one very important underlying factor. Religious groups, like people in general, have not understood their fear of intimacy. Without realizing it, they have encouraged emotional distance between people rather than the experience of love they professed to promote. For example, churches often substitute apparent expressions of love for the experience of intimacy. A good illustration of this exists in those thousands of congregations (not al by any means) in our society who willingly give money to missionary enterprises throughout the World, including Africa, proclaiming their love of all humankind but who would be very upset and uncomfortable if someone from a culture different from theirs braved the evident fear, suspicion, and hostility and attempted to worship wit them and become active in their congregation. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
In an effort to promote fellowship many congregations have coffee hours after church services. The typical remoteness and lack of self-revelation that usually marks these functions makes them even less productive of the experience of love than the average cocktail party, where people sometimes feel relatively free to be themselves and express some of their genuine feelings. Churches from study groups, women’s groups, men’s clubs, and couples’ organizations. Although these groups talk about love and fellowship, they usually speak in very rational and impersonal ways. If anyone begins to express deeply personal feelings about the subject of discussion, such groups tend to become very uncomfortable and quickly change subject. If intimate relationships between members of these groups, as they undoubtedly sometimes do, it is accomplished outside of the group and almost in spite of it, for there is little or nothing within it to encourage the experience of love. During church services the minister often talks about the feeling of love and communion, which he presumes the worshipers feel with God and with each other as they worship. If he were sufficiently self-aware, it might be more helpful if the minister could tell his people that he, like the, is aware of an awful loneliness and longing for love that is almost too frightening to act upon. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
Another way in which the church often promotes emotional distance is that it discourages honesty within its community. This happens because if they are themselves, the church’s preoccupation with behavior fosters the impression among its adherents that they will be condemned rather than accepted and loved. So the church becomes a place where people do not say things many of them often say in other life situations. It becomes a place where people pretend they do not do things which they sometimes do: drink, smoke, act primarily in terms of the profit motive in their business, fornicate, get angry with their children—whatever their particular congregation would disapprove of. And it becomes a place where people pretend they do not feel things that they really do feel: anger, lust, prejudice, fear of love. We all wear masks, of course, to protect us from the self-revelation that would make us feel exposed and vulnerable to those around us, and we will never discard them entirely, but the atmosphere that most churches create, in which members feel they will be condemned if they say or do the wrong thing, makes the possibility of genuineness and the experience of love within the religious community even more difficult. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
We live in a World of unreality and dreams. Perhaps the most powerful demonstration of my thesis is that our age is witnessing the diminishing of the teaching of humanities in our high schools and our colleges. After an intensive study of the humanities over the last six years, the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington reported that these subjects are progressively being erased from college curricula. The humanities were originally the soul of educational institutions of human life through the great work of history, literate, philosophy and art. However now, students can graduate from seventy-two percent of the colleges in the country without even taking modern or ancient history, that is, without any understanding of Greece and Rome, where our civilization came from, or our struggles since the Renaissance, or the wars that have put us in the present predicament of having our very existence threatened by nuclear war. When we entered college, it used to be pointed out that to learn a foreign language was to go into the heart of another people’s culture, and understand its art and psyche. Now a student in the majority of colleges can go through without understanding any other people’s culture, or any profession except one’s own. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
To give up our imaginary position as the center, to renounce it, not only intellectually but in the imaginative part of our soul, that means to awaken to what is real and eternal, to see the true light and hear the true silence. A transformation then takes place at the very roots of our sensibility, in our immediate reception of sense impressions and psychological impressions. It is a transformation analogous to that which takes place in the dusk of evening on a road, where we suddenly discern as a tree what we thought at first was whispering voices. We see the same colors; we hear the same sounds, but not in the same way: To empty ourselves of our false divinity, to deny ourselves, to give up being the center of the World in imagination, to discern that all points in the World are equally centers and that the true center if outside the World, this is to consent to the rule of mechanical necessity in matter and of free choice at the center of each soul. Such consent is love. The face of this love, which is turned toward thinking persons is the love of our neighbor; the face turned toward matter is love of the order of the World, or love of the beauty of the World which is the same thing. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
I recall that I stumbled into a class in the ancient Greek language in Oberlin College and, in spite of being a country boy who scarcely knew Greece had ever existed, I remained in class. It turned out to be the richest, most valuable class I ever took. Nowadays there are very few such classes that one can eve stumble into. Literature, which is the language which crosses all borders—the Russians Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, the French Proust, the German Goethe, the English Shakespeare, the Americans Emerson and Whitman—all these are now scantily studied, or not at all in the hurry to get on to the study of computers, economics and business. And as far as the classic go—these great ancient Greek dramas and myths which are buried in our souls, along with Dante’s Divine Comedy and Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus—these classics are not read at all by the majority of the graduates. The understanding of the psyche of modern Americans requires knowing the self-interpretation of human beings in symbols and myths down through the ages; yet I rarely meet in my teaching graduate students who are planning to become psychotherapists, any who has even read the great classics. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
