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Why Do I Harm the Very Person I Love?
Do you think we find our destiny somehow, no matter what happens? I mean, do you think even as immortals we follow some path that was already marked for us when we were alive? We have said that human freedom gives birth to the human spirit and that spirit is necessary if there is to be freedom. However, are not human spirit and freedom also the sources of evil? What did do we really mean when we say the wrath of God is necessary if there is to be any love of God? In the course of my therapeutic experience I have met and talked with a number of parents whose son or daughter happened to be in treatment with me. When the parents let their hair down, their attitudes varied from tearful regret on the part of a clergy member high up in the ecclesiastical hierarchy about his son’s depression to the genuine, if sad, puzzlement of a mother whose psychotic episode when her daughter was born had a good deal to do wit the latter’s present promiscuity to the boisterous instructions of a Wall Street executive who adjured me to hurry and get his son to shape up. The boisterousness of the executive only served to emphasize his subconscious realization that his authoritarianism had a good deal to with his son’s perpetual failures in everything he tired. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
If these parents could have spoken out of the depths of their feelings, each one of them—even the Wall Street executive—would have cried out, “Why do I harm the very person I love?” When we see the evil we do, scarcely any of us can remain unaffected, mostly unintentionally, to those in our own family and to people we love by our inability to understand what is going on in the other’s thoughts. Oscar Wilde’s line “Yet each man kills the thing he loves” may relieve us to some extent in that it presents the universal quality of the problem of evil; we are not alone in the harm we partly cause. However, Oscar Wilde also makes it impossible for us to forget that each of us participates in the inhumanity to other human beings. The inevitability of evil is the price we pay for freedom. And the denial of evil is also the denial of freedom. Since we have some margin of freedom, we have to make some choices; and this means the chance of making the wrong choice as well as the right one. Freedom and evil presuppose each other, whether we accept responsibility for our freedom and evil or not. Possibility is possibility for evil as well as good. We can pretend innocence, but such retreating to childhood ignorance does not help anyone. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
There is an inescapable egocentricity in all of us, leading to the absolutizing of our own perceptions, which then become destructive to those closest to us. There is a tendency in each one of us to be absolute in one’s self. Each of us is bound up in one’s own skin, each of us sees life through one’s own eyes, and none of us can escape doing some violence to those we long most to understand. The good that I would I do not, and the evil that I would not do, that I do. There is no evading this dilemma. This is the original sin: each of us speaks out of one’s separate individuality and thus inexorably runs roughshod over yearnings and perceptions that are precious to people we love. And if one tried very hard not to do this, if one makes every effort to do good, one succeeds only in adding an element of self-righteousness to the ways one confronts one’s fellows. The problem of evil has been a stumbling block for philosophers and theologians for millennia. Those who represent the rational approach to evil, from Aristotle through Aquinas to the rational philosophers of today, hold that the more we solve our problems, the less evil will exist. Evil is thus a lack of goodness. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The more our science progresses, the argument goes, the more mysterious of life and nature are solved, and the less evil there is in this would. However, I believe this point of view is wrong. I heard this judgment much more in my earlier days before the advent of Adolph Hitler, before the Second World War with all its newly technologized ways of killing, before the use of concentration camps as an accepted political arm of the government, and before hydrogen bomb, with its unutterably cruel mass maiming and slaying. This depressing list should make clear the fact that the progress of science and technology has not resulted in our being less evil. Human cruelty and capacity for evil increase neck and neck with technological progress, just look at how many of the TV news stations lie, distort facts, and ruin lives for fun. Our ways of killing are made more efficient as well as our ways of living. In fact it is thought, people who are terrorized for fun should be beautiful in person so the insult to God might be greater when the Dark Tick is done. When the World of mortals collapses in ruin, beauty will take over. The trees shall grow again where there were streets; the flowers will again cover the meadow that is now a dank field of hovels. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
That shall be the purpose of the Satanic master, to see the wild grass and the dense forest cover up all trace of the once great cities until nothing remains. And why call this Satanic? Why not call it chaos? That is all it is. However, mortals invented Satan, did they not? Satanic is merely the name they give to the behavior of those who would disrupt the orderly way in which mortals want to life. Satan is mortal’s invention, a name for the force that seeks to overthrow the civilized order of things. The first man who made laws—be he Moses or some ancient Egyptian king Osiris—that lawmaker created the devil. The devil meant the one who tempts you to break the laws. And we are truly Satanic in that we follow no law for mortal’s protection. So why not truly disrupt? Why not make a blaze of evil to consume all the civilizations of Earth? The main example of the evil that is present in technology along with the good is, of course, nuclear power. If we had any doubts about the dangers to health and even life itself in radiation, nuclear residue, as well as the nuclear bombs per se we have only to listen to the Union of Concerned Scientists to shock us out of our delusions. Not only can nuclear fission destroy the World population many times over, but there is evidence that radiation and strontium 90 may already be seeping into the bodies of an unknown number of us. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
In any case, we walk a razor’s edge in dealing with nuclear fission. Science and technology deal with the how of life, and not the why or what for—which truth reputable scientists by the score tell us. Science increases the possibilities for good and the possibilities for evil, which many esteemed scientists have been shouting to us from the housetops. There is also another group of philosophers and the theologians who take a different approach. This group includes Heraclitus, who said “war is both king of all and father of all,” through Sokratis, Augustine, Pascal, Boehme, and down to Kierkegaard and Bateson. These thinkers directly face the fact that freedom makes evil inevitable. As long as there is freedom there will be mistake choices, some of the catastrophic. However, to relinquish the capacity to make choices in favor of the dictatorial segment of us called our reason is to surrender what makes us human in the first place. The modern form of the Grand Inquisitor’s plan leads people to hand over their responsibility to the scientists in the white coat or to the psychotherapist in the comforting office or to the priest in the church or to the anonymous environment all about us. If we could do these things, we would have the temporary facsimile of evading evil. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
However, while we are no longer committing evil, we also are no longer committing goodness; and the age of the robot will be upon us. The ultimate error is the refusal to look evil in the face. This denial of evil—and freedom along with it—is the most destructive approach of all. To take refuge with the Moonies, or with Jonestown, or any others of the hundreds of cults, most of which seem to spring up in California, is to find a haven where our choices will be made for us. We surrender freedom because of our inability to tolerate moral ambiguity, and we escape the threat that one might make the wrong choice. The mass suicides at Jonestown seem to me to be the terrible, if brilliant, demonstration of the ultimate outworking of the attitudes with which the adherents joined in the first place. They committed spiritual suicide in surrendering their freedom to evade the partial evil of life, and they end up demonstrating to the World in their own mass suicides the final evil. Religious people have for millennia fervently asked, “How could a God of love permit evil?” An answer is given by that tributary of Christianity, Gnosticism: God allowed evil to exist, woven into the texture of the World, in order to increase mortal’s freedom and one’s will to prove one’s moral strength in overcoming. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
However, the question the religious people above ask is simplistic. Let us recall the words of Boehme, above, that God is a fire and it is necessary to confront the wrath of God if the love of God is to have any reality. A Hassidic saying points toward the same thing: God is not nice, God is no uncle. God is an Earthquake. We note that some saints through history have spoken of themselves as the “Chief of sinners.” Obviously, this cannot mean sinner in the sense of committing overt, objective crimes. However, it can mean that the saints, being more highly developed spiritually than ordinary people, have a correspondingly deeper awareness of their pride, vanity, hardness of heart, and obtuseness of understanding. If we look at sin from the inside, we see that there is indeed, sound meaning to their claim. It is impossible to have a sensitive conscience and a good conscience at the same time. If one has a sensitive conscience one will be aware of the evils of the World in which we as human beings participate. Hence, there is no clear, good conscience, but an active concern about the evils. It is not at all surprising, then, that in the Garden of Eden myth, the knowledge of good and evil comes by virtue of the evil of rebellion against God. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
If Adam and Eve are to have any freedom, any true autonomy or true independence, they must defy the orders of God; and whether Yahweh is benevolent or destructive does not at that moment matter. This defying of the orders of God is essential for this development of their own consciousness. Otherwise they will forever be the inert appendage of God. Is this alienating? Anxiety-creating? Guilt-producing? Of course. However, what become available with these “curses” are the blessings of love, responsibility, and the passion and power to create. Still, after meeting with certain people, one may complain about a sense of depression which comes to one’s mind. One should reduce such meetings to the least number possible, and where it is necessary to deal with them, to do so by correspondence as much as one can. It does not matter that such people may have spiritual interests and many also on the Quest. The Quest is an individual matter; it is not a group Quest. One finds God by oneself, alone in the privacy of one’s heart and life, not with the help of a group nor in public associations. Be yourself, your own divine self. Why play a part? Why be an echo? Why follow the World in its pursuit of the trivial, the stupid, the pain bringing? #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
One should not permit oneself to be re-entangled by others in past contacts which have out served their purpose and which now will only keep one down. This freedom to search for and find truth as well as to select one’s own path of approach toward it, is a precious prerogative. One refuses to accept a label; one feels oneself to be outside all the common categories. The divergence of opinion among leading individuals on every subject is extraordinary and emphasizes one again the necessity of thinking for oneself. Remember that custom and habit are the great tyrants who enslave the mass of humankind. Only when one is true to one’s own self, real freedom is possible. Do not permit yourself to be hypnotized by the common indifference to these high matters, but be loyal to the promptings of the spirit. With this decree one runs up one’s personal declaration of independence. No school can hold one. One’s loyalty is henceforth given to global thought. Nor is this all. The mystic life depends on no institution, no tradition, no sectarianism. It is an independent and individual existence. Without falling into the vacuity of skepticism, the intelligent and independent seeker shuns strict and rigid doctrines sectarian intellectual or emotional positions. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
However, this openness of mind, one’s semi-detached stand, do not prevent one’s forming favourable appreciations or accommodating unflattering impressions. “All this is the genius of Our Divine Violinist, but we must now be with him every waking moment. To force him to write we tie him to a chair. We put ink and paper in front of him. And if this fails, we make him dictate as we write down plays.” If you do not feel any affinity with it, let others follow whatever path attracts them, but do not let them impose their path upon you. The unified I: for (as I have said earlier) the unification of the soul occurs in lived actuality—the concentration of all forces into the core, the decisive moment of mortals. However, unlike that immersion, this does not entail ignoring the actual person. Immersion want to preserve only what is pure, essential, and enduring, while stripping away everything else; the concentration of which I speak does not consider our instincts as too impure, the sensuous as too peripheral, or our emotions as too fleeting—everything must be included and integrated. What is wanted is not the abstracted self but the whole, undiminished mortal. This concentration aims at and is actuality. The doctrine of immersion demands and promises penetration into thinking the One, that by which the World is thought, the pure subject. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
However, in lived actuality no one thinks without something being thought; rather is that which thinks as dependent on that which is thought as vice versa. A subject that annuls the object to rise above it annuls its own actuality. A thinking subject by itself exists—in thought, as the product and object of thought, as a limit-concept that lacks all imaginable content; also in the anticipatory determination of death for which one may also substitute its metaphor, that deep sleep which is virtually no less impenetrable; and finally in the assertions of a doctrine concerning a state of immersion that resembles such deep sleep and is essentially without consciousness and without memory. These are the supreme excesses of It-language. One has to respect its sublime power to ignore while at the same time recognizing it as something that can at most be an object of living experience but that cannot be lived. In the former centuries there was a long-lasting struggle in the Church about the religious significance of hearing and seeing. First, seeing prevailed, but then hearing became more and more significant. Finally, in the days of the Reformation hearing became completely victorious. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
The typical Protestant church-building bear witness to the victory. They are halls to hear sermons, emptied of everything to be seen of pictures and sculptures, of lights and stained windows, of most of the sacramental activities. Around the desk of the preacher a room was built to listen to the words of the law and gospel. The eye could not find a place to rest in contemplation. Hearing replaced seeing, obedience replaced vision. Truth is knowledge of things as they are, and as they were and as they are to come. Truth looks backward and forward, expanding the perspective of our small point in time. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” Truth shows us the way to eternal life, and it comes only through our Savior, Jesus Christ. There is no other way. Jesus Christ teaches us how to life, and, through his Atonement and Resurrection, he offers us forgiveness from our sins and immortality beyond the veil. This is absolutely true. Our mortal quest is to strengthen our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, to choose good over evil, and to keep his commandments. While we celebrate the innovations of science and medicine, the truths of God go far beyond these discoveries. We can know things of God as we seek them spiritually. The things of God knoweth no mortal, except one as the Spirit of God for they are spiritually discerned. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Without Pain We Would Become a Nation of Zombies—Some Critics Believe We Have Already Arrived at that State!
