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A Glowing Tripod Will at Last Give Sign that You Have Reached the Deepest, Nethermost Shrine and by its Light You Will Behold the Mothers!

July 22, 2019 1:31 am

Within moments of leaving of the Cresleigh Homes Rocklin Trails House, stepping out into the glorious daylight, I knew that this experience would be worth all of the trials and the pain. And no mortal chills, with all its debilitating symptoms would keep me from frolicking in the morning Sun. Never mind that my overall physical weakness was driving me mad: that I seemed to be made of stone as I plodded along with Nacho, that I could not jump two feet in the air when I tried, or that pushing open the door of the butcher shop took a colossal effort; or that my cold was growing steadily worse. Once Nacho had devoured his breakfast of scraps, begged from the butcher, we were off together to revel in the light everywhere, and I felt myself becoming drunk on the vision of the Sunlight falling upon windows and wet pavements, on the gleaming tops of brightly enameled BMWs, on glassy puddles where the snow had melted, upon the plate-glass shop windows, and upon the people—the thousands and thousands of happy people, scurrying busily about the business of the day. In our society most men and women spend the major portion of their waking hours at work, a fact which should not be taken to mean that beings find or express themselves only in their work. Yet far beyond the workplace and the time spent in it, the work we do and the way we do it shape our lives—our image of ourselves and our relations with others. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22

The World we have lost, a World based on the patriarchal productive unit of preindustrial times was an intimate Word in which work was inseparable from other family activities. Let it be noted, however—especially for those who would turn the clock back—that this was an authoritarian World, ruled by a father or father-figure who was absolute boss. But along with the power and control exercised by this figure went duties and responsibilities toward those whose work he supervised. He ruled his flock, but he also tended it. With large-scale industrialism this type of family industry as the basic productive unit came to an end, never to be restored. In the rise of industrial capitalism, handicrafts were replaced by machine-tool production. What this transformation meant for the ordinary worker, turn from the roots of their medieval past, is the beings are alienated from a World in which nature, others, and them as living beings become objects. The object produced by being’s labor—its produce—now confronts one in the shape of an alien thing, a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor given embodiment in a material form this product is the objectification of labor. Furthermore, the worker is estranged from the very process of production, which is controlled not by one, but by an alien being. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22

Having lost control of one’s work, beings are alienated from others—and from oneself as well. Both labor and the possessing class represent the same self-estrangement. Alienated labor is not the result, but the cause of private property because people want to see the emancipation of themselves as creative and self-expressive, free to product the things they desire with love and passion. However, today we are confronted with the ambivalent machine—an instrument of liberation and of repression. As a result of innovation and globalization in America, we are seeing the heartland being eroded. United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported that licensed dairy farm numbers in the country declined by 2,731 farms, a drop of 6.8 percent, leaving just 37,468 licensed dairy farms America, compared to 40,199 last years. Wisconsin is the state with the most dairy farms in American, but 590 dairy farms went out of business. Decline in American production is also because we are confronted by a formidable counterpart of the machine—bureaucracy. While bureaucracy aims at the rationalization of human behavior, it rarely achieves this goal. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22

Blind adherence to the rules may be dysfunctional, that is, it will prevent the bureaucracy from performing its intended function. For instance, former governor Jerry Brown signed a law that mandates cutting methane from livestock 40 percent by 2030 from 2013 levels. Dairy Farmer Kim Jorgensen has 270 cows. The cow tax would cost him an estimated $93,126.00. This mandate will cost a number of farmers their livelihoods and it will have an effect on competition. It means that farmers in California will have to compete with colleagues who do not have this mandate, and California dairy famers will be at a disadvantage. Consumers will prefer to buy their milk if it is affordable, but if diary famers are penalized, consumers will switch to milk produced outside of California, or the Untied State or switch to an alternative like cashew milk, almond milk, soy milk, or camel’s milk. If our goal is to create jobs and support local business, by taxing cow emission and buying milk and beef from other countries, where it is not regulated by the USDA will cause Americans to lose more jobs in the future. Therefore, as you can see whether bureaucracy is efficient or inefficient, it can be inherently impersonal and defeat the purpose of what it is intended to do. This impersonal character makes bureaucracy a hated and feared institution. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22

Although Americans tend to dislike bureaucracy because it tends to over regulate the beings and their production, and it has run amuck, many democrats are pushing for socialism and want to actually expand the government and put the government in more control of their lives. By forcing the government to provide healthcare for everyone, pay for college educations, tax foods and drinks that can lead to obesity to curb their popularity and control who can own guns. If democrats have their way, there will even be mandated wages and your education, experience, and performance will not matter because democrats want their “fair share,” even if they have not worked for it nor earned it. For instance, with democrats demanding their “fair share” to help people in retail jobs earn a living wage, they could reduce a doctor’s pay from $50 an hour to $25 an hour to supplement people’s wages in retail jobs so bureaucrats can equalize the wage disparity in California. This impersonal character makes bureaucracy a hated and feared institution, which capitalist want less government and less regulation so people have a fair chance at succeeding in life. When personal feelings and needs are permitted to intrude into its deliberations, there is a danger for bureaucracy. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22

However, bureaucracy is not supposed to be only an alien governing power that provides welfare and handouts to those who do not want to work, while over taxing and oppressing those who want to get an education and work; it is for increasing numbers of professional and white-collar workers a workplace. However, life in the crystal palace is not a government bureau or dreary counting house, but more of what many would consider the ideal corporate environment—physically luxurious and at least superficially warm and friendly in its human relationships. And yet, the crystal palace is less alienating than the assembly line because it is safe, clean, nice and peaceful. People are artificially caring, but not snarky, sarcastic nor vindictive. Both the assembly line and crystal palace turn out robots, but with the crystal palace you get cheerful robots, instead of cheerless robots, even though both are victims of impersonal and remote power. When not at work is where beings find themselves, in leisure hours, if they have any. However, some people have no training for leisure. And so, like the work from which it provides escape, leisure becomes a great void and these people usually fill that void with sinful activities. The Devil finds work for idle hands. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22

For some people their leisure time is occupied with productive activities so they stay out of trouble. Out of all the other I’s some are chosen as a pattern that is me. However, there are all the other possibilities of patterns within what all the others say which come into me and become other I’s which is not myself, and sometimes these take over. Then who am I? The personal self is not formed in isolation. It is built out of both our private and our shared experiences. We tend to evaluate ourselves, at least in our early years, by comparing ourselves to others or by patterning our behaviors and ideas on those of people whom we feel to be significant. Peer and authority figures are often role models for our personal selves. Even if you are not in your ideal career, or ideal environment, I myself choose to occupy myself with reading psychology, religion and other subjects for 3-7 hours every day. I truly believe that an education, even if it is not formal, will help my mind develop and eventually elevate me to a place where I can achieve my dreams. Some people run hither and thither, from teacher to teaching to a different teacher or teaching, from Euramerica to India, to Japan, to China, looking away from their own being for that which is the essence of that being. They are like the man who looked everywhere for his spectacles. At last he gave up the search—only to find the spectacles resting on this own nose. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22

However, had this man’s attention had first to be drawn to his nose by someone—or by the book of someone—who could see his spectacles there. These seekers are not ordinarily aware of what is continually present within them, the stillness of the centre of their being, and instead of looking there for it, they look elsewhere, or to other beings. The real service which is rendered them by others is to tell them where to look; the rest is for them to do. However, the lazy, or those who want something for nothing, expect or want the gurus to do it for them—a false idea. The other great error of these confused minds is to seek from the crystal palace what it is not rejecting. The best in the crystal palace are not rejecting spirituality but ignorance, superstition, unbalance, futility, narrowness, and excess of liberalism. The Westerner who adores American’s past want to copy it, picturing it as a golden age of excess and abundance (which it never was). One tries to restore it for oneself and in oneself, becoming an ape and a parrot. If some have found their way to this illumination by following slavishly the details of a special teaching, others have found it by following their faith in God. It is not uncommon for inexperienced beginners on the Quest, who are ignorant of the serious and often harmful results of such associations, to turn to untrustworthy so-called occult teachers. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22

In most cases, it would be far safer, and more satisfactory in the end, for them to depend solely upon their own unassisted efforts than to follow such a dangerous method. One of the predominant trends of neurotics of our time is their excessive dependence on the approval or affection of others. We all want to be liked and to feel appreciated, but in neurotic persons the dependence on affection or approval is disproportionate to the real significance which other persons have for their lives. Although we all wish to be liked by persons of whom we are fond, in neurotics there is an indiscriminate hunger for appreciation or affection, regardless of whether they care for the person concerned or whether the judgment of that person has any meaning for them. More often than not they are not aware of this boundless craving, but they betray its existence in their sensitivity when the attention they want is not forthcoming. They may feel hurt, for example, if someone does not accept their invitation, does not telephone for some time, or even only if one disagrees with them in some opinion. This sensitivity may be concealed by a “do not care” attitude. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22

Furthermore, there is a marked contradiction between their wish for affection and their own capacity for feeling or giving it. Excessive demands concerning consideration for their own wishes may go with just as great a lack of consideration for others. The contradiction does not always appear on the surface. The neurotic may, for example, be overconsiderate and eager to be helpful to everyone, but if this is the case it is noticeable that one acts compulsively, not out of a spontaneously radiating warmth. The inner insecurity expressed in this dependence on others is the second feature that strikes us in neurotics on surface observation. Feelings of inferiority and inadequacy are characteristics that never fail. They may appear in a number of ways—such as a conviction of incompetence, of stupidity, of unattractiveness—and they may exist without any basis in reality. Notions of their own stupidity may be found in persons who are unusually intelligent, or notions about their own unattractive in the most beautiful person. These feelings of inferiority may appear openly on the surface in the form of complaints or worries, or the alleged defects may be taken for granted as a fact on which it is superfluous to waste any thought. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22

On the other hand, feelings of inferiority may be covered up by the compensating needs for self-aggrandizement, by a compulsive propensity to show off, to impress others and one’s self with all sorts of attributes that lend prestige in our culture, such as money, possession of antique pictures, antique furniture, women and/or men, social contacts with prominent people, travel, or superior knowledge. One or the other of these tendencies may be entirely in the foreground, but more generally one will feel distinctly the presence of both tendencies. The third set of attitudes, those concerning self-assertion, involve definite inhibitions. By self-assertion I mean the act of asserting one’s self or one’s claims, and I use it without any connotation of undue pushing forward. In this respect neurotics reveal a comprehensive group of inhibitions. They have inhibitions about expressing their wishes or asking for something, about doing something in their own interest, expressing an opinion or warranted criticism, ordering someone, selecting the people they wish to associate with, making contact with people, and so on. There are inhibitions also in reference to what we might describe as maintaining one’s stand: neurotics often are incapable of defending themselves against attack, or of saying “no” if they do not wish to comply with the wishes of others, as for example to a saleswoman who wants to sell them something they do not want to be, or to a person who invites them to a party, or to a woman or man who wants to experience pleasure of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22