The purpose of the humanities is to make us more human, to enrich our lives, to develop our imaginations, and to make life worth living. And it is a saddening thing that these subjects are being dismissed. We need have no prejudice against engineering, business studies, accounting, techniques of all sorts including the use of computers, when we point out that these are studies of the how of life, to the neglect of what life is about. This is reflected in the fact that a professor of literature, so I am told by a professor-friend at one of our most distinguished universities, receives about $70,643.60 and a professor of business receives about $188,382.93. Philosophy, which used to be concerned with understanding the meaning of life, is now defunct on most campuses or, where it still exists, it has capitulated to the technical trends by becoming analytical philosophy. These studies of techniques are concerned with quantities, with exchange of goods, money, and even auctioning off of great pictures. However, the humanities are concerned with the quality, the what of life, the painting of the pictures or the composing and playing of music. The humanities are concerned, as I have said, with the questions of meaning. When, during the last century, they put on a great celebration in Boston at the completion of the stringing of telephone wires from Maine to Texas, Thoreau said, “Nobody asks the real question, Do the people of Maine have anything to say to the people in Texas?” #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
Our age is replete with techniques for mass communication, but what is the content of what we communicate beyond business and money matters? Barbara Tuchman wrote a penetrating article in the New York Times two years ago entitled, “The Decline of Quality.” When I had it xeroxed and passed around, a number of people were offended: how dare she criticize our great age of mass communication, our new techniques for everything from TV to dish-washing? This, of course, was exactly what she meant: the quality of life diminishes as the concern with quantity burgeons. This of course has a great deal to do with modern art and the future. Art—in which we include along with painting and sculpture, the dance, architecture, literate, poetry, music—is devoted to the quality of human life. Hence the great confusion in art in our time: it is as though art is lost, it has no central soul or direction in which to go. However, we note at the same time the poignant hunger of people for great art as shown in the crowds that line up to see the exhibitions of the artifacts of King Tut, or the works of Picasso or Van Gogh. Of course one can argue that this is conformism; people crowd in because that is the thing to do. However, I do not believe such arguments exhaust the motives. Even if cake with a hundred flavors is added, Men and women do not live by bread alone. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
It is a genuine hunger, a starvation for what people’s own intuition tell them is great. It is the artists, the musicians, the poets, the dramatists that remind us that life is worth living. Especially is we are talking about life abundant, some of us can say with truth that beauty has saved our lives. In ancient times the love of the beauty of the World had a very important place in mortal’s thoughts and surrounded the whole of life with marvelous poetry. This was the case in every nation—in China, in India and in Greece. The Stoicism of the Greeks, which was very wonderful and to which primitive Christianity was infinitely close, especially in the writings of Saint John, was almost exclusively the love of the beauty of the World. As for Israel, certain parts of the Old Testament, the Psalms, the Book of Job, Isaiah, and the Book of Wisdom, contain an incomparable expression of the beauty of the World. The example of Saint Francis shows how great a place the beauty of the World can have in Christian thought. Not only is his actual poem perfect poetry, but all his life was perfect poetry in action. His very choice of places for solitary retreats or the foundations of his convents was in itself the most beautiful poetry in action. Vagabondage and poverty were poetry within him; he stripped himself to his birthday suit in order to have immediate contact with the beauty of the World. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
Saint John of the Cross also has some beautiful lines about the beauty of the World. However, in general, making suitable reservations for the treasures that are unknown, little known, or perhaps buried among the forgotten remains of the Middles Ages, we might say that the beauty of the World is almost absent from the Christian tradition. This is strange. It is difficult to understand. It leaves a terrible gap. If the Universe itself is left out, how can Christianity call itself Catholic? In transitional ages there is bound to be some kind of cultural breakdown. The whole society becomes disoriented and negates itself. When we fail to see this from a historical viewpoint, then we do get hopeless, pessimistic, and lose our sense of balance—for we know only the present that will be destroyed in the cultural change. This illustrates again the dangers we face in dropping history—along with the other humanities—from college curricula. We can, however, experience ourselves as part of a culture that is dying in order that a new society may be born. This dying period is certainly no picnic for any sensitive person. Psychological breakdowns are almost the normal thing in our day; we have psychotherapists of all kinds trying to meet this need. However, for the most part therapists are equipped only to patch people up. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
The breakdowns of morals and family life—all these are part of the radical change. If we can see it that way, then we can move ahead with courage. We can realize that we are building a future, trying to produce some context, some art, some drama, some music that will communicate something to future ages. That I would like to be a part of. And I am sure all of us would. Therefore, find the ground form. Get below the surface, below all your superficial whims and find the reality, the foundation. Find the structure on which your life is built. One Summer on the coast of Maine, John Marin made several of his watercolors. These paintings were done with Marin’s character style—a dash across the sky for clouds, a jagged blue and brown expressing the ocean, strong vertical lines of green for spruce tress and the curves of brownish-red showing the unpredictable might of this rugged, rock-bound coast. Each stroke of Marin’s brush is made with profound emotion. When he had completed these particular paintings, he took them to the drug store in the little town and stood them against the wall. He then asked the pharmacist, whom we all knew as a typical “Down Easterner,” how he liked them. The druggist answered, “They will be fine when they are finished.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
What the druggist called unfinished was really the genius of Marin; he looked on beauty bare. In ever transitional age one must let go the finishing, and look on beauty care. The incompleteness, the groping, fits our age. Our beauty is not at all pretty or charming—it may be the bare rock, the skeleton watercolors of Marin, the silence of John Cage sitting at his piano without a note, the discord and sounds of cultures grinding together. If you are not prepared, it is dangerous to look. Hence Plato, as Greece began its deterioration, write of the terror of beauty, and Rilke wrote these enigmatic lines: “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we still are just able to endure and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.” We have in music, especially in the giants like Beethoven and Schonberg, Aaliyah Haughton and The Beatles, the same sense of terror. And even Dostoyevsky, who certainly knew what beauty was, has Dmitri, one of his characters in the Brothers Karamazov, cry out, “The awful thing that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the Devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of mortals.” Yes, this is what modern art is all about. It has little or nothing to do with prettiness or niceness or sweetness. It its beauty there is the terror of the ground forms, and the contemporary artists are our distant early warning. They tell us of the fundamentals of love and the terror of life and death. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