Amazing how the mind works kind of like a puzzle and as it grows, as your neurons produce more synapses which have dendrites. My guidance is what you need. You have only begun your adventure and you have no beliefs to hold you. You cannot live without some guidance. We need to understand the function of illness and health in a culture. The disease itself is not the ultimate enemy. It may actually be a blessing in disguise in that it forces the person, as tuberculosis did to me, to take stock of his life and to reform his style of work and play. Having a disease in one way of resolving a conflict situation. Disease is a method of thinking one’s World so that, with lessened responsibilities and concerns, the person has a better chance of coping successfully. Health, on the contrary, is a freeing of the organism to realize its capacities. I believe that people utilize disease in the same way older generations used the devil—as an object on which to project their hated experiences in order to avoid having to take responsibility for them. However, beyond giving a temporary sense of freedom from guilt feeling, these delusions do not help. Health and disease are part and parcel of our continuous process throughout life of making ourselves adequate to our World and our World adequate to ourselves. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Nor is pain the ultimate enemy. Americans are probably the most pain-conscious people on the face of the Earth. For years we have had it drummed into us—in print, on radio, over television, in everyday conversation—that any hint of pain is to be banished as though it were the ultimate evil. Leprosy is such a dreaded disease because of the fact that the affected person has lost the sense of pain and has no signal to tell one how and when to take care of the infected parts. We consume in this country a fabulous number of tranquilizers in the process of blocking out pain. Has this been the danger all along, the trigger of our fear? Even as we recognize it, we are yielding, and it seems the great lessons of our life have all been learned through the renunciation of fear. Fear is one again breaking the shell around us so that something else can spring to life. The interplay of pain and pleasure, and the dependence of one on the other–never, never in all our existence, not mortal or immortal, have we been threatened with an intimacy quite like this. Many of us, for example, want to know why beauty exists, why nature continues to contrive it, and what is the link between the life of a tree and its beauty, and what connects the mere existence of the sea or a lightning storm with the feelings these things inspire in us? #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
If God does not exist, if these things are not unified into one metaphorical system, the why do they retain for us such a symbolic power. What is the lantern by which we see the Devil’s Road, by what lantern have many traveled it? What have people learned besides devil worship and superstition? What do we know about other humans and how they came into existence? Give that to us, and it might be worth something. And then again, it might be worth nothing. How strange would appear to be this thing that mortals call pleasure! And how curiously is it related to what is thought to be its opposite, pain! The two will never be found together in a mortal, and yet if you seek one and obtain it, you are almost bound always to get the other as well, just as though they were both attached to one and the same head. Wherever the one is found, the other follows up behind. So, in my case, since I had pain in my leg as a result of the fetters, pleasure seems to have come to follow it up. Pain is a sensitizer in life. In running away from pain we lose our vitality, our capacity genuinely to feel and even to love. I am not saying that pain is a good thing in itself. I am saying that pain and the relief from pain paradoxically go together. They are the bow and the string of Heraclitus. Without pain we would become a nation of zombies. Some critics believe we already have arrived at that state. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
There is a common illusion that medical technology is wiping out one disease after another—such original lethal scourges as tuberculosis, which supposedly claimed the life 2nd President of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, William Wirt Winchester, in 1880. That is why in memory of her husband, Mrs. Sarah Winchester donated over $1,00,000.00 ($25,053,725.49 adjusted for inflation) to the General Hospital Society of Connecticut, for the care and treatment of tuberculosis patients. The clinic still proudly exists today as part of the Yale New Haven Medical Center. Infantile paralysis along with tuberculosis being among the recent examples—that we need only to wait, hoping we live long enough until medicine vanquishes all diseases. However, this illusion rests on a serious misunderstanding of the functions of illness and health in any human society. However, physicians must resist the idea that technology will some day abolish disease because as long as humans feel threatened and helpless, they will seek the sanctuary that illness provides. And as the population grows and we cure more diseases, other symptoms will pop up to cure the disease that overpopulation is causing the planet to suffer from. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch the people. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Not only do physicians need to resist this illusion, but even more do play people, to whom the idea that medical technology will ultimately save them is the most powerful rationalization for evading their own responsibility for their health. For human beings live—it is their destiny to do so—delicately balanced between health and illness, and this balance is what is important. There is no doubt that we, as a race, are getting healthier. However, will I be misunderstood when I affirm that the possibilities of illness get proportionately greater at the same time? Certainly, there is just as much consulting with doctors as there was one hundred years ago. What seems to be occurring is the shift in the kinds of illness from infectious diseases—which attack the person from the outside—to internal diseases like heart attacks, hypertension, and strokes—which are intimately related to anxiety and stress. The latter are the greatest killers of our day. Illness and health are complexly balanced in each of us, and taking responsibility, so far as we can, gives us some possibility of restoring the balance when it goes awry. It is not by accident that so many of our greatest persons have struggled with diseases all their lives. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Noting the large number of important creative human beings who have had tuberculosis, a physician some years ago wrote a book entitled Tuberculosis and Genius in which he argued that the tubercular bacilli must eject some serum into the blood to produce the genius. This explanation seems to me absurd. It makes much more sense to hold that they way of life of the genius—intensive work, unquenchable enthusiasm, the fire in the brain—puts too much of a strain on the balance, and hence the individual becomes ill as a necessary way of withdrawing into oneself for a times. The struggle between health and illness is part of the source of creativity. Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Mary Baker Eddy, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust and Elizabeth Barrett Browning all suffered severe illness and met in constructively. George Pickering, who suffered from his own osteoarthritic hips as an ally, which he puts to bed when they get painful; and in bed he cannot attend committee meetings or see patients or entertain visitors. However, these the ideal conditions for creative work: freedom from intrusion, freedom from the ordinary chores of life. #RandolpHarris 6 of 13
Sometimes when in pain or under the weather, one way to treat it I by becoming aware that you are involved in a fight and to pray for a cure. For ten minutes each day, focusing on your body being healed. That is a way to be conscious of and handle the consciousness of your illness or pain without letting it overcome you. One will be better, but in order to contrive with one’s body, to impose one’s wishes upon it or to cede prudently to its will. It is important to devote as much as one can into regulating one’s World, in building the being who you are, and in embellishing one’s life. What am I? Is such an ancient and perennial question only because it has to be answered by each individual for oneself. If one finds the true answer, one will find also that one cannot really transfer it to another person but only its idea, its mental shadow. That too may be valuable to others, but it is not the same. Surely the human race has by this time, by this late century in history found the truth? Why, then, does the mortal who wants it have to make one’s own personal search all over again? It is because one must know it for oneself within oneself. You yourself are your own guru. Be that. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
One who seeks the truth about these matters will discover that it is contrary to current opinion, and therefore one will have to discover it by oneself and for oneself. One should verify the truth not by reference to book or bible but by reference to one’s own private experience. There is no room in this school for those who are ready to dispose of life’s problems with secondhand judgment. The need of individual thinking is vital here. Humanity will not be saved in groups or by organizations. It will be saved individual by individual. Being true to oneself brings happiness. Being indifferent to the criticisms of those who misunderstand brings freedom from anxiety on their account. Walking the streets in a spirit of independences, enables us to walk as a billionaire! If they will, let others sacrifice themselves to snobbery; let us be free. Only when the feet rest can we bring the mind to rest—unless we are Attained Ones! We can be devout and dignified but we need not therefore be dull. I do not deny that the drift of several movements which are in the World’s eye today, is toward this idea of greater spirituality. However, whereas they are confined in their search by attachment to a set creed, or a particular philosophy, or even some one person, we propose to pursue an absolutely independent quest—one limited in its width by no qualifications or conditions. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
There are not concrete threats against life and well-being, there is not a depressing guilt feeling or a despair about ourselves. There is not a disintegrating doubt or an intolerable emptiness. There is not an extreme situation. Does this mean that there is no desire to ask for a word from the Lord? Are the situations which are not extreme situations, deprived of a word out of the dimension of the eternal? Is God silent if the foundations of our existence are not shaken? A hard question, and answered in many different ways! How would we answer? I shall never forget the word of a wise old man who said to my grandfather when I was still a child, “I need somebody who I can than when a great joy is given to me.” Can we share this experience? Do we remember such moments in which the eternal made itself felt to us through the abundance or greatness or beauty of the temporal? I believe that none of us is completely without such experiences. However, did we not say that a word from the Lord is the eternal cutting into the temporal does not mean negating it. This can mean, and this is does mean whenever we are driven into an ultimate situation. There are in everybody’s life such situations, and they are frequent in mortal’s tragic history. However, the eternal can also cut into the temporal by affirming it, by elevating a piece of it out of the ordinary context of temporal things and events, making it translucent for the Divine glory. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Without such moments, life would be poor and sad; there would be on creations in which the greatness of life is expressed. However, they exist, and the eternal shines through them; they can become a word from the Lord to us. However, still some of you are thinking: All this may be as you say, but it remains strange to us. Neither in ultimate situations nor in moments of a great elevation has the eternal cut into our temporal existence. We never got a word from the Lord. Maybe you did not hear it. However, certainly it was spoken to you. For there is always a word from the Lord, a word that has been spoken. The problem of mortals is not that God does not speak to one: God does speak to everyone who has a human countenance. For this is what makes one a human. One who is not able to perceive something ultimate, something infinitely significant, is not a mortal. Mortals are human because one is able to receive a word from the dimension of the eternal. The question is not that humankind has not received any word from the Lord; the question is that it has been received and resisted and distorted. This is the predicament of all of us. Human existence is never without that which breaks vertically into it. Mortals are never without a manifestation of that which is ultimately serious and infinitely meaningful. One is never without a word from the Lord and one never ceases resisting and distorting it, both when one has to hear it and when one has to say it. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Every Christian, and especially every Christian minister, should be aware of this: We resist and distort the word from the Lord not only when we hear it, but also when we say it. When we ask why our message of the Word of God is rejected, we often find that one does not reject that for which we stand, but the way in which we stand for it. Many of those who reject the Word of God reject it because the way we say it is utterly meaningless to them. They know the dimension of the eternal, but they cannot accept our names for it. If we cling to their words, we may doubt whether they have received a word from the Lord. If we meet them as persons, we know they have. There is always a word from the Lord, a word that has been spoken. The Christian Church believes that this word has a central content, and that is has the name Jesus the Christ. Therefore, the Church call not his words but his Being the Word of God. The Church believes that in his Being, the eternal has broken into the temporal in a way which once for all gives us a word, nay, the word from the Lord. It believes that whatever word from the Lord has been said in all history and in every individual life, is implied in this Word, which is not words but reality, a new reality, the reality of the eternal in the temporal, conquering the resistance and the distortions of the temporal. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
So we have not a, but the word from the Lord? As Christians we can boast that we have it? Can we really? Did we not receive the message through mortals, and are not we who heard it mortals? And does that not mean that the message, while it went through the mouths of those who said it and through the ears of us who heard it, lost is power to cut into our World and our soul? It is supposed that God will enter the being that ha been freed of I-hood or that at that point one merges into God; the other view supposes that one stands immediately in oneself as the divine One. Thus the first holds that in a supreme moment all selfishness ends because there is no longer any duality; the second, that there is no truth in selfishness at all because in truth there is no duality. The first believes in the unification, the second in the identity of the human and the divine. Both insist on what is beyond I and You: for the first this comes to be, perhaps in ecstasy, while for the second it is there all along and reveals itself, perhaps as the thinking subject beholds its self. Both annul relationship—the first, as it were, dynamically, as the I is swallowed by the soul, which then becomes a united being; the second, as it were statically, as the I is freed, becomes a self, and recognizes itself as the only being. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
The doctrine of dependence considers the I-supporter of the World-arch of pure relation as so weak and insignificant that one’s ability to support the arch ceases to be credible, while the one doctrine of immersion does away altogether with the arch in its perfection and the other one treats it as a chimera that has to be overcome. The doctrines of immersion invoke the greater epigrams of identification—one of them above all the Johannine “I and the Father are one,” and the other one the doctrine of Sandilya: “The All-embracing is my self in the inner heart.” The paths of these two epigrams are diametrically opposed. The former (after a long subterranean course) had its source in the myth-sized life of a person and then unfolds in a doctrine. The second emerges in a doctrines and culminates (provisionally) in the myth-sized life of a person. On these paths the character of each epigram is changed. The Christ of the Johannine tradition, the Word that has become flesh but once, takes us to Eckhart’s Christ whom God begets eternally in the human soul. The formula of the coronation of the self in the Upanishads—“That is the actual, it is the self, and you are” takes us far more quickly to the Buddhistic formula of deposition: “A self and what pertains to the self are not to be found in truth and actuality.” Beginning and end of both paths have to be considered separately. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
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You Would See an Illumination that is All Your Own—Somber, Yes, but Light and Beauty Come Together in You in a Thousand Different Patterns!
Natural enough was not it, that one of his own should take him away from this place where mortals would sooner or later have approached him, driven him stumbling away. He gave no resistance to me. In a moment he was standing on his own feet. And then he walked drowsily beside me, my arm about his shoulder, bolstering him and steadying him until we were moving away from the Palais Royal, towards the rue St.-Honore. Let us single out one aspect of that revolution, acupuncture, as represented by Dr. Harold Bailen, a doctor of Western cardiology who later became an acupuncturist. His shift to acupuncture occurred because of his growing conviction that the model of Western medicine was at best incomplete and at worst simply wrong. The sickness itself is not the enemy. Rather the wrong way of life is. Western medicine, being disease-oriented, blocks off the symptom with which patients come to the doctor, whereas Eastern medicine, with a tradition of thousands of years behind it, asks: What is the symptom trying to tell us? The symptom is the right-brain language—in its pain, ache, often remarks to patients, “Is not it marvelous that your body is so bright that it can speak to you in that language?” #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
In contrast to the left brain, from which language, logic, and rationality largely spring, the right-brain is the side that communicates in fantasies, dreams, intuition—and symptoms. The symptom is a red warning light. Right-brain language cannot be attacked from a purely rational, left-brain point of view. Acupuncture enhances communication between the right and left brain, states Dr. Bailen. It synthesizes this information, something like an altered state of consciousness. The aim of acupuncture is to stimulate, through the use of the needles, the energy circuits of the body so the body will be energized to cure itself. These circuits, called meridians, are not synonymous with the neural pathways of the body. The most accepted theory these days is that acupuncture activates endorphins, a morphinelike hormonal substance in the body. Dr. Rene Dubos, who is not an acupuncturist, describes this well: “Acupuncture can trigger the release of pituitary endorphin which, somehow, gains access to the cells of the spinal cord and can thus exert an opiate-like effect on the perception of pain. It is not too far-fetched to assume that, as in the case of other hormones, mental attitudes can affect the secretion of endorphin and thereby the patient’s perception of disease.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Dr. Dubos goes on to say that endorphin acts not only on the mechanisms of pain itself, but also inhibits the emotional response to pain and, therefore, to suffering. Hence, the demonstrated anti-pain effect of acupuncture as used by a number of dentists in their work. Acupuncture requires that the person being treated not simply be a “patient,” but that one’s body and one’s consciousness—meaning one’s whole self—be an integral part of the treatment. It is not simply done to a patient, but requires the patient’s awareness of one’s freedom and responsibility at every point. If the patient gets this message loudly and clearly, Dr. Bailen states, one is confronted with a choice point. This may take the form of a question to himself: “Oh, my God. Do I want to get rid of this?” Occasionally patient (generally arthritics) become better, get the insight, and then stop the treatment with the conclusion “It is easier for me to bear the pain than to make the change.” They had become so rigid, so bound by habit, and had gotten so much secondary gain, such as being taken care of, out of the ailment that they chose not to change their way of life. This is a conscious, responsible choice. The person is no longer in one’s victim role. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
This very much like the goal of psychotherapy, in my judgment. The purpose of psychotherapy is not to cure the clients in the conventional sense, but to help them become aware of what they are doing and to get them out of the victim role. Its purpose is to help the disturbed one get to the stage where one is free to choose one’s own way of life, as far as that is realistically possible, and to accept one’s situation in life, as far as that is unavoidable. To illustrate the choice point, I will cite an experience of Rollo May. The problem—or the symptom—with which he went to Dr. Bailen for treatment was tachycardia, which he had had since he was four years old. Though it had not handicapped him seriously as an adolescent, during the last years it had gotten severe enough to cause fainting and even more dangerous symptoms. He has been put on Inderal, one of the drugs which controls the beat of the heart. When he began he was on six Inderal (each one 10 milligrams) a day. This, indeed, did control his heartbeat, butt at the price of shutting off his brain. He felt like a zombie. The following are notes he made at the time of his acupuncture. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
This past Monday I felt very good after the acupuncture treatment, and my mood continued to be excellent on the morning of Tuesday. I was already down to one Inderal a day after several months of treatment. I decided then to cut the Inderal out entirely. However, by noon, when I was feeling high because of the possibility of curing the tachycardia entirely, I began to get a strange feeling of deep and pervasive loneliness. I paced back and forth in my office trying to figure out what this might be. There was no particular reason why I should be lonely. However, I continued to feel as though I were in a foreign land where I could not speak the language, in a World in which I was lost and unable to communicate with anyone. I has also the strange feeling that I had lost myself; I had only half an identity. In the middle of the afternoon it occurred to me that this loneliness had come out of my fantasy that the tachycardia could be cured entirely and I would be free of it. Yes! an important part of how I had experienced my identity in the past would be gone. I had grown accustomed to this image, this myth of myself, that I was this man with this particular ailment, namely tachycardia. The ailment seemed to be my friend; it has stood by me faithfully when I was under too much stress and needed some withdrawal from the active World. Like the prisoners of the River in Sacramento, California, I had become friends with my very chains. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
That night I dreamed that I was dying. My friends were gathered together and I was going around the circle saying good-bye to them. I was crying in the dream and felt that I was saying good-bye to this World. The following night I dreamt that I was having a brain operation and part of my hair had been cut away in order for the surgeons to get the part of my skull that was going to be cut out. The chief surgeon was tall, thin man [Dr. Bailen is tall and thin]. I ran out of the operating room. When I woke up the next morning [Wednesday] my tachycardia has returned in full force; my heart was pounding at the rate of 150 a minute. The tachycardia continued to trouble me all morning. I was glad to get to Dr. Bailen’s office that afternoon; for I knew that the dreams and behavior had been a very clear, if strident, cry that I was not yet ready to give up this ailment. The loneliness, and the first dream, were saying that to give up my symptom of tachycardia would be tantamount to dying, and also surrendering the identity by which I had known myself and survived since I was a child of four. The second dream makes an even more explicit cry about parting from the tachycardia: “Not yet!” it was shouting. Dr. Bailen laughingly agreed with my interpretation that I would need another month or so before making the drastic change completely. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
The hanging on to illnesses, or the difficulty in asserting one’s freedom and responsibility toward illness, has been well known through history and literature. Jean-Jacques Rousseau remarks about the tendency of human beings “to run to meet their chains thinking they secure their freedom.” Even in the Declaration of Independence our forefathers recognized this truth: “All experience hat shown that humankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” Thomas Mann shows in one of his stories how we make a way of life out of our own or others’ sickness. In “Tobias Mindernickel,” he pictures the dog as overly independent, a longer and not very friendly toward its master. In an accident the dog breaks its two front legs. The man then puts it in bed beside him nurses it through the illness. Finally, wen the dog recovers and is able to run around as used to be its wont, the man no longer has the animal to care for nor the animal’s friendliness and dependency upon him. He is beside himself. Unable to stand his present isolation, the man takes a hammer and breaks the dog’s legs all over again. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