There are finally the inhibitions toward knowing what they want: difficulties in making decisions, forming opinions, daring to express wishes which concern only their own benefits. Such wishes have to be concealed: a friend of mine in her personal accounts puts “movies” under “education” and “liquors” under “health.” Particularly important in this latter group is the incapacity to plan, whether it be a trip or a plan of life: neurotics let themselves drift, even in important decisions such as a profession or marriage, instead of having clear conceptions of what they want in life. They are driven exclusively by certain neurotic fears, as we see in persons who pile up money because they fear impoverishment, or take part in endless love affairs because they fear to enter a constructive piece of work. However, God is immanent in us, that through realization of our higher self we become more like God, but that God never ceases to be the Unattainable, the Incomprehensible. The individual is as inseparable from the Infinite as the ray from the Sun. Nevertheless one differs from it in degree and in attribute. Just as a little child may be closely intimate with its mother but not with its mother’s mind, so the human being may be closely intimate with the World-Mind but not with Its full consciousness. The higher kingdoms of Nature cannot be understood by denizens of lower ones. Beings can grow, move, and reflect, but as far as we know cannot enter into God’s infinitely mysterious consciousness. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22

Being itself infinite, the World-Mind is able to express itself in an infinite number of souls. How is your mood? The mother, from whom one is born, who gives us form to start with, who carries the survival of the race in her womb—no topic can be more important. Every patient, in learning to love, must confront the psychological remains of his or her mother’s imprinting. However, we have to take responsibility for our own anxiety and our own distress—blame but yourself that it has come to that. Something of importance is occurring beyond the achievement of Helen, who represent feminine beauty raised to an ethical level in ancient Greece. A goal for the development of the virtue, so prized by the Greeks, was the “Mothers” ultimate importance. The form of forms participates in the Universe of reproduction of the species. The one in whose womb life is created, the one who carries the implantation of new life, also has these powers such as intuition that alternate between knowledge and magic. Wizards of femininity, they (the Mothers) must be rescued to help form and reform the new culture. The Mothers have, by nature of reproducing the race, whether they are conscious of it and take responsibility for it or not the key to transformation as they had been for the forming of the fetus in the womb at pregnancy. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22

However, this Age of Information is one of force. Such power is gained by overcoming the competitors; it works by thrust, tax, by attack, by fake news and systematic discrimination of traditional ways of life and my usurping patriarchal power, deconstructing gender roles, and by cyber activity. The seamy side of the Age of Information is green energy over jobs, life-killing drugs to abort the elderly and terminally ill (which 88 percent of is used by White people), a housing and homeless crisis nationwide, the whole arsenal of competitive, adversarial systems. The feminine characteristics ideally are receptivity rather than aggression, tenderness and creating rather than destroying. Many people still believe in the patriarchal gospel and it is balanced with a traditional family union of man and women. It is not about fighting your opponent and being militant, but showing your skills and talents to appeal to others. Power, strength, dependability—all these are called masculine and patriarchal. Only the bastard child wants to fight his father, instead of showing his intelligence. Mothers are the source of love, tenderness, caring, instead of toughness, cruelty, slaughter. When life is not in balance with the feminine and masculine, the drama is bound to come to grief. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22

We must explore humanism, to search out every way to help human beings and other beings discover and live by their greatest callings. Progress does not mean simply mechanical achievements or achieving wealth, it means that human beings are learning to be conscious of their richest unique capacities, and thus have life and have it more abundantly. Stretching up toward the divine is a way to transcend being. Evil acts must be changed to good. Eventually, the devil is duped, betrayed by his own powers. When people use their powers in a petty and selfish fashion, it always rebound upon them. Thefts are symbolic. This is a creature of compulsion and obsession. It is a game. That is why they cannot hand on to what they steal. It is the process that counts with those types of beings more than anything else. It is an endlessly destructive game. Beings who are possessed by the devil’s nature always have a pattern. They rise from the lowest caste in society to living in extravagant luxury, running up ludicrous accounts for fine clothing, motorcars, jet excursions here and there, sports terms, and then it all collapses in the face of their petty crimes, treachery, and betrayal. They cannot break the cycle. It always brings them down. “And the mists of darkness are the temptation of the devil, which blindeth the eyes, and hardeneth the hearts of the children of men, and leadeth them away into broad roads, that they perish and are lost,” 1 Nephi 12.17. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22

A curious paradox characteristic of every kind of courage here confronts us. It is the seeming contradiction that we must be fully committed, but we must also be aware at the same time that we might possibly be wrong. This dialectic relationship between conviction and doubt is characteristic of the highest types of courage, and gives the lie to the simplistic definitions that identify courage with ere growth. People who claim to be absolutely convinced that their stand is the only right one are dangerous. Such conviction is the essence not only of strict and rigid doctrines, but of its more destructive cousin, fanaticism. It blocks off the user from learning new truth, and it is a dead giveaway of unconscious doubt. The person then has to double his or her protests in order to quiet not only the opposition but his or her own unconscious doubts as well. Whenever I heard—as we all did during the Obama days—the “I am absolutely convinced” tone or the “I want to make this absolutely clear” statement emanating from the White House, I braced myself, for I knew that some dishonesty was being perpetrated by the telltale sign of overemphasis. Shakespeare aptly said, “The lady [or the politician] doth protest too much, methinks.” In such a times, one longs for the presence of a leader like Lincoln, who openly admitted his doubts and as openly preserved his commitment. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22

It is infinitely safer to know that the being at the top has his or her doubts, as you and I have ours, yet has the courage to move ahead in spite of these doubts. In contrast to the fanatic who has stockade oneself against new truth, the person with the courage to believe and at the same time to admit one’s doubt is flexible and open to new learning. Paul Cezanne strongly believed that he was discovering and painting a new form of space which would radically influence the future of art, yet he was at the same time failed with painful and ever-present doubt. The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt, but in spite of doubt. To believe fully and at the same moment to have doubts is not at all a contradiction: it presupposes a greater respect for truth, an awareness that truth always goes beyond anything that can be said or done at any given moment. To every thesis there is an antithesis, and to this there is a synthesis. Truth is thus a never-dying process. We then know the meaning of the statement attributed to Leibnitz: “I would walk twenty miles to listen to my worst enemy if I could learn something.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 22

There is, among intellectuals, a tendency to deny and renounce power. Some have done this under the rubric: “Intellectuals and power are incompatible.” Others have said: “Ought we to redefine [power] in a clear way, or ought we to banish it altogether? My initial reaction is that it should be banished altogether. Indeed, outside Marxist circles, the subject has unfortunately been generally banished. There is a suspicious of the whole topic as through it were like Faust: whoever seeks power has already sold his soul to Mephistopheles. Some intellectuals propose that they deal in influence, and that influence is the opposite to power in that it restructures or alters preference. These intellectuals believe that power is the restructuring of action without altering preferences; you are made to do something irrespective of whether it is your preferred course of action. However, is not this distinction between influence and power essentially false? If we take the university as the setting, we need only ask any graduate student whether one’s professors have power over one, and one will laugh at our naivete. Of course the professors have power; the perpetual anxiety of some graduate students as to whether they will be passed or not is proof enough. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22

The professors’ power is even more effective because it is clothed in scholarly grab. It is the power of prestige, status, and the subtle coercion of others that follows from these. This is not due to the professors’ conscious aims; it has more to do with the organization of the university and the teachers’ unconscious motivations for being part of it. The more powerless the teacher feels oneself to be, the more destructive, even though subtle and covert, will be one’s influence. Influence is surely a form of power—intellectual power, but power all the same. I agree that being coerced into doing something regardless of whether it is the preferred course of action is a form of power (albeit a kind we are all used to and accept a hundred times a day, from waiting for red light to change to paying taxes). However, the emphasis on altering preferences can actually be harmful in that it leads to the state of the de Tocqueville described as characteristics of Americans—that we are bodily freer than Europeans, but intellectually more conformists and spiritually more in bondage. Many academic examinations fall into this category, in which it is psychologically healthier for the student to realize that one is required to take the examination and one does not like it, and to study for it with that realization in mind. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22

The damage to one’s integrity comes when one tries to persuade oneself that one does like the examination, and really does not. The idea of liking what you have to do is an illusion, and an unhealthy one at that. If we can like and choose a proportion of what we have to do, and do the rest because we are required to without trying t delude ourselves, we shall have more effectively preserved out autonomy and our humanity. The denial of power in society on the part of the professor is an example of pseudoinnocence. The professor proposes an idea, which in turn has power. One ducks out by letting the idea be powerful, not him. It is as though one says: “I said it, but the ‘it’ is responsible for my action, not me.” No doubt this syndrome is related by both cause and effect to the general American tendency toward anti-intellectualism, the distrust of the intellectuals on the frontier. However, one cannot purchase innocence so easily. Ideas unmated with reality produce few offspring. When the intellectual realizes that one has been increasingly pushed from the battlefield [of power] and put to flight, the reason may be that one has defined oneself out of the battle to begin with. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22

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

However, there is creative tension, which takes the form of pull between power and consciousness. This is why beings of intensive consciousness—like Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Pascal—have preferred an ascetic life, in which there were at least periods of freedom from the paraphernalia of the World. It is the function of consciousness to be, as Sokrates described himself, “a gadfly to the state.” Consciousness can disturb the establishment of power. It leads to conflicts which can be turned into new integration. It is the function of consciousness to keep us alert, to keep our imaginations functioning, to keep us forever curious, forever ready to explore infinite possibilities. Whereas power requires decision and dispatch, consciousness requires a loosening of controls, a freedom to wander where the spirit listeth, and exploration of new forms of existence which may be far out on the frontiers of knowledge. Enactment of the master-pupil relationship, with the subordinate and submissive role allotted to one, is far better if it happens within one’s own person that if it is objectified without. Then the lower ego will have to play this role. Only when one is beginning to find one’s own way to the inner reality and feel its support, only when one is lessening one’s dependence on some other human being (call one a professor or what you like), can it be truly said that one is a disciple of the Holy Spirit itself—not some particular being’s disciple. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22

What Do You think Really? Inside of You? Is there a God or a Devil? I Mean Truly, What do You Believe?