In the Middle Ages we have art for God’s sake, in the Renaissance we have art for mortal’s sake, in the nineteenth century we have art for art’s sake, in the twentieth century we have no art for God’s sake, and in the twenty-first century we have art to remind us we have a soul. The good way must be clearly good but not wholly clear. If it is clear, it is too easy to reject. What is wanted is an oversimplification, a reduction of a multitude of possibilities to only two. However, if the recommended path were utterly devoid of mystery, it would cease to fascinate mortals. Since it clearly should be chosen, nothing would remain but to proceed on it. There would be nothing left to discuss and interpret, to lecture and write about, to admire and merely think about. The World extracts a price of calling teachers wise: it keeps discussing the paths they recommend, but few mortals follow them. The wise give mortals endless opportunities to discuss what is good. Mortal’s attitude are manifold. Some live in a strange World bounded by a path from which countless ways lead inside. If there were roads signs, all of them might bear the same inscription: I-I. Those who dwell inside have no consuming interest. They are not devoted to possession, even if they prize some; not to people, even if they like some; not to any project, even if they have some. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Things are something that they speak of; persons have the great advantage that one cannot only talk of them but also to, or rather at them; but the Lord of every sentence is no man but I. Projects can be entertained without complete devotion, spoken of, and put on like a suit or a dress before a mirror. When you speak to mortals of this type, they quite often do not heart you, and they never hear you as another I. You are not an object for mortals like this, not a thing to be used or experienced, nor an object of interest or fascination. The point is not at all that you are found interesting or fascinating instead of being seen as a fellow I. The shock is rather that you are not found interesting or fascinating at all: you are not recognized as an object any more than as a subject. You are accepted, if at all, as one to be spoken at and spoken of; but when you are spoken of, the Lord of every story will be I. Some come to the truth in a roundabout way. The Quest is direct. The quest is governed by its own inherent laws, some easily ascertainable but others darkly obscure. It is a search for meaning in the meaningless flow of events. It is response to the impulsion to look beyond the ever-passing show of Earthly life for some sign, value, or state of mind that shall confer hope, supply justification, gain insight. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
Have You Found Your Soul—It is the Quest to become Conscious of Consciousness and Penetrate the Mystery of its Knowing Power
You must trust in my principles. That is our paradox. We do not leave behind the Natural Law when we receive grace. We are principled beings. I never stopped loving you, not for an instant. Whatever I felt for you are the Bryant family gathering in no way affected my feelings for you. How could it? I warned you twice to be patient with your family because I knew it was right for you to do so. Then the third time, all right, I went too far with a little mockery. However, I was trying to curb your insults, and your abuse of those you loved! But you would not listen to me. Affairs are not always tragic. If the basic relationship with the spouse is not too hopelessly unsatisfying and if the principles do not react precipitously, a marriage often survives extramarital affairs. In fact, it may be strengthened as the result of a new-found ability to be open to the experience and expression of love. However, society’s attitude about extramarital affairs often operates against the survival of a marriage. The experience of Fallon, a young wife, is probably not too exceptional. Her husband, Blake, an attorney, became involved with another woman-a divorcee—within their social group. Blake was sufficiently indiscreet about his affair that a good many members of the community, including relatives, became aware of the situation. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Fallon sought the help of a psychotherapist, who Blake also saw on a sporadic basis. As soon as others became aware that an affair was taking place, Fallon was besieged with pressure to seek a divorce. Both his parents and her parents urged it. Other friends and relatives said or implied if she did not see a lawyer and force him to move out, she was a fool. Her physician gave her similar advice. The force and the vehemence with which many of these people spoke seemed to indicate that they themselves felt threatened by the situation. It was almost as if they were saying to Alice, “If you let him get away with this without being punished for it, what is going to happen to society. We cannot afford to tolerate this kind of behavior.” Fortunately, Fallon had a mind of her own, although the constant pressure caused her many bad moments in which she asked herself if she were some kind of weakling for not seeking a divorce. However, when she did not immediately seek a divorce, things began to happen that made her happy she had not yielded to pressure. For one thing, she began to discover, through therapy, that she was very frightened of love and had never been free to express the love and affection of which she was capable. Fallon realized she had been difficult to live with throughout her marriage. She had been overly sensitive, constantly feeling hurt about something Blake had done. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Because she had hurt feelings that she felt were caused by her husband, in retaliation Fallon would either withdraw from behind a wall of hurt silence or complaint at Blake about little things that has no connection with her deeper feelings. As She became aware that she acted this way because of her fear of love, Fallon began to become much more capable of experiencing intimacy, including the expression of love to Blake. She also discovered that he, too, was changing. Having known the love of the other woman seemed to affect Blake’s view of himself. He felt more lovable and developed more confidence in his ability to express love. And even while he continued to see his lover, he became more able to express love openly to Fallon than he had ever been before. And she, through her new self-discovery—which might have never happened if Blake had not had an affair—was much more able to respond with deep-felt love and was able to enjoy the pleasures of the flesh experience of their relationship as never before. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