The moral of this story is applicable to the multitude of relationship in our World in which marriages, friendships, dependencies of various are kept together essentially by the need to be care for on the part of one member and the need to take care of on the part of the other. On the healthy side this is the comradeship we experience in comforting each other as we embrace cold and lonely destinies we cannot change. On the unhealthy side, it is the self-limitations built into the World by persons who have suffered illnesses are loathe to give up their dependency when the possibility of freedom does open up again. One must remember that one has set one’s feet upon a path, and one has begun to move on that path. One must continue to do so. One must not desert the Quest under any circumstances. He must go on until the goal is reached. It is impossible in life to avoid at some period or other difficulties, trials, handicaps, obstacles, temptations, and so on. They must come, but that is no reason why anyone should give up the Quest. One should stick to the Quest for truth in spite of all that is happenings to one. If one gets a sense of failure—and one may get it—or a sense of intense depression, one may think that the Quest is too difficult and its rewards remote, and one may be tempted to give it up. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
One must understand what is happening. One should understand that one is expressing a mood, a mood of depression and a sense of failure. However, one should remember that it is just a mood; it will pass away. And so one can say to oneself: “Very well, I will not occupy myself with thoughts of the Quest for the present. I can feel no enthusiasm for it.” Very well, but one must not give up the Quest. One should realize that one is doing it for the present, that tomorrow or next week or next month or even next year one will take it up and continue, that one is not giving it up, that one is just laying low, so to speak, for a while, but keeping in the back of one’s mind that one is sticking to the Quest, even though for a while one has to give up conscious effort. If one feels that one has failed, if one feels that one has sinned, even these are no reasons why one should give up the Quest for God. One may fall a thousand times. That does not justify one’s giving up the Quest. One must pick oneself up and try for the thousand-and-first time. There is no steady, smooth progression to he goal. It is not an easy path. One walks, and there is no possibility of moving towards the goal without meeting with hindrances and rebuffs. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
And one has to learn to be patient and to be tolerant with oneself, not to withdraw because one meets with those rebuffs or because one becomes dissatisfied with oneself. One must not give up. One can wait, and then one can continue, even if one falls, still one can say one is destined to succeed the thousand-and-first times, it may be that one is destined to succeed the thousand-and-first time. So one must try, because one never knows which of one’s efforts is going to be a successful one; and if one persists, there will come a time when this a time when this effort will and must succeed. It is as though the gods like to play with one for a while to try one’s patience and endurance, just to see how keenly one wants this attainment. If one gives up at the first few hindrances or rebuffs, it means that one is not so very keen after all; but if one can endure and keep on, and keep om, and still keep on, no matter what happens, well then, the gods say, here is someone who really wants truth, so we must give it to one. That is the attitude which one must develop. It does not matter how troubled one is personally or how dark circumstances are: they will change because they must change. The wheel of destiny is turning all the time. So one must not let circumstances or one’s own inner moods deter one from continuing on the path. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
As a matter of fact, once one has begun on the right-hand path, there is no turning back. One has accepted the responsibility, and one will have to go on with it—and if one tried to turn back, what happens is that one meets with nothing but suffering and disappointment in order to force one to return to the path. So, it is really serious undertaking to enter upon this path, because one has to continue, and the gods will give one no rest if one runs away from it once one has really set one’s foot on it. If one allows other people to influence one to abandon a worthy endeavour, one must blame only oneself, only one’s own weakness, not them. If, too, one allows obstructive circumstances to influence one in the same way, one is again to blame. This fault is harder to see and to admit than the first one. However, the Quest cannot be played with, nor undertaken only for one’s easier and more comfortable hours. It is a master to whom one has been indentured for lifelong obedience. It is a duty from which one must let nothing swerve one. If the quest becomes too arduous one can always take a holiday. It would be foolish, in the end futile, to give up altogether. Hope is the instinctive turning of the flower to the Sun. It bestows inspiring strength on the weak and gallant endurance on the sorrowful. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Hope is a way up from flinty tracts to the level plateau where the worst troubles vanish. And those of us who have planted our feet on the grander path that shall lead one day to ultimate wisdom, have to go on—whether it be through sorrow or joy, weakness or strength, World-turmoil or World-peace. For us there is not turning back. Once one has solemnly made this momentous decision and has reverently dedicated oneself to the quest, one has to remain loyal to it under all the experiences of pleasure and pain, temptation and tribulation which will henceforth be brought to bear upon one. To desert the quest at any point will only delay one’s movement and increase one’s suffering, for one will find in the end that no other ways is open to one except the way of repentance and return. One is indeed free who, unpossessed by one’s own possessions, unswayed by one’s own family, undeflected by one’s own desires, remains ever loyal to the quest. Once one has started on this quest in earnest, one will never be able to leave it again. One may try to do so for a time and to escape its claims but in the end one will fail. For some power which one cannot control will eventually and often abruptly emerge in the midst of one’s mental or emotional life and control one. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
This quest is an irreversible journey. Once you have really started on it there is no turning back. You may believe that you have given it up in despair or turned away from it for a Worldier existence, but you are only fooling yourself. For one day either a deep repressed hunger will suddenly reassert itself or else a cataclysmic turn of events will drive you back to seek this last and enduring refuge of mortal. Where is the truth to be found in all this bewildering array of doctrines, creeds, claims, systems, and beliefs? That is the reaction of many young aspirants toward a life higher than the materialistic one offered by society today. Theirs is the choice: the responsibility cannot be evaded. There may be long mental struggle or easy swift emotional acceptance but the consequences belong to them. Though all these things they learn, develop, discover, and find their way in the end. “Charity is the pure love of Christ, and it endureth forever; and whoso is found possessed of it at the last day, it shall be well with one. Wherefore, my beloved brethren, pray unto the Father with all the energy of heart, that ye may be filled with this love, which one hath bestowed upon all who are true followers of his Son, Jesus Christ; that ye may become the sons of God; that when one shall appear we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is; that we may have this hope; that we may be purified even as he is pure. Amen,” reports Moroni 7.47-48. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
I Roamed with My Mortal Attendants through a Paradise of Material Wealth, Claiming Everything that I Wanted!
He watches. Sometimes he lets himself be seen. However, when he discovers what is really going on here, only God knows what he will do. Of the countless empirical studies which bear this out, I will cite an article from the Journal of the American Medical Association, which was reported in the daily press under the caption “Nice Patients Die Faster.” This was a study of how two groups of women dealt with terminal breast cancer. “Feisty, combative women survived longer than trusting, complacent women” was the conclusion. The women who survived longest were, as a group, more anxious, depressed, hostile, and alienated about their illness tan those who succumbed faster. The feisty women seemed to maintain a combative posture rather than being hopeless victims. “They were going down fighting!” wrote Dr. Derogatis, the psychologist who made the study. “The women who survived longer had mechanisms of externalizing their conflicts, fears and angers about the disease. They were more demanding of physicians, less satisfied with treatment and were rated as less well adjusted. By contrast, the other woman—who died sooners—felt less anxious and more optimistic towards their doctors, and rated themselves as more content on a self-evaluation. I believed they has divested themselves of the responsibility of fighting the disease.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
Now breast cancer does indeed seem to be a blow of fate. Yet the women who could assert their freedom and take responsibility for the illness—and this for fighting it—have a better chance of living. I do not wish my emphasis on responsibility to be confused with that of expressed sequence tag (a unique stretch of DNA within a coding region of a gene that is useful for identifying full-length genes and serves as a landmark of mapping). Is the unborn baby the cause of its brain defect because of its mother’s malnutrition? To hold that we are responsible for everything that happens to us is to show to what absurdities when we have no understanding of our destiny. Our freedom—and, therefore, our sense of responsibility—exists only as we acknowledge and engage our destiny. Norman Cousin’s book Anatomy of an Illness excellently describes his own encounter with a vital problem of health. Cousins was pronounced incurably ill of a rare disease of the collagen tissues which he had developed in Russia. Possessing a remarkably strong will to live, he asked himself the question: “If negative emotions produce negative chemical changes in the body would not the beneficial emotions produce beneficial chemical changes? It is possible that love, hope, faith, laughter, confidence, and the will to live have therapeutic value?” #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
Norman Cousins tells us how, when the specialists pronounced him doomed, he summoned his own concern with the problem and his will to health. He moved out of the inhospitable hospital and into a hospitable hotel and began a new regimen, in consultation with his own physician. Cousins went on a program consisting of large quantities of vitamin C and equally large amounts of health-giving laughter. His story is the documentation of how one individual asserted his limited freedom and his responsibility for confronting his destiny, cruel and unfair as that destiny was. When asked by a friend whether he had not been terribly discouraged, Cousins answered that he was, “especially at the start when I expected my doctor to fix my body as though it were an automobile engine that needed mechanical repair, like cleaning out the carburetor, or reconnecting the fuel pump.” When one discusses the need for the individual to take responsibility for one’s own health, the tendency of listeners is to interpret the discussion as an attack on modern medicine. An address of Roll May’s called, “Personal Freedom and Caring,” before the convention of the American Occupational Therapy Association was reported in a newspaper under the caption “Caring Physicians Rob Patients of Their Freedom, Responsibility.” This was, if anything, directly opposite to the meaning of his address. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
Rollo May was not attacking medicine as such. None of us can escape marveling at and valuing the tremendous progress of modern medicine in the development of medical technology and the new drugs. Among his friends who are advocates of holistic medicine, his task is to caution against viewing the medical profession as the enemy. “Talk of enemies does not sit well,” Norman Cousins says, “in a movement in which spiritual factors are no less vital than practical ones.” In does no good furthermore, to refuse on principle to take a prescribed drug because one wants to preserve one’s freedom, nor to refuse to go to a doctor when such is indicated. We cannot withdraw from the contemporary World, hermitlike, to contemplate our own navels. Furthermore, such revolt smacks too much of the Luddites, eighteenth-century workers who, realizing the threat to their livelihood in the industrial revolution, armed themselves with crowbars and pickaxes and attached the machines. This rebellion does no good beyond the self-righteous feelings it gives the rebels themselves. In a given illness I believe one’s responsibility to oneself is to get the best medical advice available. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
However, they very progress of modern medicine makes our emphasis here all the more necessary, since this progress increases the mystification and authoritarianism that people have thrust upon the medical profession the medical profession has assumed all too readily. When I lived in a large metropolis, I found myself, when I needed medical service, phoning my own physician to find out which specialist I should go to. The “laying on of hands,” which has classically been central in the healing profession, has now become all too often the laying on of techniques. Since assuming the role of priest, as doctors began to do as early as Paracelsus in the sixteenth century, the tendency has been for people to see in the physician the god who has power over life and death. However, as long as physicians are made god on people’s conscious level, they will also be made the devil on an unconscious level. The rash of malpractice suits in the last fifty years shows the disillusionment and rage that people feel as this belief in the devil begins to surface. When I told my present physician of my intention to work also with an acupuncturist on the problem of tachycardia, he well remarked, “Western medicine is on the verge of a great revolution.” He did not mean in the sense of new discoveries in techniques. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
The doctor meant, rather, a revolutionary change in the philosophical and ethical basis of medicine, a change in the cultural context in which doctors operate. This revolution is seen most dramatically in the incursion of Eastern insights into Western medical treatment. The complete acceptance of philosophy involves a complete reordering of a mortal’s life. One’s conduct will be motivated by new purpose which will themselves be the result of one’s new values. One will stop acting impulsively and start acting rationally. However, in actual practice we find that the acceptance of philosophy is never so complete as this. The individual will bring it into a part of life but not into the whole of their lives. It is only gradually absorbed and the ideals which are sought to be realized are only gradually set up. Those whom embark on the quest must pay for their journey with personal self-denial and unceasing self-struggle. Knowledge of the higher laws, consciousness of the higher self, bring special obligations. To apply them carries new responsibilities to live according to them. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
There will be murmurings, complaints, and disheartenment; there may even be short or long lapses; but one will understand sooner or later that one will have to go through with this quest till the very end. Something that is certainly not one’s ordinary self drives one to do so. Indeed, one power of choice or freedom of will have become irrelevant to this particular matter. Is there any word from the Lord? This is a question asked by mortals in all periods of history. It has been asked by kings in moments of danger. They asked it of priests and prophets. It has been asked by people in all ages and places in times of unrest. They asked it of extraordinary men and women, often of those considered to be abnormal, of ecstatics and hysterics. It has been asked by individuals in moments of great personal decisions. They asked it of holy Scriptures which should give a special word to them, from saints and inner voices. What about ourselves? Have we never asked for a word from the Lord? Many, certainly, will answer with a definite “No.” They will tell us that they always decided for themselves, using their own reasonable judgment, based on experience, knowledge, and intelligence. Perhaps they impress us. Perhaps we are ashamed to confess that sometimes we have asked for a word from the Lord. However, let us wait with out answer until we have found out what these words mean. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
We should not be misled by the phrase, “word from the Lord.” It sounds as if we turned to a Heavenly authority after all others, including the authority of reason, have failed. It sounds as if we asked the Lord of providence to give us for a moment a glimpse into what he plans for us, individually and in history. However, such a favor is not granted. The answers given by seers, ecstatics, books and inner voices are mostly ambiguous, open to different interpretations, so that we would have to ask for a second Divine word to interpret the first, and so on indefinitely. Or, these answers are clear and agree with the best wisdom we can have without them. Therefore, I repeat: Let us not be misled by the phrase “word from the Lord.” It is not an oracle-word telling us what to do or to expect. Then what is it? It is the voice from another dimension than that in which we ordinarily live. It cuts into the dimension of things and events which we call our World. It does not help us to manage things within this dimension more successfully than before. It does not add to our knowledge of the factors which influence a situation, it does not remove the responsibility for our decisions. It does something else. It elevates the situation in which we have to decide, into the light of a new dimension, the dimension of that which is ultimately important and infinitely significant and for which we use the word “Divine.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
So it was in the case of the king Zedekiah and of the false prophets with whom Jeremiah had to fight. The king came to Jeremiah in a hopeless situation, in a situation into which he had brought himself and his people through guilt and error and disregard of the warnings of the prophet. He was supported in his wrong decisions by nationalistic politicians who called themselves prophets without having received a word from God. They did not interpret the situation of Judah in the midst of threatening empires in its seriousness. They lacked the realism which is the quality of true prophetism. They were not able to look beyond political chances and military calculations. And so disaster attempts to get a consoling or helping word from the prophet. However, he did not get it. Out of his prison Jeremiah tells him the only thing he did not want to hear: You shall be delivered into the hand of the king of Babylon! God will not say you! And the king felt: So it is! He did not slay the prophet of doom, as present-day dictators or nationalistic mobs would do. On the contrary, he helped him out of his miserable prison. However, he did not do anything to change the situation. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
It was too late for this politically and psychologically, and the threat of the prophet, the word he has received from the Lord for Zedekiah, became a terrible reality. Yet it was spoken in vain. It has been remembered ever since, not as an interesting historical report but as an event in which the eternal gives ultimate meaning to an historical catastrophe. The many words from the Lord which are recorded in the Old Testament have the same quality. They are not promises of an omnipotent ruler replacing political or military strength. They are not advices of a Heavenly counselor, replacing intelligent human counsel. However, they are manifestations of something ultimate breaking into our existence with all its preliminary concerns and insights. They do not add something to our situation, but they add a dimension to the dimension in which we ordinarily live. The word from the Lord is the word which speaks out of the depth of our situation. It is, one could say, the deepest meaning of the situation, of every situation which comes to us in such words. It is also the depth of our own situation that speaks to us when we receive a word from the Lord. Let us imagine an hour in which we have to make an important decision, but it the choice of a vocation, be it the choice of a mate for life. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
We know most of the factors. Nevertheless, we cannot decide. The anxiety of the possible consequences in each of them. We ask friends, counsellors; we seek for counsel in ourselves. However, the anxiety of having to decide increases. And a longing grows in our souls, a longing for something that liberates us from the anxiety of the possible and gives us the courage toward the real. It is the question of our text: Is there a word from the Lord? And perhaps an answer has been received. However, it was not an oracle-word pointing to the right vocation to choose, or the right man or woman to join with. It was a voice out of the depth of our situation, elevating our concrete problems into an ultimate perspective. In doing so, it probably has devaluated some factors determining our decision and has stressed others. Or it has left the balance of possibilities unchanged, but has given us the courage to make a decision with all the risks of a decision, including error, failure, guilt. The word from the Lord, the voice out of the depth of our situations, ends the anxiety of the possible and gives the courage to affirm the real with its many questionable elements. Some of you may say: If this is what “word from the Lord” means, how can it help me in moments of decision? However, would you really want me to tell you where to turn for an oracle which would liberate you from the burden of decision? #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
Certainly, that which is weak in you would like it. However, that which is strong in you would reject it. The Lord from whom you derive a word wants you to decide for yourselves. He does not offer you a safe way. You may be wrong in your decision. However, if you realize that in you would reject it. The Lord from whom you derive a word wants you to decide for yourselves. He does not offer you a safe way. You may be wrong in your decision. However, if you realize that in relation to God mortals are always wrong. Your wrong may turn out to be right. If in the presence of the eternal you risk defeat, through your very defeat a word from the Lord has come to you. One aspect of the 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 scriptures teach us, “For your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him, and God “knoweth all things, for all things are present before God’s eyes.” The prophet Mormon is an example of this. He did not live to see the results of his work. Yet he understood that the Lord was carefully leading him along. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
When he felt inspired to include the small plates of Nephi with this record, Mormon wrote: “And I do this for a wise purpose; for thus is whispereth me, according to the workings of the Spirit of the Lord which is in me. And now, I do not know all things; but the Lord knoweth all things which are to come; wherefore, he worketh in me to do according to his will.” Although Mormon did not know of the future loss of the 116 manuscript pages, the Lord did and prepared a way to overcome that obstacle long before it occurred. The Father is aware of us, knows our needs, and will help us perfectly. Sometimes that help is given in the very moment or at least soon after we ask for divine help. Sometimes our most earnest and worthy desires are not answered in the way we hope, but we find that God has greater blessings in store. And sometimes our righteous desires are not granted in this life. Sometimes God has a greater blessing prepared for us than we initially anticipated. And sometimes our righteous petitions to God will not be granted in this life. Faith also includes trust in God’s timing. We have the assurance that his own way and in his own time, Heavenly Father will bless us and resolve all of our concerns, injustices, and disappointments. “And thus the Lord did pour out his blessings upon this land, which was choice above all other lands,” Ether 9.20. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
I roamed with my mortal attendants through a paradise of material wealth, claiming everything that I wanted. Couches and chairs, china and sliver plate, drapery and statuary—all things were mine for the taking. And in my mind I transformed the castle where I had grown up as more and more good were carried out to be crated and shipped south immediately. To little kids I sent toys of which they had never dreamed—tiny ships with real sails, dollhouses of unbelievable craft and perfection. I learned form each object I touched. And there were moments when all the color and texture became too lustrous, too overpowering. I wept inwardly. After all, where did I spend my time now? At the grandest theaters in Paris. I had the finest seats for the ballet and the opera, for the dramas of Moliere, Corneille, and Racine—it was in tragedy that two of the three great dramatist of seventeenth-century France excelled. I was hanging about before the footlights gazing up at the great actors and actresses. I had suits made in every color of the rainbow, jewels on my fingers, hairstyles of the latest fashion, shoes with diamond buckles as well as gold souls. And I had eternity to be drunk on the poetry I was hearing, drunk on the singing and the sweep of the dancer’s arms, drunk on the organ throbbing in the great cavern of the Winchester Mansion and drunk on the chimes that counted out the hours to me, drunk on the snow falling soundlessly on the gardens of the estate. And each night I was becoming less wary among mortals, more at ease with them. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
My God—What Have We Done?