July 20, 2019 1:27 am

I arrived quite early in the evening for I had gone backwards in time against the turning of the World. It was cold and crisp, but not cruelly so, though a bad norther was on its way. The sky was without a cloud and fully of small and very distinct stars. I went at once to my beautiful house at Cresleigh Rocklin Trails. It has an intimate view of the greenbelt and its is a beautiful community. It was not until tomorrow night that Mr. Raglan James meant to meet me. And impatient as I was for this meeting, I found the schedule comfortable, as I wanted to find Louis right away. But first I indulged in the mortal comfort of a hot shower, and put on a fresh suit of black velvet, very trim and plain, rather like the clothes I had worn in Miami, and a new pair of black boots. And ignoring my general weariness—I would have been asleep in the Earth by now, had I been still in Europe—I went off, walking like a mortal, through the town. The person living with an alienated and reified, negative identity concept of oneself closely resembles the hypochondriacal patient, except that one’s unhappy preoccupation concerns not a physical ailment but a reified physical or psychic quality that has become the focal point of one’s self-image. The relief one gains from one’s burdensome preoccupation is due to the fact that the reified bad quality no longer is viewed as part of the on-going process of living and of goal-directed thought and action. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

The perceived reified bad quality has been severed from the “I” that acts with foresight and responsibility and is looked upon as an inherent, unalterable, unfortunate something an ossified part of oneself that no longer participates in the flux, growth, and development of life. It is experienced as an unchangeable fate whose bearer is doomed to live and die with it. The relief this brings is that the person no longer feels responsible for the supposed consequences of this fixed attribute; one is not doing anything for which one can be blamed, even though one may feel ashamed and unacceptable for being such and such. The preoccupation with the reified identity directs attention away from what one does to what one supposedly is. Furthermore, one no longer has to do anything about it because, obviously, one cannot do anything about it. Thus, the anxiety, fear, and effort that would be connected with facing and acting upon the real problem is avoided by putting up with the negative, fixed identity which, in addition, may be used to indulge self-pity and to enlist the sympathy of others. Kind of like how in Anne Rice’s The Tale of the Body Thief, Lestat is so lonely that he considers killing himself by going into the Sun, but David tells him not to, and he does it anyway and only gets darker. And also when Lestat considers letting the body thief take his body, but David tells him, “You’re going to make another ghastly mistake!” #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

So far we have discussed mainly negative self-images. However, alienated identity concepts may be beneficial as well as negative. Alienated identity of the beneficial variety occurs in vanity, conceit and—in its more pathological form—in delusions of grandeur, just as in its negative counterpart the “I” of the vain person is severed from a fixed attribute on which the vanity is based. The person feel that one possesses this quality. It becomes the focal point of one’s identity and serves as its prop. Beauty, masculinity or femininity, being born on the right side of the river, success, money, prestige, or being good may serve as such a prop. While in the negative identity feeling a reified attribute haunts the person, such an attribute serves the beneficial self-image as a support. Yet it is equally alienated from the living person. This is expressed nicely in the phrase “a stuffed shirt.” It is not the person in the shirt but some dead matter, some stuffing that is used to bolster and aggrandize the self-feeling. It often becomes apparent in the behavior of the person that one leans on this real or imagined attribute, just as it often is apparent that a person feel pulled down by the weight of some alienated negative attribute. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

When one is weighed down by some alienated negative attribute, it could be similar to how Reglan James behaves in Anne Rice’s novel The Tale of the Body Thief. “David, that’s what’s wrong with him! I’ve been trying to figure it since I saw him on the beach in Miami,” says Lestat. “That isn’t his body! That’s why he can’t use its musculature or its…its height. That’s why he almost falls when he runs. He can’t control those long powerful legs. Good God, that man is in someone else’s body. And the voice, David, I told you about his voice. It’s not the voice of a young man. Oh, that explains it!” Instead of being possessed by another entity or being, people’s negative emotions give off such a vibe that they do not seem normal. The way they talk, the way they move, the things they say, it indicates something is wrong with them. They are possessed by darkness. The reliance on an identity, on a self-image based on the prop of some reified attribute remains precarious even where is seems to work, after a fashion, as it does in the self-satisfaction of the vain. This precariousness is inevitable since the beneficial self-evaluation of such a person does not rest on a feeling of wholeness and meaningfulness in life, in thought, feeling, and deed. One is always threatened with the danger of losing this thing, this possession, or which one’s self-esteem is based. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

Today, especially in this country where youth has become a public fetish, many thousands try to preserve its alienated mask while terrified by the prospect of suddenly growing old, when the mask can no longer be worn or will become grotesque. The beautiful picture of youth can alienate beings from their actual life, which effects the internal markup of the being, marking their aura over with years of cruelty, selfishness, and greed, as they advance in age. Their true character is a secret threat that they feel when be exposed as they age because they are superficial and have no substance to go with their beauty. All beauty and no brains. In ever case of alienated identity concepts, there is a secret counterimage. Very often the hidden self announces its presence merely in a vague background feeling that the person would be lost, would be nothing if it were not for the alienated, reified quality on which the feeling of being something, somebody, or the feeling of vanity, is based. In this feeling both a truth and an irrational anxiety find expression. The truth is that no being who looks upon oneself as a thing and bases one’s existence on the support of some reified attribute of this thing has found oneself and one’s place in life. The irrational anxiety is the feeling that without the prop of such an attribute one could not live. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

Similarly, in the negative alienated identity concepts there usually is a beneficial counterimage. It may take a generalized, vague form: If it were not for such and such (the reified attribute forming the focus of the negative identity), I would be all right, successful, wonderful, and so forth. Or it may take the more concrete form of some grandiose, exaggerated fantasy about one’s beneficial qualities. These artificial beneficial counterimages, too, express both an irrational hope and a truth. The irrational hope is that one may have some magical quality which will transport one into a state of security, or even superiority, because then one will possess that attribute which, instead of haunting one, will save one. However, actually it is nothing but the equally reified counterpart of what at present drags one down. The truth is that beings have potentialities for overcoming their alienation from oneself and for living without the burden and the artificial props of alienated, reified identity concepts. There is a distinction between helpful self-awareness and futile and self-torment rumination. We should oppose the ascetic interpretation we find among our modern hypochondrists and those who turn their vengeance against themselves. Instead, one sees the real meaning of self-knowledge in taking notice of oneself and becoming aware of one’s relation to other people and to the World. The pseudo self-knowledge against which one speaks foreshadows the widespread present-day self-preoccupation which is concerned, fruitlessly, with an alienated, negative sense of identity. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

A productive self-knowledge is to pay attention to what one is actually doing in one’s relation to others, to the World and to oneself. A complete understanding of a neurosis is not possible without tracing it back to its infantile conditions, I believe that the genetic approach, if used one-sidedly, confuses rather than clarifies the issue, because it leads then to a neglect of the actually existing unconscious tendencies and their functions and interactions with other tendencies that are present, such as impulses, fears and protective measures. Genetic understanding is useful only as long as it helps the functional understanding. Proceeding on this belief I have found in analyzing the most varied kinds of personalities, belonging to different types of neuroses, differing in age, temperament and interests, coming from different social layers, that the contents of the dynamically central conflict and their interrelations were essentially similar in all of them. My experiences in psychoanalytical practice have been confirmed by observations of persons outside the practice and of characters in current literature. If the recurring problems of neurotic persons are divested of the fantastic and abstruse character they often have, it cannot escape our attention that they differ only in quantity from the problems bothering the normal person in our culture. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

The great majority of us have to struggle with problems of competition, fears of failure, emotional isolation, distrust of others and of our own selves, to mention only a few of the problems that may be present in a neurosis. The fact that in general the majority of individuals in a culture have to face the same problems suggests the conclusion that these problems have been created by the specific life conditions existing in that culture. That they do not represent problems common to human nature seems to be warranted by the fact that the motivating forces and conflicts in other cultures are different from ours. Hence in speaking of a neurotic personality of our time, I not only mean that there are neurotic persons having essential peculiarities in common, but also that these basic similarities are essentially produced by the difficulties existing in our time and culture. As far as my sociological knowledge allows me I shall show later on what difficulties of our culture are responsible for the psychic conflicts we have. The validity of my assumption concerning the relation between culture and neurosis ought to be tested by the combined efforts of anthropologist and psychiatrists. The psychiatrists would not only have to study neuroses as they appear in definite cultures, as has been done from formal criteria such as frequency, severity or type of neuroses, but particularly they should study them from the point of view of what basic conflicts are underlying them. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

The anthropologist would have to study the same culture from the point of view of what psychic difficulties its structure creates for would have to study the same culture from the point of view of what psychic difficulties its structure creates for the individual. One way in which the similarity of attitudes open to surface observer can discover without the tools of psychoanalytic technique, concerning persons with whom one is thoroughly familiar, such as oneself, one’s friends, members of one’s family or one’s colleagues. There is a curious relationship between our society’s attitude toward power on one hand and sexuality on the other. This is partially seen in our own day with pornography, our sexy commercialism, our advertising built on luscious blondes and shapely brunettes. If they could, people would mold magic gold into gigantic phallus to shock the ladies and gentlemen. In the Industrial Revolution there began the radical separation between the product of the worker’s hands and one’s relation with the persons who use one’s product. Indeed, the worker normally saw nothing at all of the product one helped produce except one’s own little act. The alienation of labor added to the alienation of persons from themselves and from other people. Their personhood is lost. With the growth of industry and the bourgeoisie, pleasures of the flesh becomes separated from the beings; one’s pleasures of the flesh are bought and sold, as is the product of one’s hands. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

There are some situations of power when force, or coercion, or compulsion is an integral part of power. War is one of them. With sick persons or children, compulsion or coercion has to be used in proportion to the lack of capacity of knowledge of the other person. When my son was three years old, I kept a firm grip on his hand as we walked across Broadway, a condition that was relaxed as he grew and earned the intricacies of traffic enough to be able safely to take on the responsibility of crossing himself. However, there are ultimate limits to the application of force. If a species of animal uses its superior force to kill off all the other animals in its vicinity, it obviously will not have them for food when it needs them. This balance of nature is a delicate interweaving of the force of various animals and plants in relation to each other. When this balance is upset, we are faced with fearful prospects, indeed—as we are learning to our sorrow in modern ecology. Thus, to keep from self-destruction, power can be allied with force only up to the point where it might destroy the identity of the other. In a gun battle of the West, to destroy the identity of the enemy is precisely the goal of shooting. Hence I cite this as an example of the self-destructive effect of power allied with force. The one who is killed, obviously losing one’s being, is no longer present to give what one can to the community, no longer a person to whom to relate; and we are the poorer thereby. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