So eventually, while Blake was still having his affair, she could send her advice-giving friends away muttering and shaking their heads, by saying in all honesty, “I do not want a divorce! I feel more love for my husband than I was ever able to feel in the past, and we both find much more satisfaction in our relationship than we ever did before! Why would I want to get a divorce now?” Since Blake now found many satisfactions in his marriage that neither he nor Fallon had been capable of experiencing with each other before, and since he deeply valued his home and desired to be with his children, he, too had every reason to continue the marriage rather than to seek a permanent alliance wit another woman. This is not to say that life for the couple was tranquil during these times. Not at all. Both of them, and perhaps particularly Fallon, went through great upheavals of feelings. There were moments of torrid anger and times of anguished hurt. Most of all, there were times of fear. Fallon would become terrified after expressing her love in openness during their expression of pleasures of the flesh. It was apparent that the fear that Blake would abandon her was most acute at those times, because it was then that she was most aware of how much she cared. However, the point if that growth occurred in both Fallon and Blake as they learned to deal more honestly and openly with themselves and their emotions. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Society frowns strongly on their expressions with the result that people devise a variety of techniques to hide these feelings from others as well as from themselves. It is often more effective to express hostility in safe atmosphere. Then, direct ways of dealing with the feeling can be explored. Too often, the usual efforts to suppress these negative feelings lead to the suppression of the whole self. If Fallon and Blake had automatically sought divorce as it was automatically suggested, this experience of revelations would have been short-circuited. However, it is not being claimed here that every affair will have salutary effect. Yet, it is important that society take its head out of the sand, so they do not ignore or hide from obvious signs of danger, to be aware that extramarital affairs are not always the disasters we like to assume and that it is not unusual for marriages to be strengthened and married love to be deepened by the forces that extrametrical affairs sometimes set in motion. When a person begins to seek out one’s real nature, to find the truth of one’s real being, one begins to follow their quest in life. It is a call to those who want inner nourishment from real sources, not from fanciful or speculative ones. It calls them away from things, appearances, shows, and externals to their inward being, toward reality. After such considerations, we are led to wonder what constitutes the reality behind the Universe. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
This is a quest which takes us into religion, mysticism, and philosophy and the great mysteries of life, a quest which eventually confirms the celebrated words of Francis Bacon: “A little thinking may incline the mind toward atheism, but greatness of study bringeth the mind back to God.” We are now in a transitional period similar to that of the end of Hellenism and the birth of Roman arts and culture. It is a period also like the demise of medieval art and the Renaissance. In all transitional periods there is a confusion as to what the new meaning of art if going to be. Since we are in the very midst of that confusion, our period is especially. The confusion in physics, just as before the Einsteinian and Quantum theories were born to throw light on the whole of physics, is like the present confusion in art, which is a reflection of life. The artist is the predictor of what happens in science rather than the reverse. When any new culture is established, the art gives the people their language. In the Middle Ages all the less affluent knew the meaning of the figures in the stained glass of the windows of Chartres; this was their language. Chartres consist of a vast library of dazzling symbols and myths, and these constituted the life of the less affluent. It was literally true that no sculptor or painter of fainted glass needed to sign one’s work—God could see all and he would know all. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Similarly in the Renaissance, the new humanism made the new humanistic art recognizable to all. At this moment, we are in the midst of a new cultural transition with its attendant difficulties and confusion. When giving the inaugural address at the opening of a new wing in the Modern Museum in New York, Paul Tillich spoke on the topic, “The Art of No Art.” Though we can surely understand what Chesterton and Tillich meant, the problem, strictly speaking, is not no art. It is rather a confusion in our day of many different forms of art. In the Metropolitan Museum, for example, we pass through the rooms of the Renaissance art and see a similarity in colors and in forms. In the seventeenth century we see portraits, like those by Van Dyck, running the whole length of the hall. In the early nineteenth century we see many landscapes and seascapes, which became art of the kind taught in academia. At the end of the nineteenth century we see protests against academic art Van Gogh, in Gauguin, in Cezanne and in Picasso. By the art we can recognize the period it comes from. However, it our contemporary age we have every kind of art—Wyeth and his realism, de Kooning and his jagged strokes which show great vitality and color with contorted figures, Motherwell and Franz Kline who reveal the great tensions in modern times. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
There is Tobey with his calligraphy, Picasso who seemed to change his style every decade, Pollock who painted with surprisingly harmonious colors the abstract forms by means of his drip school, Olitski with his subconscious forms expressed in coat after coat of different colors with the underlying pinks and lavenders showing through to produce a captivating charm, Rothko with his profundity in which the deepest abstract forms of reality are available for those willing to meditate in the presence of his paintings. There is Hans Hofmann with his energetic and bright colors which seem to cry out with the vitality and strength of the Earth, O’Keefee with her abstractions from nature. And so on and on. The modern age reveals many different kinds of art with the basic form, the soul of modernity if I may say so, still undiscovered. Take Picasso. In his youth his draftsmanship was fantastically accurate in his paintings of the less affluent in Spain. Then in 1907 broke forth cubism with his painting of Les Demoiselles d’Avignon, a classic picture of the natural form in a harlotry environment. Just after the First World War he was painting figures of bathers that showed what The Great Gatsby meant, namely, we play, we have beautiful bodies, but it is going to amount a meaningless tragedy. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Then in the 1930s and early 1940s, Picasso painted pictures of machines. These were portraits not of persons but of the human being as a machine, with wheels, spokes, and so on; everyone seemed cold and made of steel. He did not give these pictures names but rather numbers. Here is an artist predicting a century in which people will be taken over by computers, which is just what has actually happened. The quest we teach is no less than a quest for knowledge in completeness and a search for awareness of the Universal Self, a vast undertaking to which all mortals are committed whether they are aware of it or not. The great central questions of life for the thinking mortal are: What am I? What is my relation to, and how shall I deal with, my surroundings? What is God, and can I form any connection with God? Every puzzle which fascinates innumerable persons and induces them to attempt its solution—be it mathematical and profound or ordinary and simple—is an echo on a lower level of the Supreme Enigma that is forever accompanying mortals and demanding an answer: What is one, whence and whither? The questers puts the problem into one’s conscious mind and keeps in there. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