Torches blazed ahead, and over a chorus of mourful wails, there came other cries, distant but filled with pain. Yet something beyond these puzzling cries had caught my attention. Amid all the foulness, I sensed a mortal was near. It was Nicolas and he was alive and I could hear him, the warm, vulnerable current of his thoughts mingled with his scent. And something was terribly wrong with his thoughts. They were chaos. Also, when I exercised my freedom and vice versa the anxiety engulfed me like a tidal wave. The anxiety came in the person of this figure whom I identified as my enemy-friend, a kind of figurative devil. It is the anxiety that comes, in varying intensity, whenever one leaps into the field of new possibilities, whenever one moves into the area of new idea or new compositions in music or a new style in art. It comes after such subconscious thoughts as “Ah, there is a new vision—nobody ever painted a scene like this before.” Then there comes the feeling “Do I want to venture out so far?” And I remind myself of all the dangers in venturing into that no man’s land. In such situations the person finds oneself adjuring oneself to calm down, not to get too excited, when getting excited in the sense of becoming inspired is exactly what, on the deepest level, one wants. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Freedom and anxiety are two sides of the coin—there is never one without the other. The anxiety is part and parcel of the vision or an idea that, in the particular form it comes to us, no one has ever thought of before. This anxiety—or dread, if we wish to translate angst that way—is a function of the freedom of imagination we must exercise in order to get any idea of significance. The dread comes with the new possibility and the risk that this leap requires. We might, like the scientists who split the atom, break through into a new land, where the usual mooring places by which we have oriented ourselves no longer even exist. Hence, the sense of alienation and bewilderment—and even the experience of intense human aloneness—that such a breakthrough brings in its train. I am told that when the scientists stood behind their glass barrier near Los Alamos and saw the first atomic explosion, the faces of a number of them turned white. One cried aloud, “My God, what have we done?” There is a rational explanation for this anxiety. We must keep in mind that the anxiety comes not from the possibility that the new idea or discovery might be wrong and useless (then it can simply be discarded), but from the possibility that it might be true, as it was, for example, with atomic fission or with Armin van Buuren’s new idea about musical harmonies. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Then one’s colleagues, the professors at one’s university, will be jolted, will be required to change their lecture notes because the possibility that there are new truths has been proven to be correct. This causes upset, which was very great indeed with the splitting of the atom. Or if one is a Nicolas Copernicus with new theory that the Earth moves around the Sun, or a Karl Marx with a radically new approach to the economic life of humankind, the uproar that accompanies the shaking of the foundations will be that much more catastrophic. Although the examples above are of great mortals, we are illustrating something that we all experience, though to a lesser degree. When he or she exercises the freedom to move out into the real World of possibility, every human being experiences this anxiety. Only by not venturing—that is, by surrendering our freedom, we can escape the anxiety. I am convinced that many people never become aware of their most creative ideas since their inspirations are blocked off by this anxiety before the ideas even reach the level of consciousness. A pressure toward conformism infuses every society. One function of any group or social system is to preserve homeostasis, to keep people in their usual positions. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The danger of freedom to the group is possessed exactly at that point: that the nonconformist will upset the homeostasis, will use one’s freedom to destroy the tired and true ways. Sokratis was condemned to drink hemlock because, so the good citizens of Athens believed, he taught false daimones (moral philosophy that defines right action as that which lead to the well-being of the individual, thus holding good behavior as an essential value) to the youth of Athens. Jesus was crucified because he upset the accepted religion of his day. Joan of Arc heard voices and was burned at the stake. Aaliyah choose the material and images she liked best and perished in a mysterious plane crash. These extreme examples are of person whose idea later become the cornerstones of our civilization. However, the fact only confirms my point. The persons whose insights are too disturbing, who bring too much of the anxiety that accompanies freedom, are put to death by their own generation, which suffers the threat caused by the Earthquake of the news ideas. However, when their ideas are crystallized into the strict and rigid doctrines of the new age and there is no chance of the dead figures rising from their silent graves to disturb the peace a new, they are worshipped by subsequent generations. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
The prototype of the person who produces something new is found in Prometheus, who created fire—or, as the myth presents it, stole it from the gods—and gave it to humankind as the beginning of human civilization. No one envies his punishment in being chained to a mountainside, where an eagle would eat away at his liver all day. At night, the liver would grow back, and the same grisly process would begin all over again the next day. This accompanies his great act of defiance, which was one aspect of Prometheus’ personal freedom. The denying of the dizziness of freedom is shown in the phrase pure spontaneity. For no one can seek that without succumbing to the dreadful implications of freedom. Even John Lilly, in his experiencing pure spontaneity in one’s stimulus-free tank, describes the great dangers therein, and one’s own great anxiety in one’s experience hovering on the edge of nonbeing, death. One may envy one’s colleagues who claim to exist in pure spontaneity and who seem to be on a perpetual high. Yes, we may envy them, but we do not love them for that. We love them for their vulnerability—which means their accepting and owning the dizziness of their freedom, their destiny which always stalks their freedom. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The legend of Icarus presents a picture of a young man refusing to accept the dizziness, or the anxiety, of freedom. Icarus that day must have felt a sense of great adventure—to be the first person who could sail high and taste the ecstasy, the sheer freedom from the bonds of the Earth, with no limits at all. For this one afternoon he was completely subject, not limited even by the distant reaches of the sky. One could order one’s Universe as one wished, could live out one’s whim and desire born in one’s own imagination. Here, indeed, was pure spontaneity. No longer part of the World, no longer subject to the laws of Earth or its destiny or the requirements of community. What exhilaration there must have been in the young man’s heart! A great dream comes true, an experience of complete freedom, pure spontaneity at last. One needs only the self-preoccupation, the refusal to consider compromise. He is like humanists of previous decades who insisted that there was no evil they need bother to consider. Human kind had done such great things in the past; why could we not overcome any and all difficulties in the future? Icarus remained as spontaneous as a child and burst into the sea to drown not as a young man, but as a child. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
When they hear these truths concerning the inward life and Universal laws, how sad, how foolish that so many people turn their heads away in indifference, in apathy, and in inertia! They believe that, even if there were any truth in them, these ideas are only for a handful of dreamers, for an esoteric cult with nothing better to do with its times and thought than to entertain them. There does not seem to be any point of contact between these ideas and their own lives, no applicability to their personal selves, and hence, no importance in them at all. How gross this error, how great this blindness! The mystic’s knowledge is full of significance for every other mortal. The mystic’s discoveries are full of value for one. Mortal’s hope for a happier existence and need of faith in Universal meaning has led one to try so many wrong turnings which brought one only father from them, that it is understandable why cynicism or indifferentism should claim so many votaries. However, this is not yet the end result. The few who today have found both hope and need adequately satisfied are presages of what must happen to the others. Even those mortals who do not believe in God are unknowingly seeking to find him or waiting for him. Every mortal has within one this divine possibility. However, if one refuses to believe it, or puts one’s faith in a hard materialism, or fails to seek for it, it will remain only latent. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
It is the thought of attaining happiness in some way which induces mortals to commit most crimes, just as it is the thought of attaining truth which induces them to hold the most materialistic beliefs. Although they see both happiness and truth from a wrong angle and so are given this deceptive result, still the essential motivation of their lives is the same as that of the questers. The segregation in thought of a spiritual elite as being the only seekers is valid only for a practical view, not for an ultimate one. Like people who are visually impaired, they seek the unseen. Like mystics they want the unknow centre of their being, but the conscious mind does not yet share in this desire. Everything else they try must in the end fail them, since life itself fails them at death. Those who do not choose to tread the path of mysticism need not therefore tread the path of mysticism need not therefore tread the path of misunderstanding it. This wisdom is latent in the bad as well as the good mortal. Any moral condition will suffice as a starting point. Jesus spoke to sinners as freely as to those of better character. One’s words were not wasted as the sequence showed. Even to those who had committed great crimes, as they as they repent and understand what repentance entails, Jesus promised salvation. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Was it for the sake of a small withdrawn spiritual elite that Jesus walked in Galilees, that Buddha wandered afoot across India, that Sokratis frequented the Agora in Athens? There is hope for all, benediction for the poor and the rich, the good and the bad, for every mortal may come into this great light. However—some mortals may come more easily, more quickly, while others may drag their way. “If anyone among you thinks that one is wise in this age, let one become a fool that one may become wise. For the wisdom of this World is folly with God,” reports 1 Corinthians 3.18-19. When a speaker in a morning chapel service used this as his text, I got a written question in class: “What do you think about this morning’s sermon?” And this was the implication: How can philosophy stand in view of Paul’s deprecating words? I want to answer by trying to interpret what I believe Paul means, not only in the passage above but in the whole context. At the end of his discussion he gives the key by saying: Let no one boast of mortals. For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the World or life or death or the present of the future, all are yours; and you are Christ’s and Christ is God’s. (I Corinthians 3.21-23.) #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Paul has asked, “Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the World?” And now he exclaims, “World and life and Apollos are yours.” This means that the wisdom of the World is ours also. How could it be otherwise? We could not even read Paul’s words without the wisdom of the World which enables us to understand ancient texts, which gives us the technical tool to spread the Christian message all over the Earth, which produces and sustains the political and educational and artistic institutions which serve and protect the Church. All this is ours. And even the different theologies are ours: the more dialectical one of Paul, the more ritualistic one of Peter, the more apologetic one of Apollos. There is only one type of theology which Paul dislikes—that which wants to monopolize the Christ and call itself the party of Christ. For each of these theologies wisdom of the World is needed; scribes are needed, debaters are needed, philosophers are needed, a language is needed to which everybody contributes. It is impossible to deny all this. However, it is possible to discredit through loose talk what one cannot avoid using at the same time. There is a deep dishonesty in the accusation against the use of historical research and philosophical thought in theology. In daily life one calls somebody dishonest who bring defamation upon those whom one uses. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
We should not commit this dishonesty in our theological work. And we cannot escape using the wisdom of this World. If we say “let us use a little of it, but not much in order to escape the dangers implied in it, this is no escape. This is certainly not what Paul means. The whole World is yours, he says, the whole life, present and future, not parts of it. These important words speak of scientific knowledge and its passion, artistic beauty and its excitement, politics and their use of power, eating and drinking and their joy, pleasures of the flesh and its ecstasy, family life and its warmth and friendship with its intimacy, justice with its charity, nature with its might and restfulness, the mortal-made World above nature, the technical World and its fascination, philosophy with its humility—daring only to call itself love of wisdom—and its profundity—daring to ask ultimate questions. In all of these things is wisdom of this World and power of this World and all these things are ours. They belong to us and we belong to them; we create them and they fulfill us. However, and this “but” of Paul’s is not one of those prepositions in which everything is taken back that was given before. The great preposition to the World which is ours gives both the foundation and the limit of the World that is ours: “And you are Christ’s,” namely, that Christ whose Cross is foolishness and weakness to the wisdom of the World. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
The wisdom of this World in all its forms cannot know God, and the power of this World with all its means cannot reach God. If they try it, they produce idolatry and are revealed in their foolishness which is the foolishness of idolatry. No finite being can attain the infinite without being broken as one who represented the World, and its wisdom and its power, was on the Cross. This is the foolishness and the weakness of the Cross which is ultimate wisdom and which is the reason that Christ is not another bearer of wisdom and power of this World but that he is God’s. The Cross makes him God’s. And out of this foolishness we win the wisdom to use what is our, the wisdom of the World, even philosophy. If it be unbroken, it controls us. If it be broken, it is ours. “Broken” does not mean reduced or emaciated or controlled, but it means undercut in its idolatic claim. Paul’s courage in affirming everything given, one’s openness towards the World, his sovereignty towards life should put to shame each of us as well as all our Churches. We are afraid to accept what is given to us: we are compulsive self-seclusion towards our World, we try to escape life instead of controlling it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
We do not behave as if everything were ours. And the Churches do so even less. The reason for this is that we and out Churches do not know as Paul did what it means to be Christ’s and because of beings Christ’s, to be God’s. Those who feel no call to develop themselves spiritually, no obligation to follow the quest, are nevertheless unwittingly doing both. Only, they are doing so at so sow and imperceptible a pace that they do not recognize the activity and the moment. All the experience of life are in the end intended to induce us to seek wholeheartedly for God. That is, to lead us to the very portal of the Quest. The vision of the tree of life shows us how the effects of casualness can lead us away from the covenant path. Consider that the rod of iron and the strait and narrow path, or the covenant path, led directly to the tree of lie, where all the blessings provided by our Savior and his Atonement are available to the faithful. If we are not careful in living our covenants with exactness, our casual efforts may eventually lead us into forbidden paths or to join with those who have already entered the great and spacious building. If not careful, we may even drown in the depths of a filthy river. “The Spirit of Christ is given to every mortal, that one may know good from evil and is sent forth by the power and gift of Christ; wherefore ye may know with a perfect know it is of God,” reports Moroni 7.16. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
The Universe Contemplates Us—In the End it Sinks Back into Mystery!