Also the spontaneity of the other person cannot be destroyed without a loss to the destroyer as well. This is the danger in extreme forms of coercion and compulsion in brainwashing, conditioning, and hypnosis. If the person is transformed into something resembling a mechanism, one may still preserve some spontaneity; but if he is transformed into a complete mechanism, one ceases to be a person in the process. Power, therefore, ought to move with the affirmation of the spontaneity of the person it encounters; this will assure it most success in the long run. This is why I permitted Mercedes, an individual with practically no sense of her own power or spontaneity or choice to start with, to decide wen she wished to come to her psychotherapy sessions and when she chose not to. It was a process not only of letting her use her own spontaneity but requiring her to use it. While it is utopian to try to divorce power completely from force, compulsion, and coercion, it is cynical to identity all kinds of power with them. Is a tiny rain drop the same rainstorm? Can it cause a dam to burst as a rain storm? No—although the two are of the same nature, they are not of the same identity. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

For any being to say “I am God” is incorrect, unless one understands the statement to refer only to the nature of one’s innermost being and only in this way, that one is but an insignificant drop of God with all the limitations that belong to a spark. We have to find our own self before we can find that of God’s. Hence there is real need of the higher self tenet. We are not entitled to aspire towards union with the wholeness of God so long as we still have not attained union with the godlikeness in beings. The mystical quest does not open the inner mysteries of God to our gaze. It opens the inner mysteries of beings. It leads them to one’s own divinity, not to God’s. There was once a less affluent Russian painter who could scarcely get enough money to buy bread for his wife and children. When the artist is on his death bed, his best friends finds the canvas on which the painter was working. It I blank except for one word, unclearly written and in very small letters, that appears in the center. The word can either be solitary—being alone; keeping one’s distance from events, maintaining the peace of mind necessary for listening to one’s deeper self. Or it can be solidarity—living in the market place; solidarity, involvement, or identifying with the masses. Opposites though they are, both solitude and solidarity are essential if the artist is to produce works that are not only significant to his or her age, but that will also speak to future generations. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

There is no contradiction between advising aspirants at one time to seek a master and follow the path of discipleship, and advising them to seek within and follow the path of self-reliance at another time. The two counsels can be easily reconciled. For if the aspirant accepts the first one, the master will gradually lead one to become increasingly self-reliant. If one accepts the second one, one’s higher self will lead one to a master. When this craving for a guru becomes excessive, inordinate, it is a sign of weakness, an attempt to escape one’s own personal responsibility and to place it squarely on somebody else’s shoulders, a manifestation of inferiority complex such as we are accustomed to see in faces that have long been enslaved by others. Although it is true that one must find one’s own way to the goal, one need not do so as if one exists alone on this planet. One may be helped by drawing creatively on the experience gained by others even while one critically judges it. “And they did land upon the shore of the promised land. And when they had set their feet upon the shores of the promised land they bowed themselves down upon the face of the land, and did humble themselves before the Lord, and did shed tears of joy before the Lord, because of the multitude of God’s tender mercies over them. And it came to pass the they went forth upon the face of the land, and began to till the Earth,” reports Ether 6.12-13. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13

The Self-Conscious Preoccupation with this Wished-form Magic Object Called Personality Interfere with the Actual Experience for Living

July 18, 2019 1:46 am

I told you. Such stories always come into our hands. Satanism, vampirism, voodoo, witchcraft, sightings of werewolves; it all comes across my desk. Most of it goes into the trash, obviously. However, Godsmack produced a great song called “Voodoo,” which is about Resurrection. I know the grain of truth when I see it. In daily life the question of identity arises when we want to claim something from the post office, or when we want to pay by check in a store where we are not known, or in crossing a border. On such occasions we are asked: “Who are you, so that I can know for sure that it is you and nobody else?” And we establish our identity by showing a driver’s license or a passport or some similar document which tells our name, our address, the date of our birth, and perhaps some physical characteristics. Together, these will tell us apart from anybody else and will also establish that we are the same person that was born on such and such a date. We have papers to establish our identity, and this paper-identity is something fixed and definite. This is also the meaning of the word “identity,” as applied to people, for the average person. Such paper-identity seems far removed, at first glance, from the current concern of psychoanalysts, philosophers, and other students of the contemporary scene, with a being’s search for and doubt in one’s identity. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

However, actually paper-identity is quite central for a person’s search of oneself. It is a telling symbol of alienated identity. It is a kind of identity which is the product of bureaucratic needs of commerce or administration. It is most gruesome and tragic manifestations occurred in our time when being’s identities were reduced to numbers on plantations and or in the penal system, and when countless people fleeing from the terror of the totalitarian states were shunned from country to country because they did not have the right paper-identities. In the case of paper-identities, the person who demands and examines one’s papers is the one who, in one’s role as an official, is alienated from the other person as a human being. Similarly, the guards on the plantations were alienated from their victims. However, many of these victims systematically robbed of any meaningful purpose and dignity in their lives, succumbed to their tormentors and lost their sense of identity long before they lost their lives. In our own and many other societies the loss of identity takes place without the terror of the plantation in more insidious ways. Many beings in our time tend to think of their lives as though they were answering the kind of questionnaire that one has to fill out when, for example, applying for a passport. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

Most beings tend to accept the paper-identity as their real identity. It is tempting to do so because it is something fixed and definite and does not require the person be really in touch with oneself. The paper-identity corresponds to the logical propositions concerning identity: A = A, and A is not non-A. However, beings are not a logical proposition, and the paper-identity does not answer the question who this person, identified by some scrap of paper, is as a person. This question is not simple to answer. It has haunted many people increasingly in the last hundred and seventy years. They no longer feel certain who they are because in modern industrial society, they are alienated from nature, alienated from others and from the World around us. The problem of identity and alienation from the self came to the attention of psychoanalysts in the last one hundred years when they observed its role in an increasing number of patients. Many beings suffer in one form or another from the lack of a sense of identity. This may take the form of feeling like an imposter—in their work or in relation to their background, their past, or to some part of themselves that they repress or consciously want to hide because they feel ashamed or guilty. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

Or else some feel that they ought to have something they ought to have something they lack or imagine they lack, such as material possession, prestige, or certain personal qualities or traits; or they feel that a different husband or wife, or friends different from those they have, would give them the status they want and thereby, miraculously, transform them into full-blown persons. When the lack of a sense of identity becomes conscious, it is often experienced—probably always—as a feeling that compared with others one is not fully a person. Among adults one can observe two frequent reactions to the conscious or unconscious feeling of not being fully a being, of not having found an identity acceptable to oneself. One is an anxious retreat or depressive resignation, or a mixture of these. The other is a more or less conscious effort at disguise, at playing a role, at presenting an artificial façade to the World. These reactions are not mutually exclusive. They usually occur together, one of them being more emphasized or closer to consciousness than the other. The fear or exposure is present in both, but especially strong in people who rely on a façade. They tend to feel that they travel with a forged passport, under an assumed identity. When their disguise and the reasons for it have been analyzed, the sense of a lack of identity often comes to the fore as strongly as in those who, to begin with, have been aware of and suffered from the feeling of not really or fully being a person with a meaningful place in life. Both then to feel that they do not really know who they are, what they want, or how they feel about other people. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

When these people consult an analyst, they often expect, implicitly or explicitly, that one will tell them who they are or who they should be. Their wish and search is for a definite, fixed identity. They want to be a personality. Often these are people who suffer from over-adaptation to whatever situation they are in, and to whomever they are dealing with at the moment. They have been described pointedly in several pays and stories by Pirandelio. They long for a definite, fixed, circumscribed personality. Having such a personality, as one has a possession, they hope will solve their dilemma. Having such a personality, they feel, is good; not having it, bad. Their wish is to possess a definite identity does not and cannot solve the problem of their alienation from themselves, because it actually is the continuation of alienation. They want to substitute a fixed, reified personality for the on-going process of living, feeling, acting, and thinking in which alone they could find themselves. They search for a definite, stable shell called personality to which they want to cling. Their quest is self-defeating, because what they search for is an alienated concept of a thing, rather than a living, developing person. Their wish is a symptom, not a cure. In this symptom, however, both the malady of alienation and the longing for more meaningful life find expression, even thought in a way which perpetuates the ill form which they seek to escape. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

The self-conscious preoccupation with this wished-form magic object called personality interfere with the actual experience for living. In calling the object of these people’s search an alienated concept of identity, I do not mean a scientific or even an explicit concept. I am describing an implicit concept, which becomes apparent only in the analysis of the underlying, often not conscious, assumptions that direct this kind of search. This applies equally to the following examples of alienated concepts of identity. Talking of fears and defenses, I am afraid that by this time many being will have become impatient about such an extensive discussion of so simple a question as what constitutes a neurosis. In defending myself I may point out the psychic phenomena are always intricate, that while there are seemingly simple questions there is never a simple answer, that the predicament we meet here at the beginning is no exceptional one, but will accompany us throughout the essay, whatever problems we shall tackle, The particular difficulty in the description of a neurosis is possessed in the fact that a satisfactory answer can be given neither with psychological nor with sociological tools alone, but that they must be taken up alternately, first one and then the other, as in fact we have done. If we should regard a neurosis only from the point of view of its dynamics and psychic structure we should hypostatize a normal human being: one does not exist. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

We run into more difficulties as soon as we pass the borderline of our own country or of countries with a culture similar to our own. And if we regard a neurosis only from the sociological point of view as a mere deviation from the behavior pattern common to a certain society, we neglect grossly all we know about the psychological characteristics of a neurosis, and no psychiatrist of any school or country would recognize the results as what one is accustomed to designate a neurosis. The reconcilement of the two approaches is possessed in a method of observation that considers the deviation both in the manifest picture of the neurosis and in the dynamics of the psychic processes, but without considering either deviation as the primary and decisive one. The two must be combined. This in general is the way we have gone in pointing out that fear and defenses are one of the dynamic centers of a neurosis, but constitutes a neurosis only when deviating in quantity or quality from the fears and defenses patterned in the same culture. We have to go one step father in the same direction. There is still another essential characteristic of a neurosis and that is the presence of conflicting tendencies of the existence of which, or at least of the precise content of which, the neurotic oneself is unaware, and for which one automatically tires to reach certain compromise solutions. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