It is a quest to make life of better quality, both inside and outside the self, in the thoughts moving in the brain, in the body holding that brain, and in the environment were that body moves. It is a clarion call to mortals to seek one’s true self, a voice that asks one, “Have you found your soul?” The quest is simply the attempt of a few pioneer mortals to become aware of their spiritual selves as all mortals are already aware of their physical selves. It is a quest to become conscious of Consciousness, to explore the “I” and penetrate the mystery of its knowing power. The secret path is an attempt to establish a perfect and conscious relation between the human mind and that divinity which is its source. When a mortal passes from the self-seeking aspiration of the Quest, one passes to conscious cooperation with the Divine World-Idea. It is, from another standpoint, a quest for one’s own centre. It is the opening up of one’s inner being. The love of the order and beauty of the World is thus the complement of the love of our neighbor. It proceeds from the same renunciation, the renunciation that is an image of the creative renunciation of God. God causes this Universe to exist, but h consents not to command it, although he has the power to do so. Instead he leaves two other forces to rule in his place. On the one hand there is blind necessity attaching to matter, including the psychic matter of the soul, and on the other the autonomy essential to thinking persons. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
By loving our neighbor we imitate the divine love which created us and all our fellows. By loving the order of the World we imitate the divine love which created this Universe of which we are part. Mortals do not have to renounce the command of matter and of souls, since one does not possess the power to command them. However, God has conferred upon one an imaginary likeness of this power, an imaginary divinity, so that one also, although a creature, may empty oneself of one’s divinity. Just as God, being outside the Universe, is at the same time the center, so each mortal imagines one is situated in the center of the World. The illusion of perspective places one at the center of space; an illusion of the same kind falsifies one’s idea of time; and yet another kindred illusion arranges a whole hierarchy of values around one. This illusion is extended even to our sense of existence, on account of the intimate connection between our sense of value and our sense of being; being seems to us less and less concentrated the farther it is removed from us. We relegate the spatial form of this illusion to the place where it belongs, the realm of the imagination. We are obliged to do so; otherwise we should not perceive a single object; we should not even be able to direct ourselves enough to take a single step consciously. God thus provides us with a model of the operation which should transform all our soul. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
In the same way as in our infancy we learn to control and check it in our sense of time, values, and being, freedom endlessly re-creates itself, gives birth to itself. Otherwise from every point of view except that of space we shall be incapable of discerning a single object or directing a single step. Freedom is capacity, we have seen, to transcend its own nature—an occurrence in which that overused word transcend really fits: We begin to appreciate the great fascination that freedom, phoenixlike in its capacity to rise from its own ashes, exercised on our ancestors. We begin also to experience the dangers in freedom. People will cling to freedom, treasure it, and if necessary they will die for it, or continually yearn and fight others for it if they do not now enjoy it. And it is still true, according to the statistical studies of Milton Rokeach, that the majority of people place freedom highest on their list in the ranking of values. Freedom is not only basic to being human, but also freedom and being human are identical. This identity of freedom and being is demonstrated by the fact that each of us experiences oneself as real in the moment of choice. When one asserts “I can” or “I choose” or “I will,” one feels one’s own significance, since it is not possible for the enslaved person to assert these things. In the act of choice, in the original spontaneity of my freedom, I recognize myself for the first time as my own true self. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Existence is real only as freedom. Freedom is the being of existence. When I exercise my freedom, only in those moments am I fully myself. To be free means to be one’s self. The possibility of changing, which we have said is freedom, includes also the capacity to remain as one is—but the person is different from having considered and rejected changing. This change, furthermore, is not to be confused with changing for its own sake, as we shall see presently, or changing for escapist reasons. Hence, the gross confusion of license, so often pointed at in American youth, with genuine freedom is that they are exercising their freedom when they immerse themselves in invigorating tasks and spiritual growth, as it keeps healthy young adults from living at the expense of society. Freedom consists of how you confront your limits, how you engage your destiny in day-to-day living. The Lord our God is one, and you shall love the Lord your God with all your heart, and with all your soul, and with all your might. Praise the Lord, who covered the Heavens with clouds, who prepared the rain for the Earth, who made the grass grow upon the mountains. And may our souls be together in the bundle of life in the light of out Lord. May the Lord bless you, and keep you; the Lord make his face shine upon you; and be gracious to you; the Lord life up his countenance upon you, and give you peace. #RandolpHarris 13 of 13
The Kingdom of Heaven is within You–Wisdom Penetrates Everywhere on Account of its Perfect Purity
There will come a time, a time to tell you everything slowly so that you understand. However, now is not that time. Something is stirring in me, knowledge as clear as if a voice is speaking: this is not the most difficult part. Often two people will try to express their feelings toward each other verbally, or will try to explain themselves or some situation, and they simply cannot understand each other. This occurs when people are inarticulate, when conflicts about their feelings are prominent and they try to hide it, when they are not really familiar with what their feeling is, or when they are very intellectualized and the words are used defensively to obfuscate the situation. Especially with intellectual people, words paradoxically can be the largest obstacle to communication because people often spend a great deal of time and word trying not to say something or avoiding the central point, which is often known to themselves. If we are able to have a satisfying and fulfilling sense of completion in our lives insofar as meaningful relationships are concerned that we need to experience emotional intimacy beyond our immediate families, it seems an inescapable conclusion. And not to have these wider experiences both raises questions about the nature of our family relationships and threatens them. For to expect that all of one’s needs for emotion intimacy with adults can be satisfied by one person is to put an almost unbearable burden on any association. And to attempt to do so suggests an immaturity and overdependency that is detrimental to the experience and expression of love. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