I blinked my eyes. I felt weary suddenly; it was almost a feeling of despair. And I thought confusedly, This is ridiculous, I never despair! Others do that, not me. I go on fighting no matter what happens. Always. Sometimes we find the specter of anxiety forcing its way into the picture time and time again. When a person is most vulnerable to anxiety, that is the moment of pause. It is the tremulous moment when we balance possible decisions, when we look forward with wonder and awe or with dread or fear of failure. The pause is the moment when we open ourselves, and the opening is our vulnerability to anxiety. When we spoke about listening to the silence, we noted that many people flee from silence because of the anxiety of the anxiety the silence brings. They perpetually seek the company of some noise or the television or radio even to the extent of carrying blaring portable sets with them on the streets or in the erstwhile peace of the parks. John Lilly found in his experiments in which people floated in his stimulus-free tank that silence, with its complete freedom, brings to many people more anxiety than they can bear. Who knows what devil may emerge out of the complete silence? Where are our familiar boundaries? #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
The members of John Cage’s audience at his famous concert of silence were required to absorb their own anxiety. There was no music to do it for them. People shrink from the quiet desperation that confronts them in periods of complete silence, fearing they will lose all ways of orienting themselves. In our technological society, we are moving toward periods of greater and greater leisure—in earlier retirement, for example—and superficially we welcome this prospective leisure. However, we find within ourselves a curious gnawing fear of something missing. What will we do with all this unfilled free time, this unplanned, unscheduled empty space? Does it not hang before us—O paradox of paradoxes! –like a great threat, the threat of emptiness, rather than the great boon we were seeking? Will our capacities, lying fallow, evaporate? Will we lose our abilities? Will we be blotted out in sleep for over a century like Lestat de Lioncourt? If there is nobody knowing at the door, will we lose our consciousness? Secretly, man of us interpret freedom as becoming nothing. And will we, in our now unhampered possibility, become simply no thing? This is a real and immediate source of anxiety, covered up and unadmitted though it generally is. Formless freedom, unstructured freedom without the limits of destiny, leaves human beings inert. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
At such times the pause takes over People do not know what to do, and they cry out for someone or something to organize them. Hence, organized play and planned leisure—which are really contradictions in terms. Thrown on their own resources, people may find themselves bankrupt since they have long gotten into the habit of ignoring their pauses. Let us consider again the illustration of a speaker receiving promptings and directions from the audience. Suppose, in one’s millisecond pauses, no such prompting comes. In anxiety over this possibility, some speakers choose to write out their lectures word for word, and then they can fall back on the printed page regardless of the promptings or lack thereof from the audience. However, in reading one’s speech the speaker has surrendered one’s opportunity for freedom, for the discovery of new ideas, for the adventure of exploring new frontiers, for the heady thrill of uncertainty. Thus, one chooses security over freedom, as the Grand Inquisitor so passionately adjured. However, such a choice exacts a serious price in self-consciousness, tension, and the loss of freedom. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Sometimes the anxiety that accompanies freedom is intermixed and confused with excitement. Once, while waiting (which is a form of pausing) at an airport for a person whom I knew only slightly and who was going to be my guest at my country farm for three days, I felt the excitement that always comes wit the anticipation of meeting a new person. However, this excitement merged back and forth into the anxiety that came as I asked myself in fantasy: What will two people do cooped up in an twelve room farm house for long? Will the intimacy become boring or scary? So I jotted down the following notes: When does excitement—for example, the constructive side of anxiety, which keeps life from being boring, keeps us spontaneous, stimulated, and alive—lead into destructive anxiety, which shuts out spontaneity, paralyzes, and blocks our freedom? Excitement, the risking of which is pleasurable, gives us the spirit of the chase, keeps us growing. This has a clear survival value. It remains excitement so long as I feel I can cope; I can retain a sense of some autonomy. When I cannot do this, it becomes destructive. Thus as long as we can experience “I can” and “I will,” we remain open, we experience our freedom, we preserve the power to experience new possibilities. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Does this anxiety always occur in the exercise of freedom? The answer to that depends on how one views life. If we follow Martin Heidegger and Paul Tillich, who conceive of life as a continuous dialectical tension between being and nonbeing, each of us engaged in every breath in preserving our own being against the threat of nonbeing, then we must answer “Yes.” In any case I prefer to keep the question on the level of consciousness. This would mean starting that while there is always some accompaniment of dizziness with freedom, we, as human beings, may not be aware of it since we have different points where we block it off, where we repress the dizziness temporarily or deny it altogether. All people are trying to find God, to feel his love and sense his peace. Those who are in flight from Worldly things do s consciously; those who are in pursuit of them do so unconsciously. Life compels no one to enter upon this conscious Quest, although it is leading everyone upon the conscious Quest. Even among the students of this teaching, not all are following the Quest, many are merely seeking for an intellectual understanding; their interest has been attracted and their curiosity aroused, but they have not felt called upon to go any farther. This may be due to inner weakness or to outer difficulties or both. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Such men and women do not have to pledge themselves to any moral tasks or mystical experiences. Nevertheless, their studies and reflections upon the teaching will not be without a certain value and will place them on an altogether different level from the unawakended herd which is bereft of such an interest. However, I a mortal’s mission requires one to know only one’s association with one’s cause and no real relation to any soul, no present encounter with God, so that everything around one becomes It and subservient to one’s cause? What about the saying of Napoleon, “I was never truly my own master but was always ruled by circumstances.” Was not that legitimate? Is this phenomenon of experiencing and using no person? Indeed, this master of the age evidently did not now the dimension of the soul. The matter has been put well: all being was for him valore. Gently, he compared the followers who denied one after his fall with Peter; but there was nobody whom one could have denied, for there was nobody whom he could have denied, for there was nobody whom he recognized as a being. He was the demonic spirit for the millions and did not respond; to the soul he responded be calling it an It, he responded fictitiously on the personal level—responding only in his own sphere, that of one’s cause, and only with his deeds. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
This is the elementary historical barrier at which the basic word of association loses its reality, the character of reciprocity: the demonic spirit for whom nobody can become true soul. In addition to the person and the ego, to the free and the arbitrary mortal—not between them—occurs in fateful eminence in fateful times: ardently, everything flames toward one while one oneself stands in a cold fire; a thousand relations reach out toward one but none issues from one. One participates in no actuality, but others participate immeasurably in one as in an actuality. To be sure, one views the beings around one as so many machines capable of different achievements that have to be calculated and used for the cause. However, that is also how one views oneself (only one can never cease experimenting to determine one’s own capacities, and yet never experiences their limits). One treats oneself, too, as an It. This the individual is saying one is not vitally empathic, not full. Much less does it feign these qualities (like the they are the foundation of the I of the modern ego). One does not even speak of oneself, one merely speaks on one’s own behalf. The I spoken and written by one is the required subject of the sentences that convey one’s statements and orders—no more and no less. It lacks subjectivity; neither does it have a self-consciousness that is preoccupied with being-that-way; and least of all does it have any delusions about its own appearance. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
I am the clock that exists and does not know itself: thus one oneself formulated one’s fatefulness, the actuality of this phenomenon and the inactuality of the soul, after one had been separated from one’s cause; for it was only then that one could, and had to, think and speak of oneself and recollect one’s soul which appeared only then. What appears is not mere subject; neither does it reach subjectivity: the magic spell broken, but unredeemed, it finds expression in the terrible word, as legitimate as it is illegitimate: The Universe contemplates Us! The end it sinks back into mystery. Who after such a step and such a fall, would dare to claim that this mortal understood one’s tremendous, monstrous mission—or that one misunderstood it? What is certain that the age for which the demonic mortal who lives without a present has become master and model will misunderstand one. It fails to see that what holds sway here is destiny and accomplishment, not the lust for and delight in power. It goes into ecstasies over the commanding brow and has no inkling of the signs inscribed upon this forehead like digits upon the face of a clock. One tries studiously to imitate the way one looked at others, without any understanding of one’s need and necessitation, and one mistakes the objectivity severity of this I for fermenting self-awareness. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
The word “I” remains the shibboleth of humanity. Napoleon spoke it without the power to relate, but he did speak it as the I of an accomplishment. Those who exert themselves to copy this, merely betray the hopelessness of their own self-contradiction. What is that: self-contradiction? When mortals do not test a priori of relation in the World, working out and actualizing the innate soul in what one encounters, it turns inside. Then it unfolds through the unnatural, impossible object, the I—which is to say that it unfolds where there is no room for it to unfold. Thus the confrontation within the self comes int being and this cannot be relation, presence, the current of reciprocity, but only self-contradiction. Some mortals may try to interpret this as a relation, perhaps one that is religious, in order to extricate themselves from the horror of their Doppelganger: they are bound to keep rediscovering the deception of any such interpretation. Here is the edge of life. What is unfulfilled as here escaped into the mad delusion of some fulfillment; now it gropes around in the labyrinth and get lost ever more profoundly. When mortals are overcome by the horror of the alienation between I and World, at times, it occurs to one that something might be done. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Imagine that at some dreadful midnight you lie there, tormented by a waking dream: the bulwarks have crumbled and the abysses scream, and you realize in the midst of this agony that life is still there and I must merely get through it—but how? How? Thus feels mortals in the hours when one collects oneself: overcome by horror, pondering, without direction. And yet one may know the right direction, deep down in the unloved knowledge of the depths—the direction of return that leads through sacrifice. However, he rejects this knowledge; what is mystical cannot endure the artificial midnight Sun. One summons thought in which one places, quite rightly, much confidence: thought is supposed to fix everything. After all, it is the lofty art of thought that it can paint a reliable and practically credible picture of the World. Thus mortals say to one’s thought: “Look at the dreadful shape that lies over there with those cruel eyes—is she not the one which with whom I played long ago? Do you remember how she used to laugh at me with these eyes and how good they were then? And now look at my wretched soul—I will admit it to you: it is empty, and whatever I put into myself, experience as well as use, does not penetrate to this cavern. Will not you fix things between her and me so that she relents and I get well again?” #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
And thought, ever obliging and skillful, paints with its accustomed speed a series—nay, two series of pictures on the right and the left wall. Here is (or rather: happens, for the World pictures of thought are reliable motion pictures) the Universe. From the whirl of the stars emerges the small Earth, from the teeming on Earth emerges small mortals, and now history carries one forth through the ages, to preserve in rebuilding the anthills of the cultures that crumble under its steps. Beneath this series of pictures is written: “One and all.” On the other wall happens the soul. A female figure spins the orbits of all stars and the life of all creatures and the whole of World history; all is spun with a single thread and is no longer called stars and the life of all creatures and the whole of World history; all is spun with a single thread and is no longer called stars and creatures and World but feeling and representations or even living experiences and states of the soul. And beneath this series of pictures is written: “One and all.” Henceforth, when mortals are for once overcome by the horror of alienation and the World fills one with anxiety, one looks up (right or left, as the case may be) and see a picture. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Then one sees that the soul is contained in the World, and that there is really no I, and this the World cannot harm the I, and one calms down; or one sees that the World is contained in the I, and that there really is no World, and thus the World cannot harm the I, and one calms down. And when mortals are overcome again by the horror of alienation and the I fills one with anxiety, one looks up and sees a picture; and whichever one sees, it does not matter, either the empty I is stuffed full of World or it is submerged in the flood of the World, and one calms down. However, the moment will come, and it is near, when mortals overcome by horror, looks up and in a flash sees both pictures at once. And one is seized by a deeper horror. Shall we say that all humans are traveling on this quest of God but most humans do so unconsciously and unwillingly? For then the person technically called a quester simply differs from other persons by one’s awareness of the journey, the demands in makes upon one, and one’s willingness to co-operate in satisfying demands. Mortals unconsciously seeks one’s freedom and enlightenment, as one consciously seeks one’s welfare and happiness. However, there is a faceless sinister, sarcastic, evil presence that one can sense sometimes. It plants thoughts and puts on demonic plays to cause worry and fear. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
As the influences of the World increasingly embrace the evil, we must strive with all diligence to stay firmly on the path that leads us safely to our Saviour. Cries and howls continue. A new anthem of curses upon those who break the sacred laws, blasphemed, provoke the wrath of God and Stand. They are pulling on the gates and lower windows. They are doing stupid things like throwing rocks at the wall. It I because God is hidden in all creatures that all creatures are searching all the time for God. This remains just as true even though in their ignorance they usually mistake the object of their search and believe that it is something else. Only on the quest does this search attain self-consciousness. The uninformed mortal is blind to the work of spiritual evolution which goes on within one and consequently thwarts and obstructs it unwittingly. The informed mortal sees the work and co-operates with it consciously. The blessing of feasting upon the words of Christ are powerful and life changing. The words of Christ will profoundly touch hearts and open the eyes of those who do not see him. “Ye must press forward with a steadfastness in Christ, having a perfect brightness of hope, and a love of God and of all mortals, animals and other living and non-living beings. Wherefore, if ye shall press forward, feasting up the word of Christ, and endure to the end, behold, thus saith the Father: Ye shall have eternal life,” reports 2 Nephi 31.20. In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Nobody Does it Without Carrying Scars in One’s Soul One’s Whole Life
I was enchanted by the World of rock music—the way the singers could scream of good and evil, proclaim themselves angels of devils, and mortals would stand up and cheer. Sometimes they seemed the pure embodiment of madness. And yet it was technologically dazzling, the intricacy of their performance. It was barbaric and cerebral in a way that I do not think the World of ages past has ever seen. Also there was something vampiric about rock music. It must have sounded supernatural even to those who do not believe in the supernatural. I mean the way the electricity could stretch a single note forever; the way harmony could be layered upon harmony until you felt yourself dissolving in the sound. So eloquent of dread it was, this music. The World just did not have it in any form before. Since personal freedom is a venture down paths we have never traversed before, we can never know ahead of time how the venture will turn out. We leap into the future. Where will we land? With freedom one experiences a dizziness, a feeling of giddiness, a sense of vertigo, giddiness, dread—are expressions of the anxiety that accompanies freedom like its shadow. Sometimes a patient in therapy will wryly smile and say, “When I am mad at you, I think I was better off when I was neurotic—then I could go along in only one groove.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
I say “wryly” because if he really believed this, he would not be in therapy in the first place since the purpose of therapy is precisely to take one out of the rigid grooves, the narrow, compulsive trends, which are blocks to freedom. This gives the person a sense of release. However, it is a freedom that brings anxiety. Anxiety is potentially present whenever we are free; freedom is oriented toward anxiety and anxiety toward freedom. Anxiety is the reality of freedom as a potentiality before this freedom has materialized. For freedom is possibility, and who is to forecast what the end result of any possibility may be? Dostoevsky’s Grand Inquisitor saw this clearly: “Nothing has ever been more insupportable for a mortal and a human in society than freedom. Mortals are tormented by no greater anxiety than to find someone quickly to whom one can hand over that gift of freedom with which the ill-fated creature is born.” Freedom is a burden because it brings anxiety in its wake; and the Grand Inquisitor sought to shield people from the paralyzing aspects of anxiety by robbing them of its positive aspects—chiefly, freedom. Requiring the surrender of their freedom, he removed the stimulus to invent new forms, new styles, new ideas—in short, new possibilities. Now, as he insisted, men and women are “vile, weak creatures,” “slaves by nature,” “base creatures.” He is surely logical: if you take away freedom, you make people into the base, weak, vile salves the Grand Inquisitor describes. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
It is helpful to keep in mind that anxiety, like dizziness, can be both constructive and destructive. The constructive aspect is stimulating and gives one energy and zest; anxiety is a teacher that, since we carry it inwardly, can never be avoided. Anxiety illuminates experiences that we would otherwise run away from. Civilization is the result of anxiety in that cavemen were forced to invent thinking in order to cope with the saber-toothed tiger and the bison and other animals, which were stronger in tooth and nail and would have exterminated the human race. The anxiety that comes with excessive freedom can also be destructive in that it can paralyze us, isolate us, send us into panic; and when repressed, it may lead to cardiac ailments and other psychosomatic illnesses. These two aspects of anxiety are parallel to constructive and destructive stress. If one lives with any sense of adventure, every person must bear constructive stress; but destructive stress is the excessive tension we see on the modern assembly lines which can tear the human being to pieces. This is why personal freedom is fascinating and the most prized of all human conditions. However, because it is inseparable from anxiety, it is dangerous and understandably dreaded at the same time. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The longer I live and the more I observe in the lives of others, the more numerous becomes the illustrations of higher laws—the factuality of righteousness and the universality of the Quest. This is only as it should be for both are parts of the World-Idea. Thought and action are reflected back by choices and what the consequences of our choices are. They can lead to corruption, or to eternal life. “I have set before you life and death, blessing and cursing; therefore choose life, that both you and your descendants may live,” reports Deuteronomy 30.19. Everything in life goes exactly according to what is written in God’s Word. There are no exceptions. This is the law that affects everyone, whether a believe or a non-believer. You will reap what you sow. All corruption that is in the World comes from lusts. Let no one make the mistake of separating out the quest from everyday life. It is Life itself! Questers are not a special group, a labeled species, which one does or does not join, but are all humanity. This is not merely a matter for a small elite interested in spiritual self-help. It is a serious truth important to every mortal everywhere. The inability to measure up to these ideals does not carry a stigma. All mortals at this level come to Earth with their imperfections. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