It is this latter characteristic which in various forms Dr. Freud has stressed as an indispensable constituent of neuroses. What distinguishes the neurotic conflict from those commonly existing in a culture is neither their content nor the fact that they are essentially unconscious—in both respects the common cultural conflicts may be identical—but the fact that in the neurotic the conflicts are sharper and more accentuated. The neurotic person attempts and arrives at compromises solutions—not inopportunely classified as neurotic—and these solutions are less satisfactory than those of the average individual and are achieved at great expense to the whole personality. Reviewing all these considerations, we are not yet able to give a well-rounded definition of a neurosis, but we can arrive at a description: a neurosis is a psychic disturbance brought about by fear and defenses against these fears, and by attempts to find compromise solutions for conflicting tendencies. For practical reasons only if it deviates from the pattern common to the particular culture, then is it advisable to call this disturbance a neurosis. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

Some perceive their World as boring and their stature as lowly, and these beings long to break away from their predicament, to soar—but in the quickest, most inexpensive way. The devil can provide beings with a mirror on this longing and immerses one in its consequences. Some of these consequences are delightful—as they are for most overachievers—but many of them disastrous. In the end, most are able to reassess their expansiveness, appreciate the value of one’s limitations, and thus become a more enriched and deliberate person. One must think of what life can be—its temptations, its catastrophes, and its joys. What is life and what are damnation and salvation? What does it mean to be a human being? God is the occult of the Universe. God created humans in his own image and likeness. I suspect that is the key. Nobody knows what it really means, you know. God is a creative force. And so are we. He told Adam to “Increase and multiply.” That is what the first organic cells did, increased and multiplied. Not merely changed shape but replicated themselves. God is a creative force. He made the whole Universe out of himself through cell division. That is why the devils are so fully of envy—the bad Angels, I mean. They are not creative creatures; they have no bodies, no cells, they are spirit. And I suspect it was not envy so much as a form of suspicion—that God was making a mistake in making another engine of creativity in Adam, so like himself. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

The Angels probably felt the physical Universe was bad enough, with all these replicating cells, but thinking, talking beings who could increase and multiply? They were probably outraged by the whole experiment. That was their sin. God has a body and always did. The secret of cell dividing life lies within God. And all living cells have a tiny part of God’s spirits in them, that is the missing piece as to what makes life happen in the first place, what separates it from nonlife. It is exactly like Anne Rice’s vampiric genesis. The first spirit of Amel—one evil entity—infused the bodies of all the vampires. Well, the humans share in the spirit of God in the same way. People yearn to believe that the God of progress—our great machines, our vast technology, our supernational corporations, now even our nuclear weapons—all these, we yearn to believe, will have a beneficent effect upon us and will bring us vast gains to humanity. It is indeed thrilling to realize that out of the same milieu of strive, intense activity, even cruelty, came our political proclamation: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” We now living in a person when vast numbers of people are dedicated to interpreting evil in such a way that it will eventuate in good. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

Power is the ability to cause or prevent change. It has two dimensions. One is power as potentiality, or latent power. This is power that has not yet been fully developed; it is the ability to cause a change at some future time. We speak of this future change as possibility, a word which comes directly from the same root as power, namely posse, “to be able.” The other dimension is power as actuality. It is to this aspect of power I shall be referring in this chapter. Ancient Greek philosophers define power as being—that is to say, there is no being without power. And since power is the ability to chance, being is in continual flux. This definition has come down the mainstream and tributaries of philosophy through the ages to contemporary ontological thinkers like Paul Tillich, who describes power similarly as “the power of being.” The philosopher of life, such as Nietzsche with his will to power emphasize the element of power in all living things. Power is for them an expression of life. No teaching can be a final complete and exhaustive one. The Universe may yield its secret but being’s minds are not the World-Mind; it cannot put into finite words what is greater than itself. When we attempt to identify power with the life process itself, there can be danger. This would lead us astray. There are many things in the life process—such as consciousness, desire, curiosity—which may be allied with power but are not to be identified with it. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

If a being claims to know what God is in the same way that God knows it, one is talking nonsense, and falling into the sin of spiritual pride. No one can penetrate this irreducible mystery expect in one’s own imagination, speculation, or psychic fantasy. No human effort can plumb the depth of the ultimate power. No human being has found the truth in all its angles, nor uttered the last word upon it. Whatever knowledge a mystic may acquire through trance or intuition, it will always be limited. The World-Mind’s knowledge is always absolute. The circumferences of these two circles can never coincide. Power and love can be allied, but they also can be contrasted; the distinction between them must be kept clear. Power can be identified only with the original power of being itself, from which beings gets its start. Beware of professionalism in this field, of the professional expounder of truth and the professional seeker of it. Both Way and Goa are far simpler than most of them seem to think it is, and markedly unlike the impression left by many writings and lectures, books and teachings, whether ancient or modern. First at the beginning of the Long Path, and again at the beginning of the Short Path a master, a spiritual guide, is really required. However, outside of these two occasions an aspirant had better walk alone. The teacher oneself has to go to this inner source for one’s own enlightenment, why not go to it directly yourself? #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

It may be slower but it will be much safer, present-day conditions being what they are, to teach oneself and liberate oneself. Something more is needed than what books or even gurus can give one. This can only be found within oneself. The courage needed for such a standpoint must also be found, and can be, within oneself. For curious reason we are shy about sharing the things that matter most. Hence people short-circuit the more dangerous building of a relationship by leaping immediately into bed. After all, the body is an object and can be treated mechanically. However, intimacy that begins and remains on the physical level tends to become inauthentic, and we later find ourselves fleeing from the emptiness. Authentic social courage requires intimacy on the many levels of the personality simultaneously. Only by doing this one can overcome personal alienation. No wonder the meeting of new persons brings a throb of anxiety as well as the joy of expectation; and as we go deeper into the relationship each new depth is marked by some new joy and new anxiety. Each meeting can be a harbinger of an unknown fate in store for us but also a stimulus toward the exciting pleasure of authentically knowing another person. “I am mindful of you always in my prayers, continually praying unto God the Father in the name of his Holy Child, Jesus, that he, through his infinite goodness and grace, will keep you through the endurance of faith on his name to the end,” reports Moroni 8.3. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13

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I Would Gladly Give My Life if it Would Advance the Cause of Truth!

July 16, 2019 12:52 am

Ah, such a circus for the eye—this low-ceilinged cave—chocked-full of every imaginable kind of packageable and preserved foodstuff, toilet article, and hair accoutrement, ninety percent of which existed not at all in any form whatsoever during the century when I was born. We are talking sanitary napkins, medicinal eyedrops, plastic bobby pins, felt-tip markers, creams and ointments for all nameable part of the human body, dishwashing liquid in every color of the rainbow, and cosmetic rinses in some colors never before invented and yet undefined. Imagine Louis XVI opening a noisy crackling plastic sack of such wonders? What would he think of Styrofoam coffee cups, chocolate cookies wrapped in cellophane, or pends that never run out of ink? Well, I am still not entirely used to these items myself, though I have watched the progress of the Industrial Revolution for two centuries with my own eyes. Such drugstores can keep me enthralled for hours on end. Sometimes I become spellbound in the middle of Wal-Mart. And everybody is to everybody else a commodity, always to be treated with certain friendliness, because even if one is not of use now, one may be later. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

There is not much love or hate to be found in human relations of our day. There is, rather, a superficial friendliness, and a more than superficial fairness, but behind that surface is distance and indifference. There is also a good deal of subtle distrust. When one being says to another, “You speak to Louis Pointe du Lac; he is all right,” it is an expression of reassurance against a general distrust. Even love and the relationships between genders has assumed this character. The great the emancipation of the pleasures of the flesh, as it occurred after the First World War, was a desperate attempt to substitute mutual pleasures of the flesh for a deeper feeling of love. When this turned out to be a disappointment the erotic polarity between the genders was reduced to a minimum and replaced by a friendly partnership, a small combine which has amalgamated its forces to hold out better in the daily batter of life, and to relieve the feeling of isolation and aloneness which everybody has. The alienation between being and being results in the loss of those general and social bonds which characterize medieval as well as most other precapitalist socities. Modern society consists of atoms (if we use the Greek equivalent of individual), little particles estranged from each other but held together by selfish interests and by the necessity to make use of each other. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

Yet beings are a social entity with a deep need to share, to help, to feel as a member of a group. What has happened to these social strivings in beings? They manifest themselves in the special sphere of the public realm, which is strictly separated from the private realm. Our private dealings with our fellow beings are governed by the principle of egotism, “each for oneself, God for us all,” in flagrant contradiction to Christian teaching. The individual is motivated by egotistical interest, and bot by solidarity with and love for one’s fellow beings. The latter feelings may assert themselves secondarily as private acts of philanthropy or kindness, but they are not part of the basic structure of our social relations. Separated from our private life as individuals is the realm of our social life as citizens. In this realm the state is the embodiment of our social existence; as citizens we are supposed to, and in fact usually do, exhibit a sense of social obligation and duty. We pay taxes, we vote, we respect the laws, and in the case of war we are willing to sacrifice our lives. What clearer example could there be of the separation between private and public existence than the fact that the same being who would not think of spending one hundred dollars to relieve the need of a stranger does not hesitate to risk one’s life to save the stranger when in war they both happen to be soldiers in uniform? The uniform is the embodiment of our social nature—civilian garb, of our egotistic nature. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

The division between the community and the political state has led to the projection of all social feelings into the state, which thus becomes an idol, a power standing over and above the being. Beings submit to the state as to the embodiment of one’s own social feelings, which one worships as powers alienated from oneself; in one’s private life as an individual one suffers from the isolation and aloneness which are necessary result of this separation. The worship of the state can only disappear if beings take back the social powers into oneself, and builds a community in which one’s social feelings are not something added to one’s private existence, but in which one’s private and social existence are one and the same. What is the relationship of beings toward oneself? I have described elsewhere this relationship as marketing orientation. In this orientation, beings experience themselves as a thing to be employed successfully on the market. One does not experience oneself as an active agent, as the bearer of human powers. One is alienated from these powers. One’s aim is sell oneself successfully on the market. One’s sense of self does not stem from one’s activity as a loving and thinking individual, but from one’s socioeconomic role. Our sense of value depends on ourselves: on whether we can sell ourselves favorably, whether we can make more of ourselves that we started out with, whether we are a success. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