If we are two independent individuals who recognize that we are essentially alone and do not fool ourselves into believing that we do not in the last analysis live essentially separate lives, even in marriage we are most happy and fulfilled. To attempt to avoid our essential loneliness and isolation through neurotic dependence on each other is a pseudo escape from an important reality. Let there be spaces in your togetherness for the pillars of the temple stand apart, and the oak and the cypress grow not in each other’s shadow. Although our increased mobility and decreased clan experiences have tended to brings us face to face with our loneliness and isolation, the net results may not be negative. If we can develop close tires with others in spite of the fears of love that deter us, we may discover there are better reasons for intimacy than those created by the happenstance of being related by common ancestry. Three married couples formed a very close and loving relations that has existed over a period of seven or eight years. They have probably been together on an average of two times a month during that times. Since some members of the group had a professional interest in psychotherapy, it was not unnatural that the group frequently explored their feelings about each other and other relationships in their lives, often talking long into the night. Sometimes violent feelings came to the surface that seemed likely to split the couples apart. The strength of these feelings should put a red flag on some of one’s interpersonal relations. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
If an individual finds oneself verbally going in and hurting other people quite viciously and unintentionally or unconsciously, it is important to be able to better understand that one is somehow responding to an internal force rather than the situation he or she is involved in. Sometimes when a person feels another individual pulling away from them, the response to their living one psychologically is for the individual who feels they may be abandoned to go after that individual even more strongly, which is self-defeating since all they do is withdraw even more rapidly. Many individuals respond to abandonment by giving full vent to the hostility and anger that they are experiencing and blame it complete on the person with him they are involved with. However, it is best to stop whatever it is that one is doing and try, as honestly as one possibly can, to say to the other person: I do not feel I am being very fair with you,” or something to that effect, which lets him or her know that a bit of irrationality has exhibited itself and it has really confused the issues that we were discussing. Another important lesson is not to fear that irrational side. Know that it is there and know that there is enough sanity to not be afraid to give full vent to that irrational part of oneself, since it does two things: it can give an individual clearer handles as to where it came from, as well as giving the other person an opportunity to be more able to cope with one more as a total person in a more beneficial way. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
Each time people are honest, individuals can emerge from these experiences with deeper feelings of love for each other. Sometimes, in conflicts, what is actually going on is people are acting out a lot of the hostility that they have towards one of their parents, and it takes some insight into one’s own soul to understand the emotion that is influencing one’s response to another individual on what they thought were non-emotional issues. At times people feel defensiveness about reflecting on their own emotions, as they do not know what they will reveal about themselves. These feelings can be compounded by normal conflicts that happen during the day, which could lead to a blow on, when that is not a rational response. People who have unresolved issues are often emotionally dangling on the edge of a cliff with almost no way of rescue. If people realize they have problems, then they can do something about them by facing them. Those who get help have a desire not to let destructive impulses take over their lives. By revealing what the underlying situation involves, it leaves one to have more optimistic experiences with others and can lead to an increase in one’s feeling of personal significance, and in confidence regarding one’s ability to succeed at making connections with people. One can then proceed to enjoy more the human encounter. It is interesting that one of the most empathic themes of the New Testament is the importance attached to the experience of love among the early Christians as expressed in such phrases as, “Beloved, let us love one another; for love is of God.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
One reason for this emphasis on love, in addition to the teachings of Jesus, may have been the fact that in some instances conversion to Christianity meant complete spitting up of families who were hostile to the new sect and its members. With such isolation and loneliness thrust upon them, the new converts would naturally seek to satisfy their need for intimacy with each other. They did, no doubt, have the same fear of love that hinders us, for the record shows they bickered among themselves and found many ways to deprive themselves of experiencing and expressing the love they longed for. Can the expression of pleasures of the flesh can be exclusive? Certainly, if we choose to, we can limit expression of pleasures of the flesh to one person. There are any ways of expressing love to others in addition to expressing it through pleasures of the flesh. We are free to choose whatever way or ways we wish. From a mental health standpoint it is important to make this choice a conscious decision. A great many men and women expend a great deal of emotional energy attempting to avoid awareness of pleasures of the flesh for anyone other than a spouse. When awareness of desire does creep in they feel guilty and frightened because they do not trust themselves we the power of a conscious choice. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
We have already examined the damage to emotional and physical health that such dulling of awareness can bring about. If we can recognize and accept within ourselves that we do—in common with most of humanity—have such desires for pleasures of the flesh, it will be much more healthy. However, also keep in mind some people choose to abstain. Nonetheless, for those who choose to have adult relationships with passionate intimacy, they can enjoy the delicious feelings and decide on a conscious level what, if anything, they want to do about them. It is surprising how many people imagine they are somewhat unusual in having strong desires for pleasures of the flesh for more than one person. This is probably particularly true with women, for whom it is not culturally acceptable to have such feelings. However, women who are alive to their feelings do have these desires, and it is often a great relief to a woman to find she is not unique in this respect. As a culture we are quite reluctant to openly examine the fact that large numbers of married persons do not choose to be exclusive in their relationships. We are probably particularly afraid to recognize that any possible good could result from extramarital affairs. To do so might seem to condone or even encourage such behavior and perhaps lead to the collapse of our monogamous system, at least as we know it. However, if that system is of value and if it is not already a fiction, then the open examination of all relevant questions certainly should not destroy it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
On the one hand it is undoubtedly true that many extramarital relationships are destructive events in which the individual is using a conquest as another way of avoiding intimacy, while on the other hand there are other instances where individuals appear to be open up to the experience and expression of love in an affair in a way in which they have not been able to do with a spouse. One of these aspects of marriage that we do not like to admit is the fact that it may not be most conducive to the experience of love. There are many reasons a married person can find for not feeling close to a spouse. There may be unspoken resentments about any number of things that have been built up over a period of time. The relationship may be experienced primarily in terms of obligation and duty so that the experience of freedom so conducive to love has evaporated in that trapped feeling. It is probably true that these are ways in which we avoid experiencing the love that is there because of our fear of love. However, be that as it may, it is not surprising that some people find they experience love more freely outside of marriage. Some people have an uncommon personal warmth, gentility, and graciousness. We often find the minds of others to be highly developed faculties of critical observation joined with an innate reverence for the sacred to explore the fundamental issues of the human heart: knowledge of its present state, of its higher potentials, of the nature of the Universe. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