All mortals seek for truth either consciously and deliberately or unconsciously and blindly, but they can seek only according to their capacity and ability, circumstances and preparedness. It is not a question whether questers are happier than non-questers—for that is an individual personal matter: the division itself is an artificial one. The ascent to Consciousness is for all mortals, not for a few only. Humankind is so near to God and yet so far away from God! Every fresh day is a fresh call from God to mortals. “Then he went home; and the crowd came together again, so that they could not even eat. And when his friends heard it, they went out to seize him; for they said, ‘He is beside himself,’” reports Mark 3.19-21. It is there in all, whether it be latent or patent, this impulse in each mortal to improve and better oneself into a person of worth. Ultimately it develops, in this body or a later one, into the aspiration to transcend oneself. The divine soul dwells in every mortal. Therefore, if only one will apply the faculties one possesses, every mortal may find it. “And his mother and his brothers came; and standing outside they sent to him and called him. And a crowd was sitting about him; and they said to him, ‘Your mother and your brothers are outside, asking for you.’ And he answered, ‘Who are my mother and my brothers?’ And looking around on those who sat about him, he said, ‘Here are my mother and my brothers! Whoever does the will of God is my brother, and sister, and mother,’” reports Mark 3.31-35. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
For most of those who go away to a university to study, it is not the first time that they leave the home of their parents. However, for all of them it is an important step on their own independent way of life. Every step on this road brings them farther away from the place from which they came, the family into which they were born. The first moves towards independence occur very early in life—as exemplified in the story of the twelve-year-old Jesus in the temple. And none of these moves is without pain and tragic guilt—as indicated in the anxiety of the parents of Jesus and the reproaches they made to him. However, only after Jesus has begun his public activities the depth of the gap between him and his family becomes fully manifest. In the story which we have just read and which is recorded by the three Gospels, Jesus uses the family relations as symbols for a relation of a higher order for the community of those who do the will of God. Something unconditional breaks into the conditional relations of the natural family and creates a community which is as intimate and as strong as the family relations, and at the same time infinitely superior to it. The depth of this gap is emphasized in the attempt of one’s family to seize him and to bring him home because of his extraordinary behavior which makes them believe he is out of his mind. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
And the gap is strongly expressed in Christ’s saying that one who loves father and mother more then him cannot be his disciple, words even sharpened in Luke’s version, where everyone is rejected by one who does not hate father and mother and wife and children and brothers and sisters—and one’s own life. All these words cut with divine power through the natural relation between the members of the family whenever these relations claim to be ultimates. They cut through the bondage of age-old traditions and conventions and their unconditional claims; they cut through the consecration of the family and ties by sacramental or other laws which make them equal to the ties between those who belong to the new reality in the Christ. The family is no ultimate! The family relations are not unconditional relations. The consecration of the family is not a consecration for the final aim of mortal’s existence. We can imagine the revolutionary character of such sayings in face of the religions and cultures of humankind. We can hardly measure their disturbing character in face of what has happened century after century within the so-called Christian nations—with the support of the Christian churches who could not stand the radical nature of the Christian message in this as in other respects. However, in spite of its radicalism, the Christian message does not request this dissolution of the family. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
The Christian message affirms the family and limits its significance. Each mortal must someday take this quest. This is as certain as the Sun’s rising, for it is not said on high authority that we can live by bread alone? The work of the opening up to one’s inner being, and to its best, not worst, side is both the duty and the destiny for every mortal. One may evade the first and retain the second for a time but cannot do so for all time. What the quester does of one’s own free choice today, the generality of mortals will be obliged to do tomorrow. The hour of awakening must come to every mortal, even if it has to come at the hour of deathl and when it does it will be with utter amazement and stupefaction at best, or else with all the force of an explosive shock. For one is a member of the human species, not the animal one, and shares its destiny. Jesus takes up the prophecy of Micah, that in the last days “brother will deliver up brother to death, and the father his child, and the children will rise against parents and have them put to death.” It belongs to periods in which the demonic powers get hold of the World, that the family community is turned into its opposite. However, when Jesus uses this prophecy, he adds, “And you will be hated by all for my name’s sake.” The same words which point to the demonic disruption of the family are used to describe its inescapable divine disruption. This is the profound ambiguity of the Biblical teaching. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Now let us look into our own situation. We cannot cut the ties with our family without being guilty. However, the question is: Is it willfulness which demonically disrupts the family communion, or is it the step toward independence and one’s own understanding of the will of God which divinely liberates us from the bondage to our family? We never know the answer with certainty. We must risk tragic guilt in becoming free from father and mother and brothers and sisters. And we know today better than many generations before us what that means, how infinitely difficult it is and that nobody does it without carrying scars in one’s soul one’s whole life. For it is not only the real father or mother or brother or sister from whom we must become free in order to come into our own. It is something much more refined, the image of them, which from our earliest childhood has impregnated our souls. The real father, the real mother may let us go free, although this is by no means the rule in Christian families. However, even if they have the wisdom to do it, their images can prevent us from doing what the will of God is in a concrete situation, namely, to do acts in which love, power, and justice are united. Their image may prevent us from love by subjection to law. It may prevent us from having power by weakening our personal center. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Their image may also prevent us from exercising justice by blinding us to a concrete situation and its demands. And the same thing happens with the images of brothers and sisters. Although it is easier to become free from them in an external sense, they may hiddenly produce decisions which determine for the worse whole periods of our lives. However, do not mistake me! Opposition and revolt are not yet freedom. They are unavoidable stages on the way to freedom. However, if they are not overcome as much as the early dependence must be overcome, they create another servitude. How can this happen? Certainly, in pathological cases, psychotherapy is needed, as Jesus himself acted as a healer, bodily and mentally. However, more is necessary, namely, the dependence on that which gives ultimate independence, the image of that which makes it possible to hate and to love every life, including our own. No human problem and certainly not the family problem can be solved on a finite level. This is true although we know that even the image of God can be distorted by the images of father and mother, so that its saving power is almost lost. This is the danger of all religion and a serious limit for our religious work. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
However, it is not a limit for God, who again and again break through the images we have made of him, and who has shown in Christ that he is not only father and mother to us, but also child, and that therefore in hum the inescapable conflicts of every family are overcome. The Father who is also child is more than a father as he is more than a child. Therefore we can pray to the Father in Heaven without transferring our hostility against the father image to him. Because God has become child, it is possible for us to say the Our Father. How dissonant the ego sounds! When it issues from tragic lips, tense with come self-contradiction that they try to old back, it can move us to great pity. When it issues from chaotic lips that savagely, heedlessly, unconsciously represents contradiction, it can make us shudder. When the slips are vain and smooth, it sounds embarrassing or disgusting. Those who pronounce the name of God, wallowing in the soul, uncover the shame of the World spirit that has been debased to mere spirituality. The Quest cannot be evaded. In the end all must come to it; otherwise they will be pulled or pushed along it however unwilling or reluctant they may be. More and more people are moving, albeit at a slow pace and with suspicious minds, into mystical teaching—but they are moving. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Nature is trying to teach mortals to equilibrate themselves. The sooner they learn this lesion, the better for their happiness and success. How beautiful and legitimate the vivid and empathic God sounds! Prayer is our infinite conversation, and the air of conversation is present on all its ways, even before our judges, even in the final hour on Earth. In prayer we actually go out in faith and toward God. Thus, we stand together with the holy Trinity in actuality and are never severed from it. Even solitude cannot spell forsakenness, and when the human World falls silent for one, one his one’s soul say You. How beautiful and legitimate the full armor of God is. It is the pure intercourse with nature. Nature yields to it and speaks ceaselessly with it; she reveals her mysteries to it and yet does not betray her mystery. The soul believers in her and says to the rose: “So it is You”—and at once shares the same actuality with the rose. Hence, when it returns to itself, the spirit of actuality stays with it; the vision of the Sun clings to the blessed eye that recalls its own likeness to the Sun, and the friendship of the elements accompanies mortals into the calm of dying and rebirth. Thus, accepting God as adequate, true, and pure resounds through the ages. And to anticipate and choose an image from the realm of unconditional relation: how powerful, even overpowering, is our Saviour, and how legitimate to the point of being a matter of course! #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
For it is the unconditional relation in which mortals call the soul of the Holy Ghost has become unconditional for one. If detachment ever touches one, it is surpassed by association, and it is from this that one speaks to others. In vain we seek to reduce our spirituality to something that derives its power from itself, nor can we limit our soul to anything that dwells outside us. Both would once again deactualize the actual, the present relations. Everyone can seek God and then become righteous; everyone can say Father and then becomes son or daughter: actuality abides. The multitudes who people our planet will eventually travel the same course that the philosophic aspirant now travels. However, they will do it slowly through the lapse of numerous centuries; they will move lightly, imperceptibly, and without the intense pressures one puts upon oneself. Mortal are made in God’s image in the sense that one latently possesses certain Godlike qualities. However, these have to be developed by evolution which can be meticulous, through the path of normal experience, or swift through Quest. “Never be weary of good works, but be meek and humble in heart; for such shall find rest to their souls,” Alma 37.34. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Wide Unclasp the Tables of Their Thoughts—These Same Thoughts, People, this Little World
It was time to go out, time to test my powers. After all there had not been a case of witchcraft in a hundred years, the last that I knew f being the trial of La Voisin, a fortune-teller, bunt alive in the time of Louis the Sun King. All the houses, built by Cresleigh Homes in Rocklin, California, looked like dollhouses to me in their completeness. They reminded me of baby Winchester Mansions. Perfect collections of toys with their dainty little wooden chairs and polished mantelpieces, mended curtains and well-scrubbed floors. I saw all this as one who had never been a part of life, gazing lovingly at the simplest details. A starched white apron on its hook, worn boots on the hearth, a pitcher beside a bed. And the people . . . oh, the people were marvels. I was reflecting on my time at the Winchester Mansion, after the passing of Mrs. Winchester in 1922, we opened one of the safes, and I was flabbergasted by what I saw there. The safe was crammed with gems and gold and silver. There were countless jeweled rings, diamond necklaces, ropes of pearls, plate and coins and hundreds upon hundreds of miscellaneous valuables. I ran my fingers lightly over the heap and then held up handfuls of it, gasping as the light ignited the red rubies, the green of the emeralds. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
I saw refractions of color of which I have never dreamed, and wealth beyond any calculation. It was the fabled Caribbean pirates’ chest, the proverbial king’s ransom. And it was mine now. More slowly I examined it. Scattered throughout were personal and perishable articles. Satin mask rotting away from their trimming of gold, lace handkerchiefs and bits of cloth to which were fixed pins and brooches. Here was a strip of leather harness hung with gold bells, a moldering bit of lace slipped through a ring, snuffboxes by the dozen, lockets on velvet ribbon. Had Mrs. Winchester been collecting this all her life? I lifted up a jewel-encrusted sword, far too heavy for these times, and a worn slipper saved perhaps for its rhinestone buckle. There were other objects scattered about in this treasure. Rosaries made up gorgeous gems, and they still had their crucifixes! I touched the small sacred images. Perplexity is leavened by extravagant Victorian beauty scattered along each crooked path of exploration in this 160-room catacomb. Regularly each night Mrs. Winchester dined in lonely splendor, table set with a $774,387.88 solid-gold dinner service. And each night she counted every piece as it was put away in one of the mansion’s six huge safes. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
I think I was on the verge of deceiving her, of creating some strong emanation of contentment with all the powers I had. I would tell mortal lies with immortal skills. I would start talking and talking and testing my every word to make it perfect. However, something happened in the silence. I do not think I stood still more than a moment, but something changed inside of me. An awesome shift took place. In one instant I saw a vast and terrifying possibility, and in that same instant, without question, I made up my mind. It had no words to it or scheme or plan. And I would have denied it had anyone questioned me at that moment. I would have said, “No, never farthest from my thoughts. What do you think I am, what sort of monster” . . . And yet the choice had been made. I understood something absolute. The relation between creativity and pause is as close as it is startling. Not only does one get one’s original ideas in the pause—Albert Einstein got his while shaving. Henri Poincare, French Mathematician, got his while walking by the sea; others get theirs in dreams at night—but the capacity to pause is woven all through the creative production itself. The pause is an active, nimble, often intense state, as when an Olympic diver, Jennifer Abel or Tom Daley, pauses at the end of the diving board until that precise hundredth of a second when every muscle is tensed in harmony. And at that instant one dives. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The creative person stands in a state of openness, heightened sensitivity, incubating the creative idea, with a sharpened readiness to grasp the creative impulse when it is born. The phrase “inviting the Muses,” which is a part of the occupation in the pause, is an active yearning, an imploring, the authenticity of which is demonstrated by the hours of hard work the creative person puts in before and after the insight. While writing this essay, I went to the nearby coast one Sunday hoping to do a sketch. Afterward, I wrote some notes about the experience: I walk about on the shore in a mood of readiness, openness, asking myself, Where is the scene that grasps me? This red cliff with that water behind it or that boulder with the other rocks in front of the ocean? I continue looking until I have the special feeling that a particular scene seizes me. I see it; and though I do not think of this consciously, I see it in a way that no one has ever seen it before. I think only: “This I like, this turns me on.” When I start painting: The colors flow into each other . . . my muscles react . . . I make this line going off in the direction, another great rock on the paper . . . the colors form almost as though they had their own plan in mind . . . the World is born anew in the painting. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Not only did no one ever see this scene before as I do now [everyone sees every scene differently] but I find a new picture coming to birth, new to me as well as others, in the flowing of the colors into each other, new in that the combination makes a different effect from what I have expected. We see how important are such terms as “readiness,” “openness.” In these active pauses, we see the work of destiny born in the unpredictable flowing of colors. Hence so much of creativity seems accidental. However, the artist, whether one be scientific inventor or painter or writer or what not, is the one who can most often put oneself in readiness for the “accident.” True, the picture comes out differently from what one expects. However, knowing one can never predict for the “lucky accident.” This means that “accident” is not the right term: rather, a myriad of different possibilities exist, and out of these one is born. Our capacity to appreciate is already a kind of creativity which shows the activity in the pause. Our appreciative listening to Mozart, Aaliyah, Bach, our concerned reading of Aeschylus, is our creative contribution. The listening and the seeing are what is important; hence, Frederick Franck in his book on Zen painting entitled it, very rightly, The Zen of Seeing. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Indeed, it takes listeners, actual or imaginary and partakes of the creative act by virtue of the fact that writing poetry or prose or music dramas would not be possible without a real or imagined audience, whether an author writes for people of one’s own century (like most of us) or for later centuries (like Soren Kierkegaard). The presence of the pause is very clear in Henri Matisse’s paintings in his use of space—which is a synonym for pause. Ben Shahn tells, in his description of creativity, of one day taking his daughter out to his studio with him to make a mock-up book out of one color, rejected it, pondered another, put it aside, and so on for half an hour. When they came back into the house, the little girl asked her mother, “Why can’t Daddy make up his mind?” Ben Shahn goes on to explain that the artist is the one who has the courage to pause, to be suspended for a certain duration in midair. And even though in our technological culture such doubts may appear on the surface to imply weakness, this pausing is really a sign of an inner richness of discriminatory powers. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
There is a phrase among artists, “negative space,” which stands for space not noticed by the usual viewer. On a Rorschach record, “negative space” is the white area surrounding the black or colored. Many people who take the Rorschach never notice or remark on the white spaced—it is simply “surrounding.” Those who do, who see many white spaced may be adjudged “stubborn” on the test because they are preoccupied with the opposite to what most people point out. This is an interesting commentary on the conformist tendencies in our culture to see artist and musicians as a bit strange and to see the pause as an anomaly. I want to make clear that the common misconception that the creative person is passive is just that—a misconception. The creative person is receptive. I agree entirely with Archibald MacLeish when he quotes a Chinses poet, “We poets struggle with Non-being to force it to yield Being. We knock upon silence for an answering music.” Archibald MacLeish continues, “The ‘Being’ which the poem is to contain derives from ‘Non-being,’ not from the poet. And the ‘music’ which the poem is to own comes not from us who make the poem but from the silence; comes in answer to our knock.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
The creative act has always been a paradox, and it probably will always be one. Practically everybody trying to explain it, especially the psychoanalysts who propose that creativity is “regression in the service of the ego,” find they crash upon the rocks of their inability to distinguish between passivity and receptivity. The creative persons are the latter; they are certainly not the former. We do not know from what combination in the brain cells and synapses the creative ideas spring. However, we do know that creativity requires freedom, and the pause is the way to give that creative combination the chance to work. Pausing is wondering, and wonder is first cousin to creativity. Poetry for me is the space between the words. A poet is a poet when he or she can create that tension between words—a tension created by spaces—that lift the reader would add, of intense or mild ecstasy—standing mentally outside oneself. These new experiences of splendor or wonder or just plain insight have their start in the poem, but they leap out into the reader’s conception of his own private World. Creativity comes not only out of our moments or hours or weeks of effort; it requires—and this is essential—the moments or hours or weeks of pause between the effort. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