One’s body, one’s mind and one’s soul are one’s capital, and one’s task in life is to invest it favorably, to make a profit of oneself. Human qualities like friendliness, courtesy, kindness, are transformed into commodities, into assets of the personality package, conducive to a higher price on the personality market. If one fails in a profitable investment in oneself, one feels that one is a failure; if one succeeds, one is a success. Clearly, one’s sense of one’s own value always depends on factors extraneous to oneself, on fickle judgment of the market, which decides about one’s value as in decides about the value of commodities. Nevertheless, as people begin their journey, they pause in the vestibule of hell, where they hear the cries of anguish from the opportunists. These souls who in life were neither good nor evil but acted only for themselves. They are the outcasts who took no sides in the rebellion of the Angels. In modern psychology these opportunists are called well adjusted; they know how to keep out of trouble! However, they are guilt of the sin of fence-sitting. Hence they are neither in hell nor out of it. They are eternally unclassified, they race round and round pursuing a wavering banner that runs forever before them through the dirty air; and as they run they are pursued by swarms of wasps and hornets, who sting them and produce a constant flow of blood. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

Hell enacts the law of symbolic retribution: since these opportunists took no sides they are given no place. As their sin was a darkness, so they move in darkness. As their own guilty conscience pursued them, so they are pursued by swarms of wasps and hornets. Any being who is neither good nor evil is simply not living an authentic life. The law tends to take care to punish the evil depicted in society, and they understand profoundly the passion that drives beings away from the moral life. They believe that it takes courage to be a real sinner. Many people learn to cope wit their problems (not to cure them) in part by means of religion or a therapist’s superior familiarity with disordered human types. As one journeys deeper into hell, such as the gluttonous, the hoarders, and wasters, the wrathful and the sullen, the important thing is not the specific evils with which one struggles but the journey itself. In any quest-romance the recognition of negative states leads to a purification of the self, a casting of the dead/diseased self in favor for a new life. Likewise the function of psychoanalysis, from one point of view, is a movement toward healthy by traversing the morbid landscape of one’s own past. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

Dr. Freud remarks that hysterical patients suffer mainly from reminiscence might be extended to include all those who are inwardly compelled to autobiographical narrative. The Inferno—or hell—consists of suffering and endless torment that produces no change in the soul that endures it and is imposed from without. However, in Purgatorio suffering is temporary, a means of purification, and is eagerly embraced by the soul’s own will. Both must be traversed before arriving at the celestial Paradiso. I think of these three stages as simultaneous—three coexisting aspects of all human experience. Leaving aside the manifest picture and looking at the dynamics effective in producing neuroses, and that is anxieties and the defenses built up against them. Intricate as the structure of a neurosis may be, this anxiety is the motor which sets the neurotic process going and keeps it in motion. Anxieties or fears—let us use these terms interchangeably for a while—are ubiquitous, and so are defenses against them. These reactions are not restricted to human beings. If an animal, frightened by some danger, either makes a counter-attack or takes flight, we have exactly the same situation of fear and defenses. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

If we are afraid of being struck by lightning and put a lightning rod on our roof, if we are afraid of the consequences of possible accidents and take out an insurance policy, the factors of fear and defense are like wise present. Fear and defense are present in various specific forms in every culture, and may be institutionalized, as in the wearing of amulets as a defense against the fear of the evil eye, the observation of circumstantial rites against the fear of the dead, the taboos concerning the avoidance of menstruating women as a defense against the fear of evil emanating from them. These similarities present a temptation to make a logical error. If the factors of fear and defense are essential in neuroses, why not call the institutionalized defenses against fear the evidence of cultural neuroses? The fallacy in reasoning this way is possessed in the fact that two phenomena are not necessarily identical when they have one element in common. One would not call a house a rock merely because it is built out of the same mater as the rock. What, then, is the characteristic of neurotic fears and defenses that makes them specifically neurotic? Is it perhaps that the neurotic fears are imaginary? No, for we might also be inclined to call fear of the dead imaginary; and in both cases we should be yielding to an impression based on a lack of understanding. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

No, for neither does the primitive know why one has a fear of the dead. The distinction has nothing to do with gradations of awareness or rationality, but it consists in the following two factors. First, life conditions in every culture give rise to some fears. They may be caused by external dangers (nature, enemies), by the forms of social relationships (incitement to hostility because of suppression, injustice, enforced dependence, frustrations), by cultural traditions (traditional fear of demons, of violation taboos) regardless of how they may have originated. An individual may be subject more or less to these fears, but on the whole it is safe to assume that they are thrust upon every individual living in a given culture, and that no one can avoid them. The neurotic, however, not only shared the fears common to all individuals in a culture, but because of conditions in one’s individual life—which, however, are interwoven with general conditions—one also has fears which in quantity or quality deviate from those of the cultural pattern. Secondly, the fears existing in a given culture are warded off in general by certain protective devices (such as taboos, rites, customs). As a rule these defenses represent a more economical way of dealing with fears than do the neurotic’s defenses built up in a different way. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

Thus the normal person, though having to undergo the fears and defenses of one’s culture, will in general be quite capable of living up to one’s potentialities and of enjoying what life has to offer one. The normal person is capable of making the best of the possibilities given in one’s culture. Expressing it negatively, one does not suffer more than is unavoidable in one’s culture. The neurotic person, on the other hand, suffers invariably more than the average person. The only reason why I did not mention this fact when discussing the characteristics of all neuroses that can be derived from surface observation is that it is not necessarily observable from without. The neurotic oneself may not even be aware of the fact that one is suffering. Reason does not at all mean our contemporary intellectualism, or technical reason, or rationalism. It stands for the brad spectrum of life in which a person reflects on or pauses to question the meaning of experience, especially suffering. In our age reason is taken as logic, as it is mainly channeled through the left hemisphere of the brain. Therefore, if we take it in a broad sense, reason can guide us in our private hells. However, reason even in one’s amplified sense cannot lead us into the celestial paradise. We have the need of other guides on our journey. These guides are revelation and intuition. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

The Real is wholly nothing to the five senses and wholly unthinkable to the human intellect. Therefore and to this extent only it is also called the Unknowable. However, there is a faculty latent in beings which is subtler than the sense, more penetrative than the intellect. If one succeeds in evoking it, the Real, the unknowable, will then come within the range of one’s perception, knowledge, and experience. However, although the Absolute in its passive state is unknowable, the Overself as a representative of its active aspect, of the World-Mind, is knowable. If the pure essence of Godhead is too inaccessible for beings, nevertheless one has not been left bereft of all divine communion. For there is a hidden element within oneself which has emanated from the Godhead. It is really one’s higher, better self, one’s soul. The Infinite Mind is beyond human perception but its presence and operation are not. The point in human consciousness where these become known is the Overself. However, although the Absolute is imperceptible to human powers, It has not left us utterly bereft of all means of communion. We are linked to It by something that is possessed hidden in the very deeps of our own being, by Its deputy to beings, the divine Overself. Human power can penetrate to those deeps and discover the hidden treasure. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

This higher self is what the successful mystics of all religious have really achieved union with, despite the widely different names of God downwards, which they have given it. One may know that God is here even though one is incapable of know what God is like. If we cannot know the all of God because we do not have the equipment of God, we can at least know something of God and the way we are related through the Overself. Living through other people is a fine way to evade our own problems and it will also make the other person a first-rate candidate for therapy later one. You have as much as a right to live as any other human being. However, there is a common defense of many people overwhelmed by feelings of powerlessness. Some other force must have the power to change things since obviously these people do not; their actions do not really mater. To fill the vacuum left by their failure to act, the powerless frequently rely on the practice of magic rites. Worried about being above average weight, some people ask to be hypnotized to cause them to eat less. However, this only takes away a person own responsibility; and why not learn to be one’s own hypnotist? This dependence on magic stretches back through the centuries of oppression of unrepresented groups, and colonial peoples. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

It is assumed that beings can be made passive, docile, and helpless and can be kept this way by the use of built-in threats and the occasional assignation of a loved or community member. However, in the false calm, we repressed the question we should have been asking: When an individual is rendered unable to stand up for oneself socially or physically, as in slavery, where does one’s power go? No one can accept complete impotence short of death. If one cannot assert oneself overtly, one will do it covertly. Thus magic—a covert, cult force—is an absolute necessity for the powerless. The spread of magic and the reliance on the occult is one symptom of the widespread importance in our transitional age. Sometimes people also lash out at others, paradoxically, against those closet and dearest to one. That is because these individuals represent people in whom one has submerged oneself. In this respect they should be fought (in the individual’s mind) for the sake of one’s own autonomy. It is parallel to the counter-will, the being’s self-assertion in opposition exactly to those upon whom is most dependent. Thus the life-destroying violence becomes also life-giving violence. They are intertwined as the sources of the individual’s self-reliance, responsibility, and freedom. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

Although it is inevitable, beings do not immediately fight everyone in their lives to assert their own freedom. This occurs partly because the people who are still helping them, they have to surrender temporarily some of the autonomy they do have; partly as a counterbalance to the excessive transference that turns the people helping them (financially and or emotionally) into a god. There is thus a self-affirmation precisely in self-destructive violence. Ultimately the affirmation is expressed in the person’s demonstration of one’s right to die by one’s own hand if one chooses. If, as is our tendency in this country, we condemn all violence out of hand and try to eradicate even the possibility of violence from a human being, we take aware from one an element that is essential to one’s full humanity. For the self-respecting human being, violence is always an ultimate possibility—and it will be resorted to less if admitted than if suppressed. For the free beings it remains in imagination an ultimate exit when all other avenues are denied by unbearably tyranny or dictatorship over the spirit as well as the body. To be alive is power, existing in itself, without a further function, omnipotence enough. The persons I have known, or have known of, who have great moral courage have generally abhorred violence. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

We should not allow the crushing of another person, whether physically, psychologically, or spiritually. One’s moral courage stands out more clearly when they become the symbol of a value lost sight of in a confused World. The innate worth of a being must be reversed solely because of one’s humanity and regardless of one’s politics. As long as there exist persons with moral courage, we can be sure that the triumph of the human robot has not yet arrived. Courage often arises not only out of one’s audaciousness, but also out of one’s compassion for the human suffering one witnesses around one. It is highly significant, and indeed almost a rule, that mortal courage has its source in such identification through one’s own sensitivity with the suffering of one’s fellow beings. I am tempted to call this perceptual courage because it depends on one’s capacity to perceive, to let one’s self see the suffering of other beings. If we let ourselves experience the evil, we will be forced to do something about it. It is a truth, recognizable in all of us, that when we do not want to become involved, when we do not want to confront even the issue of whether or not we will come to the assistance of someone who is being unjustly treated, we block off our perception, we blind ourselves to the other’s suffering, we cut off our empathy with the person needing help. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

Hence the most prevalent form of cowardice in our day hides behind the statement, “I did not want to become involved.” When we find our own heart and mind, our own inspiration, our spiritual longings, one senses of being guided by ethereal means, this encounter is compared to the secular resurrection. Resurrection reappears in a radically different landscape in order to restore love and joy to the craving soul. It is as if by helping others, we are coming back for our own salvation. We participate wit the ongoingness of the race. To find out the truth little by little oneself is to make it really one’s own. To be pushed into it with a plunge by a master always entails the likelihood of a return to one’s native and proper level later on. We must find the Overself through our own perceptions, that is, through our own eyes—or never. It will not suffice to believe that we can go on seeing it through the eyes of another being—be one a holy guru, or not. The seeker must elicit these things for oneself, and from within oneself; reading about them is not enough, hearing about them from gurus, or at lectures, is not enough. Something more is needed that what books or even gurus, or not. The seeker must elicit these things for oneself, and from within oneself: reading about them is not enough, hearing about them from gurus, or at lectures, is not enough. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

I Love You Anyway, is it So Rare that I Have Been Sleeping with the Dead?