Being intellectually stimulated is a very important quality in any relationship. Many people have a sincere inner aspiration for deeper knowledge and experience of the inviolable spirit within their own hearts. We are simply human beings exploring ever more profound truths with increasing depth and concentration. Freedom is thus more than a value itself: it underlies the possibility of valuing; it is basic to our capacity to value. Without freedom there is no value worthy of the name. In this time of disintegration of concern for pubic weal and private honor, in this time of the demise of our values, our recovery—if we are to achieve it—must be cased on our coming to terms with this source of all values: freedom. This is why freedom is so important as a goal of psychotherapy, for whatever values the client develops will be based upon one’s experience of autonomy, sense of personal power and possibilities, all of which are based on the freedom one hopes to achieve in therapy. “And I will show you something different from either your shadow at morning striding behind you. I will show you fear in a handful of dust. A crowd flowed over London Bridge, so many, I had not thought death had on done so many,” The Waste Land by T.S. Eliot (1922). What followed the publication of Eliot’s poem, and what I believe Eliot was predicting, was the waste land of our culture, the disintegration of the World we all had know and counted on, The Great Depression, the Dust Bowl, World War II and the Savings and Loan Crises. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
Nobody knew it would happen then—except the artists. Even if T.S. Eliot would have known it consciously, I doubt it. However, when he wrote that poem, he knew it unconsciously with the genius of the poet. It is woven around the medieval myth of the wasteland and its impotent king. Eliot pictures our age as a wasteland in which the king has lost his potency and hence cannot procreate, a land in which no crops can grow, a land that is wasting away. The king is powerless to do anything about it. The whole poem is a fantastic prophecy—by common consent one of the great classic. In the same year, 1922, The Great Gatsby by F, Scott Fitzgerald appeared. Several films were made of this novel which I think were travesties; they missed the whole point of the story. Actually The Great Gatsby is a prediction of the demise of the American Dream, the dream that everybody can get rich like Horatio Alger. In this novel Fitzgerald draws the picture of a man who believes he can make himself over into anything he wishes: he sprang from his Platonic conception of himself. He had a ferocious indifference to the drums of his destiny, to destiny itself. At one point Gatsby cries incredulously, “Can’t repeat the past? Why of course you can!” He believed he could do anything, he worshipped change, with no regard for destiny or society. Here is a man who believed in optimistic thinking with a vengeance. He lived by the belief that destiny and determinism had no place in this World. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
The novel ends in a crashing tragedy—a tragedy which the human potential movement the New Age people have not yet appreciated, even in the early 2000’s. If it does not give it some kind of religious meaning, if it does not make of it the analogy of a sacrament, the legal character of punishment has no true significance; and therefore all penal offices, from that of the judge to that of the executioner and the prison guard, should in some sort share in the priestly office. Justice in punishment can be defined in the same way as justice in almsgiving. It means giving our attention to the victim of affliction as to a being not a thing; it means wishing to preserve in one the faculty of free consent. When they are really despising the weakness of affliction, mortals think they are despising crime. One is thus the object of the greatest contempt. Contempt is the contrary of attention. There are exceptions only where there is a crime which for some reason has prestige, as is often the case with murder on account of the fleeting moment of power which it implies, or where the crime does not make a very vivid impression upon those who assess it culpability. Stealing is the crime most devoid of prestige, and it causes most indignation because property is the thing to which people are most generally and powerfully attached. Even in the penal code, that is apparent. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
No state is beneath that of a human being enveloped in cloud of guilt, be it true or false, and entirely in the power of a few mortals who are to decide one’s fate with a mortal who are to decide one’s fate with a word. These mortals do not pay any attention to one. Moreover, from the moment when anyone falls into the hands of the law with all its penal machinery until the moment one is free again—and those known as hardened criminals are like Neil Caffery in the TV Series White Collar, in that they hardly ever do get free until the day of their death—such a one is never an object of attention. Everything combines, down to the smallest details, down even to the inflections of people’s voices, to make one seem vile and outcast in all mortal’s eyes including one’s own. The brutality and flippancy, the terms of scorn and the jokes, the way of speaking, the way of listening and of not listening, all these things are equally effective. There is no intentional unkindness in it all. It is the automatic effect of a professional life which has as its object crime seen in the form of affliction, that is to day in the form of horror and defilement are exposed in their starkness. Such contact, being uninterrupted, necessarily contaminates, and the form this contamination takes is contempt. It is this contempt which is reflected on every prisoner at the bar. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
The penal apparatus is like a transmitter which turns the whole volume of defilement contained in all the circles where the miserable crime is to be found upon each accused person. The mere contact with this penal apparatus causes a kind of horror in part of the soul remaining intact, and the horror is in exact proportion to the innocence. Those who are completely rotten receive no injury and do not suffer. If there is not something between the penal apparatus and the crime capable of cleansing defilement, it cannot be otherwise. This can only be God. Infinite purity alone is not contaminated by contact with evil. All finite purity becomes defilement itself through prolonged contact. However, the code may be reformed, punishment cannot be human unless it passes through Christ. The severity of the sentence is not the most important thing. Under present conditions, a condemned mortal, although guilty and given a punishment which is relatively light in view of one’s offense, can more often than not be rightly considered as having been the victim of cruel injustice. What is important is that the punishment should be legitimate, that is to say that is should be recognized as having a divine character, not because of its content but because it is the law. It is important that the whole organization of penal justice should be directed toward obtaining from the magistrates and their assistants the attention and respect for the accused that is due from every mortal to any person who may be in one’s power and from the accused one’s consent to the punishment inflicted, a consent of which the innocent Christ has given us the perfect model. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