The pause is that situation in which symbols are formed. The intensity of handling all the stimuli that come at us requires the symbol. How are we to assess these stimuli, how are we to judge them, to weight them—all of which must be done before one can throw one’s strength toward this response rather than that one, to employ our simplest paradigm of freedom? The term symbol comes from two Greek words, sym meaning “with” and bollen meaning “to throw.” The symbol is, thus, that which throws or brings together these antimonies into one image, one form. The vitality of the situation is preserved for as long as the symbol continues to exist. We surely cannot handle all these stimuli by computer; we cannot add and subtract and in other mathematical ways try to fashion them into a decision. In a technological problem one can do this. However, when one tries to turn human decisions—such as whom shall I marry—over to the machine and tried to abstract oneself out of the picture, one becomes more and more mechanical, less and less personal and human. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Lo and behold, the warmth has gone out of the situation, the vitality lost, the personal characteristics fled, and the person talking to you experiences you as less and less a person and more and more a machine. This is similar to talking with brain-injured patients in a mental hospital: they understand all the words you use, but cannot go behind the words to understand you as the person speaking. A human being is normal communication speaks in symbols, and if these are not grasped—and they are not by the brain-injured—the person is not understood. Al vital words carry some residue of their origin as symbols. In a human problem, the pattern is all-important and personal likes and dislikes are crucial. The response, to which you throw your weight, will not be only a conclusion, but will also be a commitment with its own power. Many factors need to be taken into consideration, some of which are only partially conscious. In such personal questions there is no decision which is right, but only approximately so. We have to keep the different factors all alive, like a juggler with a dozen balls in the air; we cannot avoid some factors without doing damage to the totality. What ideally happens is that these stimuli begin to fit into a pattern, a whole, a totality, a form that preserves the kernel and the value of each one. This is the symbol. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Take, for example, the apparently simply stimuli that arise around the concept of patriotism. There is the call of one’s homeland; the fact that our forefathers fought in 1776 to construct this nation; the feeling of comradeship with people who speak the same language; and a million and one other facts and memories acting as stimuli. You hit upon a banner, and you call it a flag. The flag does not leave out any of the above meanings; it expresses the multitude of meanings in a compact, dynamic symbol. The elements that are forged and united into symbol in this pause which we have made the center of freedom come from many sources. They are from past and present, individual and group, consciousness and unconsciousness, and they are both rational and irrational. All of these antimonies are brought together in the pattern which is the symbol. The symbol keeps them alive and vital. Every great culture that embraces more then one people when a response is made to a You, an essential act of the spirit. Reinforced by the energy of subsequent generations that points in the same direction, this creates a distinctive conception of the cosmos in the spirit; only this does a human cosmos become possible again and again; only now can a mortal again and again build houses of worship and human houses in a distinctive conception of space and from a confident soul—and full vibrant time with new hymns and songs and give the human community itself a form. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
However, only as long as one possesses this essential act in one’s own life, acting and suffering, only as long as oneself enters into the relation is one free and thus creative. When a culture is no longer centered in a living and continually renewed relational process, it freezes into the It-World which is broken only intermittently by the eruptive, glowing deeds of solitary spirits. From that point on, common causality, which hitherto was never able to disturb the spiritual conception of the cosmos, grows into an oppressive and crushing doom. Wise, masterful fate which, as long as it was attuned to the abundance of meaning in the cosmos, held sway over all causality, has become transformed into demonic absurdity and has collapsed into causality. The same karma that appeared to earlier generations as a beneficial dispensation-for our deeds in this life raise us into higher sphere in the next—now is seen as tyranny for the deeds of a former life of which we are unconscious have imprisoned us in a dungeon from which we cannot escape in this life. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Where the meaningful law of Heaven is used to arch, with the spindle of necessity hanging from its bright vault, the meaningless, tyrannical power of the planets now holds sway. It used to be merely a matter of entering Dike, the Heavenly path that aimed t be ours, too, and one could live with a free heart in the total measure of destiny. Now we feel, whatever we do, the compulsion of heimarmene, a stranger to spirit who bends every neck with the burden of the dead mass of the World. The craving for redemption grows by leaps and bounds and remains unsatisfied in the end, in spite of all kinds of experiments, until it is finally assuaged by one who teaches mortals how to escape from the wheel of rebirth, or by one who saves the souls enslaved by the powers into the freedom of the children of God. Such accomplishments issue from a new encounter that becomes substantial, a new response of one human being to one’s You, an event that comes to determine fate. The repercussions of such a central essential act may include the supersession of one culture by another that is devoted to this ray, but it is also possible for a culture to be thus renewed. The yearning for spiritual light wells up in the heart spontaneously. It is a natural one. However, desires, egoism, and materialism cover it for so long a time that it seems unreal. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
And Sometimes the Pain and Ache and Even Agony of Miscarried Love is Almost More than We Can Bear!
The stone moved out easily enough, as I had seen before, and it had a hook on the inside of it by which I could pull it closed behind me. However, to get into the narrow dark passage I had to lie on my belly. And when I dropped down on my knees and peered into it, I could see no visible light at the end. I did not like the look of it. I knew that if I had been a mortal still, nothing could have induced me to crawl into a passage like this. It would be too much to expect the mass of people to take to this quest in its fullness. They are unable to make more than an elementary effort to confine the lower nature within the requires limits. Most people are like sleep-walkers, caught up in their own illusions. Their belief that they are awake is the biggest of these illusions. The poor are overpowered by their grinding poverty, the rich by their fortune; both find neither the time nor taste for spiritual enquiry. Easily stupefied by sensuality, thoroughly bewitched by constant repetition of the same pleasure, they shrug aside the disturbing thoughts and visible reminders of life’s transitoriness and the body’s infirmity. So, why is it so hard for people to see that if one really cares about some other person, there will be some attachment, some normal jealousy and one will be vulnerable to pain; and that the aim with jealousy is not to exorcise it entirely, but to realize it is a problem only when it reaches neurotic proportions? #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
The awareness of normal jealousy is the one corrective to the growth of neurotic jealousy, the dreary picture of which we have seen in these vignettes. It times in which there were difficulties standing in the way of pleasures of the flesh, such as perhaps during the decline of the ancient civilization, love became worthless and life empty, and strong reaction-formations were required to restore indispensable affective values…the ascetic current in Christianity created physical values for love which pagan antiquity was never able to confer on it. The decline of the ancient civilizations, when love became worthless and life empty, is related to the disintegration of our mores and culture. Too many people focus on pleasures of the flesh as an antidote against anxiety; the neurological pathway that carries the sexual stimulation cuts off that pathway which transmits anxiety. In our own concern with the innumerable problems in our society that we cannot solve, it is understandable that we turn to our preoccupation with pleasures of the flesh. However, we should avoid making principles out of our own abnormal state. The books and TV shows are alike in that they reflect and act upon the moral vacuousness that has become so commonplace as to be nearly normative in recent writings about pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Is not this moral vacuity one explanation for the fact that, while we never has more talks and workshops and public-school teachings on pleasures of the flesh, contraception, terminating pregnancies, and complication with unprotected and even protected sex, the rate of venereal disease, teenage pregnancies and abortions are rising dramatically? Pleasures of the flesh and intimacy that goes with it are so basic a part of human existence that one cannot separate them from one’s values. To treat pleasures of the flesh and values as totally divorced from each other is not only to block the development of one’s freedom, but also to make the cultural problem of pleasures of the flesh simply insoluble. Moral concern in pleasures of the flesh hinges on the acceptance of one’s responsibility for the other as well as for oneself. Other people do matter; and the celebration of this gives pleasures of the flesh its ecstasy, its meaning, and its capacity to shake us to our depths. When made into the be-all and end-all of pleasures of the flesh, without a committed relationship, at the legal age, and without intimacy—it is an expression of narcissism. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Narcissism is not beautiful. It is actually a personality disorder in which a person has an inflated sense of self-importance. There are fewer than 200,000 cases diagnosed per year, so it is rare. Treatment can help, but this condition cannot be cured. It requires a medical diagnosis, but lab test or imaging not required. Chronic narcissism can last for years and be lifelong. Narcissism is a refusal to love, a running from the beautiful Echo as Narcissus did in the myth. Pleasures of the flesh as solitary stimuli, carried on in the absence of sharing, without intimacy, is an overpowering concern with one’s own stimuli, a peering endlessly at oneself, as Narcissus peered into the pool. As a way of life, pleasures of the flesh without intimacy is motivated by resentment and vengeance, like Echo’s myth. Narcissus allegedly self-destructs by stabbing himself, but we self-destruct by a long, drawn-out amputation of vital parts of ourselves. Our contemporaries seem not to be vengeful because some specific person will not love them now (as was the case with Echo), but they seem to carry a vengeance from infancy, an experience of not having been loved, that they have never come to terms with. They have never accepted, as one must accept, their destiny, with all its cruel and its beneficent strains. Nor have the accepted the fate that no one ever gets enough love. This yearning for love makes us human. Having accepted that aspect of destiny, perhaps then we can join the human race. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
What the proponents of the ideal of pleasures of the flesh without intimacy as the way to genuine freedom have grossly overlooked is that freedom in the pleasures of the flesh is like freedom in every other realm of life: one is free only as one recognizes one’s limits—for instance, one’s destiny. The structure, the design, of the pleasures of the flesh function in life needs to be seen steadily and whole. In human relations responsibility comes out of ever-present loneliness and our inescapable need for others, which is dramatically true in pleasures of the flesh; and without this sense of responsibility there is no authentic freedom. Our freedom is pleasures of the flesh then grows in proportion to the parallel growth of our sensitivity to the needs, desires, wishes of the other. These needs, desires, and wishes of the other are the givens. The fact that pleasures of the flesh are stimuli can blossom into authentic intimacy and into love is one of the mysteries of life which can give us a lasting solace and joy. As in all aspects of confronting destiny, there is a risk. If you have feelings, you are bound to be vulnerable and hurt. And sometimes the pain and ache and even agony of miscarried love is almost more than we can bear. However, accepting this risk is the price of freedom, and especially the freedom to love authentically. Who wishes to trade these for existence as a zombie? #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Standing under the basic word of separation which keeps apart I and It, one has divided one’s life with one’s fellow mortals into two neatly defined districts: institutions and feelings. It-district and I-district. Institutions are what is out there where for all kinds of purposes one spends time, where one works, negotiates, influences, undertakes, competes, organizes, administers, officiates, preaches; the halfway orderly and on the whole coherent structure where, with the manifold participation of humans heads and human limbs, the round of affairs runs its course. Feelings are what is in here where one lives and recovers from the institutions. Here the spectrum of emotions swings before the interested eye; here one enjoys one’s inclination and one’s hatred, pleasure and, if it is not too bad, pain. Here one is at home and relaxes in one’s rocking chair. Institutions comprise a complicated forum; feelings, a boudoir that at least provides a good deal of diversity. This separation, to be sure, is continually engendered, as our supportive feelings break into the most objective institutions; but with a little good will it can always be restored. A dependable separation is most difficult in the areas of our so-called personal life. In marriage, for example, it is not always so simple to attain; but time works wonders. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
In the areas of so-called public life it is eminently successful: consider, for example, how in the age of political parties, but also of groups and movements that claim to be above parties, Heaven-storming congresses alternate flawlessly with the day-to-day operations that crawl along on the ground, whether mechanized and evenly or organically and slovenly. However, the severed It of institutions is a golem, and the served I of feelings is a fluttering soul-bird. Neither knows that human being; one only the instance and the other only the object. Neither knows person or community. Neither knows the present: these, however modern, know only the rigid past, that which is finished, while those, however persistent, know only the fleeting moment, that which is not yet. Neither has access to actual life. Institutions yield no public life; feelings, no personal life. That institutions yield no public life is felt by more and more human beings, to their sorrow; this is the source of the distress and search of our age. That feelings yield no personal life has been recognized by few so far; for they seem to be the home of what is most personal. And once one has learnt, like a modern mortal, to become greatly preoccupied with one’s own feelings, even despair over their unreality will not easily open one’s eyes; after all, such despair is also a feeling and quite interesting. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
Those who suffer because institutions yield no public life have thought of a remedy: feelings are to loosen up or thaw or explode the institutions, as I they could be renewed by feelings, by introducing the freedom of feelings. When the automatized state yokes together totally uncongenial citizens without creating or promoting any fellowship, it is supposed to be replaced by a loving community. And this loving community is supposed to come into being when people come together, prompted by free, exuberant feelings, and want to live together. However, this is not how things are. True community does not come into being because people have feelings for each other (though that is required, too), but rather no two accounts: all of them have to stand in a living, reciprocal relationship to a single living center, and they have to stand in a living, reciprocal relationship to one another. The second event has its source in the first but is not immediately given with it. A living reciprocal relationship includes feelings but is not derived from them. A community is built upon a living, reciprocal relationship, but the builder is the living, active center. Even institutions of so-called personal life cannot be reformed by a free feeling (although this is also required). #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Marriage can never be renewed expect by that which is always the source of all true marriage: that two human beings reveal the You to one another. It is of this that the You that is I for neither of them builds a marriage. This is the metaphysical and metaphysical fact of love which is merely accompanied by feelings of love. Whoever wishes to renew a marriage on another basis is not essentially different from those who want to abolish it: both declare that they no longer know the fact. Indeed, take the much-discussed eroticism of our age and subtract everything that is really egocentric—in other words, every relationship in which one is not at all present to the other, but each uses the other only for self-enjoyment—what would remain? True public and true personal life are two forms of association. For them to originate and endure, feelings are required as a changing content, and institutions are required as a constant form; but even the combination of both still does not create human life which is created only by a third element: the central presence of the You, or rather, to speak more truthfully, the central You that is received in the present. The basic word I-It does not come from evil—anymore than matter comes from evil. It comes from evil—like matter that presumes to be that which has being. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
When mortals let it have its way, the relentlessly growing It-World grows over one like weeds, one’ own I loses its actuality, until the incubus over one and the phantom inside one exchange the whispered confession of their need for redemptions. In our story, Jesus as well as His foes acknowledge authority. They struggle about valid authority, not about authority as such. And this is what we find everywhere in the Bible and the life of the Church. Paul fights with the original disciples, including Peter, about the foundations of apostolic authority. The bishops fight with the princes about ultimate source of political authority. The reformers fight with the hierarches about the interpretation of the Bible. The theologians fight with the scientists about the criteria of ultimate truth. None of the struggling groups denies authority, but each of them denies the authority of the other group. However, if the authority is split in itself, which authority decides? Is not split authority the end of authority? Was not the split produced by the Reformation the end of the authority of the Church? Is not the split about the interpretation of the Bible the end of the Biblical authority? Is not the split between theologians and scientists the end of intellectual authority? Was not the split between the gods of polytheism the end of their divine authority? #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Is not the split in one’s conscience the end of the authority of one’s conscience? If one has to choose between different authorities, not they but oneself is ultimate authority for oneself, and this means: there is no authority for one. This, however, creates the dreadful alternative of our historical period. If there is no authority, we must decide ourselves, each for oneself. As finite beings we must act as if we were infinite, and since this is impossible, we are driven into complete insecurity, anxiety and despair. Or, unable to stand the oneliness of deciding for ourselves, we suppress the fact that there is a split authority. We subject ourselves to a definite authority and close our eyes against all other claims. The desire of most people to do this is very well known to those in power. They use the unwillingness of human beings to decide for themselves in order to preserve their power and to increase it. This is true of religious as well as of political powers. On this ground of human weakness the systems of authority are built in past and present. “By what authority” do you do this? Jesus is asked And Christ answering but by pointing to the acting and speaking of John. Here, Christ tells the leaders of his nation, you see the rise of an authority without ritual or legal foundation. However, you deny the possibility of it. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
So you deny both the Baptist and myself. You deny the possibility of an authority guaranteed by its inner power. You have forgotten that the only test of the prophets was the power of what they had to say. Listen to what the people say about us, namely, that we speak with authority and not as you, who are called the authorities. That is what Christ tells them. What would Christ say to us? He would not have to fight about his authority with the chief priests and the scribes and the elders of our day. In our time they all acknowledged Christ. He would have to ask quite a different question of them. He would have to ask: “What is the nature of my authority for you? It is like that of John the Baptist, or is it like that of the authorities who tried to remove me? Have you made the words of those who have witnessed to me, the Bible, the Church Fathers, the popes, the reformers, the creeds, into ultimate authorities? Have you done this in my name? And is so, do you not abuse my name? For whenever my name is remembered, my fight with those who were in authority is also remembered.” After the work done to gain livelihood or fulfil ambition, there is usually a surplus of time and strength, as part of which could and should be devoted to satisfying higher needs. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
There is hardly a mortal whose life is so intense that it does not leave one a little time for spiritual recall from this Worldly existence. Yet the common attitude everywhere is to look no farther than, and be content with, work and pleasure, family, friends, and possessions. It feels no urge to seek the spiritual and, as it erroneously thinks, the intangible side of life. It makes no effort to organize its day so as to find the time and energy for serious thought, study, prayer, and meditation. It feels no need of searching for truth or getting an instructor. People who find their own company boring, their own resources empty, their own higher aims non-existent, must needs flee from it to some form of escape, such as the cinema, the radio, the theatre, or television. Here they are not confronted by the uncomfortable problem of themselves, by aimless meaningless drifting “I.” Humanity ordinarily shirks this enquiry into truth partly because of its difficulty, partly because of its apparent personal unprofitability, and partly because of its loneliness. There are those—and they are many—who do not want such a quest: its disciplines frighten them away or its studies bore them or its isolation makes too daring a demand on their gregariousness. “Some things lighten nightfall and make a Rembrandt of a grief. But mostly the swiftness of time is a joke; on us. The flame—moth is unable to laugh. What luck. They myth are dead,” reports Stan Rice “Poem on Crawling into Bed: Bitterness” Body of Work (1983). #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Age of No Mystery—It is So Nice to be in Love for I am Tired of Doing it for My Complexion!