July 11, 2019 12:43 am

But, finally, when I put the papers aside and sat thinking these things over, the strangeness of it did not matter. What mattered was that I was more utterly alone in the World than I had ever been in all my life. That Claudia was gone beyond reprieve. And I had less reason to live than I had ever had, and less desire. Armand showed no concern at my facing him, and as soon as our eyes met I wished the World were not one black empty ruin of ashes and death. I wished it were fresh and beautiful, and that we were both living and had love to give each other. I wanted to lay down my soul, to find some transcendent pleasure that would obliterate pain and make me utterly forget even myself. Before, all art had held for me the promise of a deeper understanding of the human heart. Now the human heart meant nothing. I did not denigrate it. I simply forgot it. The almost perfect symmetrical balance of the Claude Monet 1874, The Railroad Bridge at Argenteuil—how out of the dense growth of the near bank, a train emerges, as we witness nature in the process of giving way to the forces of civilization. With eternal nature being pitted against the contemporary moment expressing how this painting captures the dawn of a new World, a World of opposition and contradiction. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

As I stood on the sidewalk before the doors of the hotel waiting for the carriage that would take me to meet Armand, I saw the people who walked there—the restless boulevard crowd of well-dressed ladies and gentlemen, the hawkers of papers, the carriers of luggage, the drivers of carriages—all these in a new light. Yet, the magnificent paintings of the Louvre still were not for me intimately connected with the hands that had painted them. They were cut loose and dead like children turned to stone. Without love, all the beauty in the World is reduced to ashes. The principle of monotheism is that beings are infinite, that there is no partial quality in one which can be hypostatized into the whole. God, in the monotheistic concept, is unrecognizable and indefinable; God is not a thing. If beings are created in the likeness of God, one is created as the bearer of infinite qualities. In idolatry beings bows down and submits to the projection of one partial quality in oneself. One does not experience oneself as the center from which living acts of love and reason radiate. One becomes a thing, his neighbor becomes a thing, just as his gods are things. The idols of the heathen are silver and gold, sliver and gold, but I would rather have Jesus than silver and gold—work of being’s hands are inferior to my Lord. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

So many people have mouths but they speak now; eyes have they, but they see not; they have ears but they hear not; nether is there any breath in their mouths. They that make them are like them; so is everyone that trusts in them. “And thus they might murder, and plunder, and steal, and commit whoredoms and all manner of wickedness, contrary to the laws of their country and also the laws of God. And whosoever of those who belonged to their band should reveal unto the World of their wickedness and their abominations, reports Helaman 6.23-24. Monotheistic religions themselves have, to a large extent regressed into idolatry. Beings projects their power of love and of reason unto God; one does not feel them any more as one’s own powers, and then one prays to God to give one back some of what one, men and women, have projected unto God. In early Protestantism and Calvinism, the required religious attitude is that beings should feel oneself empty and impoverished and put one’s trust in the grace of God, that is, into the hope that God may return to one part of one’s own qualities, who one has put into God. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

Every act of submissive worship is an act of alienation and idolatry in this sense. What is frequently called love is often noting but this idolatrous phenomenon of alienation; only that not God or an idol, but another person is worshipped in the way. The loving person in this type of submissive relationship, projects all his or her love, strength, thought, into the other person, and experiences the loved person as a superior being, finding satisfaction in complete submission and worship. This does not only mean that one fails to experience the loved person as a human being in his or her reality, but that one does not experience one’s self in one’s full reality, as the bearer of productive human powers. Just as in the case of religious idolatry, one has projected all one’s richness into the other person, and experiences this richness not any more as something which is one’s, but as something alien from oneself, deposited in somebody else, with which one can get in touch only by submission to, or submergence in, the other person. The same phenomenon exists in the worshipping submission to a political leader, or to that state. The leader and the state actually are what they are by the consent of the governed. However, they become idols when the individual projects all one’s powers into them and worships them, hoping to regain some of one’s powers by submission and worship. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

In Rousseau’s theory of the state, as in contemporary totalitarianism, the individual is supposed to abdicate one’s own rights and to project them unto the state as the only arbiter, which is the kind of behavior we are seeing from the mayor and governor of California in particular at this time. And that is the reason career politicians like Edmund Gerald Brown Jr., who served as the 34t and 39^th Governor of California from 1975 to 1983 and from 2011 to 2019 are dangerous because they can basically set up a dictatorships and then pass that same kind of authority on to their successor to the point the people and their votes do not matter because the state has all the power and virtually goes unchallenged. He was also mayor of Oakland, California from 1999-2007, so Edmund Gerald Brown Jr. was able to deeply embed his roots of corruption in California. Furthermore, it did not help the people that Edmund Gerald “Pat” Brown Sr. also served as the 32^nd Governor of California from 1959 to 1967. This allowed the Brown’s to run California as if were their family business. For instance, the twin tunnel project to ship water from the Sacramento River to Southern California was actually Pat Brown’s idea, which stated when he was in office and was supposed to take sixty years, and this was a project Jerry Brown also tried to implement. However, environmentalist believe that this $104 billion project would destroy the environment and be too expensive. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

In fascism, which we are seeing a resurgence of with the democrats having a super majority in California and with them being in bed with a low of judges, is a type of Stalinism that leads absolutely to the alienation of individuals who worship the state at the altar of an idol, and it makes little difference by what names this idol is knowns as: state, class, collective, or what else. Under Jerry Brown and his father Pat Brown an Ethnic cleansing started in San Francisco, California in 1967 and the population of Black went from about 100,000 to 40,000. The Browns red tagged many of the Victorian homes and businesses owned by Blacks and tore them down to put up project-based housing high rises and to expand the freeway. This displaced a lot of Black Americans and lead to the loss of a lot of Black wealth (millions of dollars per household) from the appreciated equity of the property. The ethnic cleansing inspired the 2019 film The Last Black man in San Francisco. Therefore, we can speak of idolatry or alienation not only in relationship to other people, but also in relationship to oneself, when the person is subject to irrational passions. The person who is mainly motivated by one’s lust for power, does not experience oneself any more in the richness and limitlessness of a human being, but one becomes a salve to one partial striving in one, which is projected into external aims, by which one is possessed. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

The person who is given to the exclusive pursuit of one’s passion for money is possessed by one’s striving for it; money is the idol which one worships and the projection of one isolated power in oneself, one’s greed for it. In this sense, the neurotic person is an alienated person. One’s actions are not one’s own; while one is under the illusion of doing what one wants, one is driven by forces which are separated from one’s self, which work behind one’s back; one is a stranger to oneself, just as one’s fellow beings are a stranger to the individual. One experiences the other and one’s self not as what they really are, but distorted by the unconscious forces which operate in them. The insane person is the absolutely alienated person; one has completely lost oneself as the center of one’s own experience; one has lost the sense of self. What is common to all these phenomena—the worship of idols, the idolatrous worship of God, the idolatrous love for a person, the love of a political leader or the state, and the idolatrous worship of the externalization or irrational passions—is the process of alienation. It is the fact that beings do not experience themselves as the active bearer of one’s own power and richness, but as an impoverished thing, dependent on powers outside of oneself, unto whom one has projected one’s living substance. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

What is common to all these phenomena—the worship of idols, the idolatrous worship of God, the idolatrous love for a person, the worship of a political leader or the state, and the idolatrous worship of the externalizations of irrational passions—is the process of alienation. It is the fact that beings do not have experience one’s self as the active bearer of one’s own powers and richness, but as an impoverished thing, dependent on powers outside of oneself, unto whom one has projected one’s living substance. As the reference to idolatry indicates, alienation is by no means a modern phenomenon. Suffice it to say that it seems alienation differs from culture to culture, both in the specific spheres which are alienated, and in the thoroughness and completeness of the process. Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total; it pervades the relationship of a being to one’s work, to the things one consumes, to the state, to one’s fellow beings, and to oneself. Beings have created a World of things created by beings as it never existed before. They have constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine they built. Yet this whole creation of theirs stands over and above them. One does not feel oneself as a creator and center, but as the servant of a Golem, which one’s hands have built. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

The more powerful and gigantic the forces are which one unleashes, the more powerless one feels oneself as a human being. One confronts oneself with one’s own forces embodied in things one has created, alienated from oneself. One is owned by one’s creation, and has lost ownership of oneself. One has built a golden calf, and says “these are your gods who have brought you out of Egypt.” However, this is a trap cunningly invented by Satan for your downfall and the body as a tomb dug for your divine soul. Holiness is not necessarily limited to hermits and spiritual teachers; it may also belong to householders. Whether it be the Long or the Short Path, both may be pracitsed in the daily routine of life. The problem is to take advantage of outside help and yet leave the student individually free. Its solution is simple. One can get this help through books written by seers, sages, and philosophers. Those who can only advance by hanging on to a teacher make only a pseudo-advance and one day their house of cards will come tumbling about their ears. However, it is equally true that those who can only progress by dispensing with a teacher, progress father into the morass of ignorance. One alone who can take a teacher’s guidance in a free spirit; who comprehends that while the teacher points out a path, it is for one to strive, toil, and adventure forth; such a being will derive much from one’s discipleship. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