A death sentence for a slight offense, pronounced in such a way, would be less horrible than a sentence of six months in prison given as it is at the present day. Nothing is more frightful than the spectacle, now so frequent, of an accused, whose situation provides one with nothing to fall back on, but one’s own words, and who is incapable of arranging these words because of one’s social origin and lack of culture, as one stands broken down by guilt, affliction, and fears, stammering before judges who are not listening and who interrupt one in tones of ostentatious refinement. For as long as affliction is to be found in society, for as long as legal or private almsgiving and punishment are inevitable, the separation between civil institutions and religious life will be a crime. The lay conception considered alone is completely false. It only has some excuse as a reaction against a totalitarian religion. In that respect, it must be admitted, it is partly justifiable. In order to be present everywhere, as it should, religion must not only not be totalitarian, but it must limit itself strictly to the plane of supernatural love which alone is suitable for it. If it did so it would penetrate everywhere. The Bible says: “Wisdom penetrates everywhere on account of its perfect purity.” #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
Through the absence of Christ, mendicity, in the widest sense of the word, and penal action are perhaps the most frightful things on the Earth—two things that are almost infernal. They have the very color of hell. Prostitution might be added to them, for it is to real marriage what almsgiving and punishment without charity are to almsgiving and punishment which are just. Mortals have received the power to do good or harm not only to body but to the souls of their fellows, to the whole soul of those in whom God is not present and to all that part of the soul uninhabited by God of the others. A mortal may be indwelt by God, by the power of evil or merely by the mechanism of the flesh. When one gives or punishes, what one bears within one enters the soul of the other through the bread of the sword. The substance of the bread and the sword are virgin, empty of good and of evil, equally capable of conveying one or the other. One who is forced by affliction to receive bread or to suffer chastisement as one’s could exposed in starkness and defenseless both to evil and to good. There is only one way of never receiving anything but good. It is to know, with our whole soul and not just abstractly, that mortals who are not animated by pure charity are merely wheels in the mechanism of the order of the World, like inert matter. After that we see that everything comes directly from God, either through the love of a mortal, or through the lifelessness of matter, whether it be tangible or psychic, through spirit or water. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
All that increases the vital energy in us is like the bread for which Christ thanks the just. All the blows, the wounds, and the mutilations are like a stone thrown at us by the hand of Christ. Bread and stone both come from Christ and penetrating to our inward being bring Christ into us. Bread and stone are love. We must eat the bread and lay ourselves open to the stone, so that it may skin as deeply as possible into our flesh. If we have any armor able to protect our soul from the stones thrown by Christ, we should take it off and cast it away. Our World is manifold, and our attitudes are manifold. What is manifold is often frightening because it is not neat and simple. Mortal prefer to forget how many possibilities are often to them. They like to be told that there are two World and two ways. This is comforting because it is so tidy. Almost always one way turns out to be common and the other one is celebrated as superior. Those who tell of two ways and praise one are recognized as prophets or great teachers. They save mortals from confusion and hard choices. They offer a single choice that is easy to make because those who do not take the path that is commended to them live a wretched life. To walk far on this path may be difficult, but the choice is easy, and to hear the celebration of this path is pleasant. Wisdom offers simple schemes, but truth is not so simple. Not all simplicity is wide. However, a wealth of possibilities breeds dread. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
Hence, those who speak of many possibilities speak of the few and are of help to even fewer. The wise offer only two ways, of which one is good, and thus help many. We are to enter a new and different rhythm and tell such as will listen that they need not be forlorn, lost, or without hope because they find one to appeal to their hearts or mind. They are asked to follow the God within themselves, for the Kingdom of Heaven is within you. Those who feel alone in this matter or who can only walk outside the groups on an independent path should be reminded that there is a God within them who can guide and help them if they turn to him. The Quest not only begins in the heart but also ends there too. It is an endeavour to lift to a higher plane, and expand to a larger measure, the whole of one’s identity. It brings in the most important part of oneself—being, essence, consciousness. One know thyself! There is a whole philosophy distilled into the single and simple statement. Between the ordinary mortal who takes oneself is one is, and the philosopher who does exactly the same, there stands the Quester. In the first case, outlook is narrow, being limited by attending to the inescapable necessities and demands of day-to-day living. In other case, peace of mind has been established, the thirst for knowledge fulfilled, the discipline of self realized. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
In between these two, the Questers is not satisfied with oneself, has a strong wish to become a better and more enlightened mortal. One tires to exercise one’s will in the struggle for realization of one’s ideal. It lifts human consciousness vertically and enlarges human experience spiritually. If the Infinite Being is trying to express its own nature within the limitations of this Earth—and therefore trying to express itself through us, too—it is our highest duty to search for and cultivate our diviner attributes. Only in this way do we really fulfill ourselves. This search and this cultivation constitute the Quest. It offers a conception of life which originates on a higher level. The Quest is both a search for truth and dedication to the Overself. By “Quest” I mean the deliberate and conscious dedication to the search for spiritual truth, freedom, or awareness. The inner meaning of life does not readily reveal itself; it must be searched for. Such a search is the Quest. “Who among you fears the LORD and obeys the word of his servant? Let one who walks in the dark, who has no light, trust in the name of the LORD and rely on one’s God,” reports Isaiah 50.10-11. It is the Lord who gives salvation even unto Kings, it is the Lord who delivered even David from the hateful sword; let our sons grow as plants grow, and let our daughters be cornerstones, polished as if they were the cornerstones of the palace…happy is that people, whose God is the Lord. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
Randolph Harris II International Institute 