And yet my grief was not entirely gone from me. It lingered like an idea, and the idea had a pure truth to it. I believe that this masking of dating without something to strive for, is an expression of narcissism, that it is also a rationalization for fear of intimacy and closeness in interpersonal relations, and that is arises from the alienation in our culture and adds to this alienation. Intimacy is the sharing between two people not only of their dreams, visions, goals, aspiration, values and religion, but also their personal space and thoughts. Intimacy is sensation blooming into emotion. Love is a state of being. That relation is intimate which is enriched by sharing our nature, in which one longs to hear the other’s fantasies, dreams, and experiences and reciprocated by sharing one’s own. Having lived for three years in a country in which the carnival season was built into the yearly calendar, I can testify to the great relief and pleasure in attending champagne parties that went on all night long and that ended only when the Sun was rising. For most people the carnival season is a time to dream dreams that my never come into reality. A patient from Germany, shy man among whose problems was a fear of intimacy, told how he had gone regularly to the masked balls in Berlin after the way, always hoping to meet some mysterious great love. However, of course, he never found anybody. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Dating without intimacy is sometimes helpful for adolescents, when deal with their peer group, for they are still navigating their way into the mysterious World and do not want to get trapped. Yet another use is for the divorcees in healing the wounds of separation, abandonment, and rejection. Dating without intimacy is said by some therapists to be a stage in getting emotionally free from the estranged spouse and launching oneself into the stream of life again. Other therapists add that a period of friendships can be a way of avoiding marrying on the rebound or getting too deeply involved with a partner before one has lived through the inevitable mourning period of the previous abandonment. Now we note that each of these is clearly a freedom from. Serial dating is supposedly free from tension; masked balls are freedom from the perpetual burden of too much consciousness; adolescents dating their peers is a freedom from bewilderment; divorcees’ dating is a freedom from the pain of wounded self-esteem. If dating without intimacy cannot enhance freedom of being itself, at least it can prepare the ground for later enhancement. Reading about these truths has a revelatory effect upon certain minds but only a boring or irritating effect upon others. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Why might learning about the truth be boring or irritating? It is because the first have been brought by the experience or reflection to a sufficiently sensitive and intuitive condition to appreciate the worth of what they are reading, whereas the second, comprising for the most part an extroverted public, will naturally be impatient with such mystical ideas and contemptuous of their heretical expounder. Indeed, some of these writings must seem as incomprehensible to a Western ear as the babblings of a man just awakening from the chloroformed state. The masses would show no interest for they possess insufficient mental equipment to understand it. How can large principles find a resting place in such little persons? The incomprehensions of the undeveloped minds and unrefined hearts puts up a barrier between them and philosophy. To ignore it is first to bewilder and then to frustrate them. It is not fair to ask them to accept and believe in teachings which seems to be contradicted by all their experiences and by all the experience of the society around them. How can we demand that they violate their own thinking and their own feeling by doing so? #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
They are not necessarily more materialistic. It is simply that they have not begun to think about life, to question its meaning and ask for its purpose. The call to a higher kind of life may sound absurd to the lower kind of mind. It is often said in the criticism that its doctrines are unreasonable and its techniques impracticable. It is a subject which the arrogant intellectuals of our time, being unable to cope with it, find irritating or bewildering. The seeming failure to get these truths accepted more widely, still more to get them practiced, is no failure at all. Mortals are what they are as a result of what they were in the past. It is easier for most persons to lay down their distressing burdens at the door of faith in formal religion than turn to the quest which explains the very presence of these burdens and prescribes the technique to remove them. Too many people who are ordinarily supposed to be good people with some religious side to their character, hide behind their duties and responsibilities to avoid the Quest for truth of God. They find in these two things sufficient excuse to disregard the larger questions of life. They keep themselves busy supporting themselves and their family or keeping up a position in the World of activity, following an occupation, or maintaining a business. In this way they are able to ignore any self-questioning about why they are here on Earth at all or what will happen to them after death or whether these practical duties and responsibilities are that is required from them by the God they profess to believe in. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
However, when dating without intimacy is made into one’s overall way of life a la Playboy or Playgirl a very different thing occurs. This is a compartmentalization of the self, an amputation of the important parts of one’s being. In one’s fascination with the mystery in masked balls or dating without intimacy, one wakes up, in our twenty-first century “age of no mystery,” to find oneself with the mechanical counterpart to the masks, the love machines, literally or in the form simply of feelingless people. It is so nice to be in love. I am tired of doing it for my complexion. Sometimes relations or serial dating, without a real connection, is boring. Many people have an aim to learn to be in relationships without sensation or without emotion. The strange thing is that these same clients sometimes come for therapy on the advice of their partner. A young woman in her first session stated that she wanted a monogamous relationship with her partner and she was entirely happy with her partner and did not want to see other people, but her partner persuaded her that something was wrong if she could not date other men. And this is what she, at his urging, had come to learn to do. One woman tells of a quarrel she has with her spouse in which he expressed his irritation that she confined herself to a monogamous relationship with him. She found herself crying out, “If I want to be faithful to you, what bloody business is it of yours?” #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
In such men we see the fear of intimacy, often stimulated by their general fear of women. They may be afraid that too much responsibility will be dumped on them by the woman, afraid of enchainment to the woman’s emotions, afraid of being encroached upon by the woman’s needs. Obviously, women have similar fears of men: fear that they will be enveloped by the man, fear that they will not be able to express themselves, that they will lose their autonomy—fears made all the stronger by the cultural emphasis, at least until recently, on the woman’s role as subordinate to men. The fears are understandable. Being in a committed relationship requires momentous acts of trust and intimacy. And for tens of thousands of years before the last few decades, this has meant the man’s leaving his pearl with her with the possibility of her carrying a fetus for none months and then having another mouth to feed and child to take responsibility for. What arrogance makes us think we can change that cultural inheritance of tens of thousands of years’ duration in a couple of decades? All the World complains nowadays of a press of trivial duties and engagements which prevents their employing themselves on some higher ground they know of; but undoubtedly, if they were made of the right stuff to work on that higher ground, they would now at once fulfill their superior engagement and neglect all the rest, as naturally as they breathe. They would never be caught saying that they had no time for this when the dullest man knows that this is all that he has time for. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
There are now so many activities calling for one’s interest and energies that modern mortals thinks one has no time to devote to finding one’s soul. So one does not seek it: and so one remains unhappy. The joining of two people in a loving relationship is, psychologically and physiologically, the most intimate of all relationships to which the human being is heir. It is a uniting of the most sensitive parts of ourselves, our soul, mind, heart, finances, secrets, identity, and emotions with an intimacy greater than is possible than with anyone else. A loving relationship is the ultimate way we become part of each other; the throb of the other’s heart and pulse are then felt as our own. It is not the fear of intimacy I am questioning—there is no wonder we yearn for freedom from intimacy in carnivals and occasional flings. However, I am questioning the rationalization of this fear into a principle that ends up amputating the self. Another rationalization is the idea that, since dating is at times recreation, it is noting but recreation; and one does not get intimate with one’s partner in tennis or bridge. This ignores not only the meaning of love, but the power of the soul. No wonder true love in our society is being steadily replaced by pornography. However, in these days, pleasures of the flesh without intimacy in the extreme, leads ultimately to one’s own death. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
The discomfort of being confronted by the fundamental questions which we must at some time, early or late, ask of life can be evaded—as all too many persons do evade it—by deliberately turning to more activity, or reinforced narcissism. Some reject the whole system for such reasons as “I do not want to become a saint,” or “I have to earn my livelihood.” This is an unwise attitude. Their minds are mostly occupied by personal matters, both petty and large, leaving little or no space in them for thoughts about life in general. How then can there be interest in the quest for truth? They dismiss the teachings in a few seconds under the erroneous belief that it is expounder is just another cultist. It is easy to fall into such gross misconceptions since they know nothing about it, or about the ancient tradition behind it. The fact is that, in the ordinary consciousness, many people are not interested in the question of truth, nor in the discovery of what seems without personal benefits of a Worldly kind; they are certainly not willing to practice various controls of thoughts, emotion, speech, and passion. Considering these factors, it will not come as a surprise when I state that, on the basis of my psychotherapeutic experiences, the people who can best function in a system of dating without intimacy are those who have little capacity for feeling in the first place. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
It is the persons who are compulsive and mechanical in their reactions, untrammeled by emotions, the persons who cannot experience intimacy anyway—in short the ones who operate like nonsentiment motors—that can most easily carry on a pattern of dating without intimacy. One of the saddest things about our culture is that this nonloving, compulsive—obsessional type seems to be the fruit of the widespread mechanistic training in our schools and life, the type our culture cultivates. The danger is that these detached persons who are afraid of intimacy will move toward a robotlike existence, heralded by the drying up of their emotions not only on personal levels, but on all levels, supported by the motto “my love don’t cost a thing.” Little wonder, then, that in the story which cites what the women of different nationalities say after dating, the American woman is portrayed saying “What is your name, darling?” I have noticed that in detached relationships with women, some male patients, not uncommonly intellectuals, are very competent with having modern relationships. They not only exemplify serial dating, but they also think and live without intimacy; and their yearnings, hopes, fears have been so strait-jacketed as to be almost extinct. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Then in therapy they begin to make process. Suddenly they find themselves impotent. This troubles them greatly, and they often cannot understand why I regard it as a gain that they have become aware of some sensibilities within themselves and can no longer direct their pleasures of the flesh on command as one would a computer. They are beginning to distinguish the times when they really want to have an intimate, monogamous relationship and the times they do not. This impotence is the beginning of a genuine experiences of pleasures of the flesh with intimacy. Now their adult life ideally can be built on a new foundation of relationship; now they can be monogamous partners, instead of serial dating. In contrast, the new narcissist is permissive about promiscuity, but this has given those types of individuals no true peace. What happens is that a premium is placed upon not feeling. Susan Stern, in describing how she gravitated toward the Weathermen, confesses an “inability to feel anything. I grew more frozen inside, more animated outside.” Some women who encourage their male partners to explore with other woman admit they would be hurt only if they felt too much, for instance, developed some intimacy with the other woman along with pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Enlightenment has suffered miscomprehension in its own land by its own people and many are unfamiliar or unable to cope with righteous intuitive perceptions. The pleasures of the flesh without intimacy trend in our culture goes hand in hand with the loss of the capacity to feel. His is a trend I saw developing in patients in therapy as early as the 1950s. Speaking of some new moments in our culture, our of a pervasive dissatisfaction with the quality of personal relations, many are taught not to make too large an investment in love and friendship, to avoid excessive dependence on others, live out loud, and to live for the moment—the very conditions that created the crisis of personal relations in the first place. Our society has made deep and lasting friendships, love affairs, and marrieds increasingly difficult to achieve. Some of the new therapies dignify this combat as assertiveness and fighting fair in love and marriage. Others celebrate impermanent attachments under such formulas as open marriage and open-ended commitments. Thus they intensify the disease they pretend to cure. Too many quacks, incompetents, fanatics, charlatans, tools, or lunatics have brought reproach and opprobrium on them. Only a small handful of persons employ them deliberately to express the lofty, the admirable, and the honorable meanings. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Few are willing to undergo the philosophical discipline because few are willing to disturb their personal comfort or disrupt their personal ease for the sake of a visionary ideal. The eagerness to improve oneself, the willingness to cultivate noble qualities are uncommon. If some joyfully recognize the truth as soon as they meet with it, others shudderingly turn away from it. The materialistically minded persons are too sceptical to take up this training and re-education of the mind; the self-indulgent ones are too lazily unwilling to disturb their comfort with it and come out of the groove in which they have sunk; while the narcissistic are too uninterested in merely long-range, far-off, and tangible benefits to se any value in it. Many people, especially in the working and the petty bourgeious classes, find their felicity at the beer and bacon table or the television, in idle chatter or in the particular successes of ambition. The notion that anyone could find it by means of nothing that can be measured in materialistic terms would seem foolish to them, while the Quest of God would seem the highest point of all foolishness. They accept the futility of materialism because they have never known the vitality of transcendentalism. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
This is not the atmosphere in which those minds are satisfied with the shackles of strict doctrines or the pretensions of mere opinion can thrive: hence few glances at philosophy are often enough to keep them away. Most people devalue themselves, although they do not know it. A part of them is divine, but it is ignored and neglected. The improvement of the ability to experience and use generally involves a decease in mortal’s power to relate. The mortal who sample the spirit as if it were spirits—what is one to do with the beings that live around one? “Tempting to place in coherent collage the bee, the mountain range, the shadow of my hoof—tempting to join them, enlaced by logical vast and shining molecular thought-thread thru all Substances—Tempting to say I see in all I see the place where the needle began in the tapestry—but ah, it all looks whole and part—long live the eyeball and the lucid heart,” reports Stan Rice from “Four Days in Another City” Some Lamb (1975). First problem with us today is that we have not enough faith in God; the second is that we have become too soft and will not submit our lives to God. Amusements, sports, gossip, even pleasures of the flesh protect the thoughtless masses from having to confront the higher challenges of life, from having to let into the minds basic questions. It allows them to escape all through the length of their incarnation from the one thing they were put here on Earth to face. In short, they hide from the Quest. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Randolph Harris II International Institute 