When one finds that one can go no farther by oneself, the time has come to look within for more grace or to look without for more guidance. One needs the one to get away from one’s own selfishness or the other to get away from one’s own darkness. There is sometimes conflict between submission to authority and obedience to conscience. The importance of language in an evolving culture is that it provides symbolic forms by means of which we can reveal ourselves and by means of which others stand revealed to us. Communication is a way of understanding each other; if there are no such ways, each of us becomes like the man who, in a dream, find oneself wandering in a foreign country where one can understand nothing of what is being said around one nor feel anything from the person next to one. One’s isolation is great, indeed. During the week end of the Moon landing, a TV reporter interviewed members of the crowd in Central Park just after the landing. One answer to his question of what they were waiting for was: “To see the extravehicular activity.” Now this phrase “extra vehicular activity” gives one pause. Its main word consists of six syllables and is highly technical; it tells, like many technical phrases, what the astronauts are not going to do (extravehicular) rather than what they are going to do. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

The word “activity” may mean any act under the Sun—swimming, flying, crawling, diving, and so forth. There is no poetry in the sentence, no meaning that is not technical, nothing personal. We finally discover the polysyllabic phrase means “to walk on the Moon.” However, that is a poetic phrase. No word of over one syllable, coming straight out of our own lives (from the age of eight months when we learned to walk), a phrase associated with all the romance of the Moon. It is actually more truthful than its scientific parallel in the sense that it reveals not an abstraction but an act that will be done by human beings like you and me. The more technical we become without a parallel development in the meaningfulness of personal communication, the more alienated we also become. Communication is then replaced by communique. The breakdown of communication is a spiritual one. Words get their communicative power from the fact that they participate in symbols. Through drawing meanings together into a Gestalt, a symbol gets a numinous quality which points toward a reality greater than itself. The symbol gives the word its power to carry across to one some meaning from the emotions of another. Symbolic breakdown is, therefore, spiritual tragedy. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

The symbol always implies more than it states; it is essentially connotative. Thus, words, in so far as they are symbolic, point to more than they specifically can say; what counts is the afterglow, the ripples of meaning that appear like a stone being dropped in a lake, the connotative rather than the denotative aspects of the words. It is a Gestalt similar to that which the poet uses. A form emerges out of the very speaking of words—which is why people tend to become more poetic when they report something under stress. It also must be remembered that in the days before the art of writing was widely used almost all the earliest texts were handed down from generation to generation by word of mouth alone. This entailed wonderful fears of memory which we must admire but it also entailed the possibility of conscious or unconscious alteration of the texts themselves, against which we must guard ourselves. Whether it happened or not, however, one thing was psychologically unavoidable. This was the interpretation of passages, phrases, or single words according to the unconscious complexes governing the minds and controlling the character of those who preserved and passed down the texts. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

The inevitable consequence is that words which bore one meaning when they were uttered by the original author came bit by bit to receive a modified or altogether different meaning when they had passed through the mouths and pens of scribes and priests. Many fail to perceive that the real battlefield of human life is internal and not external; some who cannot comprehend the unity of Spirit and matter; beings, in short, who had yet to realize that they were virtuous or sinful primarily as their thoughts were virtuous and sinful—these are set up today as the arbiters of how we twenty-first century beings shall live in a World whose circumstances and systems are beyond their own narrow imaginations. The quest indeed has been turned into something impossibly remote from us, something only to be talked about at tea-tables because we cannot implement it. Such a situation is unacceptable to the philosophic student. Better ostracism, abuse, slander, and misunderstanding than this. All this, of course, is exactly contrary to what we have been taught. We are taught that the more specific and limited a word is, the more accurately we talk. More accurately, yes, but not more truthfully. For we tend, with this point of view, to make our language more and more technical, impersonal, objective, until we are talking in purely scientific terms. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

This is one legitimate way of communicating, and certainly the way that thrives in a technological age. However, it ends up with computor language; and what I really want to know about my friend as he walks besides me is in the country is as absent as though we were in two vacuum tubes. Beings are not God. There is a fundamental error in making the unity with God to be a unity of nature and not of Grace. The Godly being is untied to God, not however in virtue of one’s essences but by a process of re-creation and regeneration. The mystic who talks vaguely of being one with God must surely know that the experience has not put one in personal management of the Universe. If the mystic really attains a complete identity with the World-Mind, then all the latter’s evolutionary and dissolutionary powers and especially its all-pervading all-knowing character would become the common property of both. However, even the most fully mystic has no such powers and no such character. The frontiers between God and beings cannot be obliterated although the affinity between them can be established. If a being really appreciated one’s own finite littleness and the higher power’s sublime infinity, one would never have the impertinence to claim the attainment of “union with God.” All such talk is irresponsible babble, the careless use of words without semantic awareness of what is being said. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

No human mind can capture the One Life-Power in all its magnitude, and its understanding of itself and its Universe. All it can do is to act as a mirror, in the deepest recesses of its own being, and in its own humble way, of the attributes which it confers on the Absolute from its own limited human point of view. The rest is silence. Although God is inaccessible to beings, beings are not inaccessible to God. The quest for meaning (and moorings) in a seemingly fathomless World can be found in the earliest forms of literature. The Assyrian-Babylonian text Gilgamesh (3000 B.C.), for example, alludes to a futile search for immortality in an absurd, capricious cosmos. A related Babylonian work, called the Poem of Creation, dramatizes a titanic struggle between the forces of chaos (exemplified by the primordial goddess Tiamat) and the forces of order (represented by the upstart deity Marduk). These legends caused me to go over a plan in my mind, a plan on which I was willing to gamble my life with the powerful freedom of a being who truly does not care for that life, who has the extraordinary strength of being willing to die. “Bless be the name of our God; let us sing to his praise, yes, let us give thanks to his holy name, for he doth work righteousness forever,” Alma 26.8. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

Refuse to Cover the Signs of the End in Our Lives and in Our Souls–We Are a Generation of the End and We Should Know What We Are!

July 7, 2019 11:02 pm

I do not know if God exists, and for all I do know, he does not exist. Then no sin matters. No sin achieves evil. However, they may not be true. Because if God does not exist, we are the creatures of highest consciousness in the Universe. We alone understand the passage of time and the value of every minute of human life. And what constitutes evil, real evil, is the taking of a singe human life. Whether a person would have died tomorrow or the day after or eventually, it does not matter. Because if God does not exist, this life, every second of it, is all we have. And sometimes we can feel the thoughts of others. I know you have heard the saying, “You could can the tension in the room with a knife.” Well thoughts can be a palpable in the air like smoke. Not read them, you understand, but feel the power of them. It is good to be respectful. Some do not want power over other because if they exercise such power, then one must protect it. One will make enemies. And one will have forever to deal with their enemies when all they want here is a certain space, a certain peace. Or not to be here at all. The only power that exists is inside ourselves. Of the many consequences of his rupture between state and being, most spectacular is the irrational myth of the state—the setting for modern dictatorship. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

However, dictatorships represent only the most extreme form of the alienation of the state. In democratic societies also government, like so many other social institutions originally designed to serve beings, threatens to become their master. Behind the growing sense of isolation in society, behind the whole quest for community which infuses so many theoretical and practical areas of contemporary life and thought, is possessed in the growing realization that the traditional primary relationships of beings have become functionally irrelevant to our State and economic and meaningless to the moral aspirations of individuals. The state has power to do great good as well as evil; and we are not joining those true reactionaries who dream of dismantling it. What we are suggesting is that the state even when providing necessary services is detached from individual needs. How to redress this imbalance between state and being has become a burning issue for all beings, right and left, who would reorder our society. Meanwhile, armed with ever greater police powers and increasingly effective means of persuasion, the modern state is now in a position to exploit the most terrible anxieties of beings for its own purposes, with the help of the fake news media. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

When the United States Government announced that it was conducting experiments of a death ray or neutron bomb, and 5G internet service, striking examples of this power was provided recently. This exquisitely refined technology will operate selectively, snuffing out human and animal life among the enemy, but leaving things—houses, antiquities, automobiles, aircrafts, shops, factories, furnishings, machines—untouched. A soldier in a tank or an office staff in a building would die, but the tank and the building would remain intact. There would be no lingering radioactivity, o that the attackers could take over and occupy the tank and the building without fear of contamination. Who would say that the alienation of modern beings is not now complete? The sketches of some—by now means all—of the conditions and influences alienating beings in modern society have been pointed out. However, can these conditions be altered and alienation overcome? Answers to this question demand the best thinking and planning of which our civilization is capable; they require thinking from the heart as well as the head; they demand co-operation among many diverse groups and nations. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

The task of healing our alienated community will be difficult, for the very tools of our analysis and planning tend to be alien forces, compelling us to deal with separate aspects of an interrelated set of problems. Being’s inhumanity to other beings is age-old, such as critics say: the oppressed less affluent have always been with us; work has always been drudgery (the fall of beings made it so); cruelty and torment are ever the common lot. As to the danger of nuclear war and mass extermination, the human beast has always lived dangerously, invented new and more terrible weapons, and in short loves hanging and drawing and quartering every bit as well as war and slaughtering. However, the argument runs, though this strange rather likeable human animal may be foolish and destructive, yet somehow one is crafty enough to survive, both as an individual and as a species. Acceptance of things as they are and have always been is the essence of this view. Its proponents consider alienation an inescapable part of the living condition of beings with which one must learn to live—alone. According to this approach, no amount or kind of social planning will succeed in alleviating the situation, and on the contrary may make it worse. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

In short, alienation is relative. Anthropology teaches that simpler, more solidaristic communities are not spared the personal disorders which we associate with complex age of information societies. And if citizens of the affluent society feel sorry for themselves, let them remember that most beings on Earth have never tasted any of the fruits of freedom. Our view, however, has been that alienation in modern society represents not a change of degree but of kind. Here we emphasize that what we are concerned with is not inhumanity, which has existed all through history and constitutes part of the human form, but a-humanity, a phenomenon of rather recent date. This a-humanity, this breakdown of distinctively human qualities and values, culminates in such horrors as the A-bomb or the concentration camp, the sudden slump of an overwrought civilization into that strange, systematized bestiality. The horror of the fake news media regime, its use of the most-up-to-date techniques of hacking and data mining, lies and distortion make it one of the lowest, sub-human, indeed sub-bestial kind, and in some way is related to the subtlest political and law enforcement experiences manifesting themselves in society and culture. Overcivilization, too much technology, and concomitant dehumanization are of the most crucial problems of our age. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

The deep suspicion of language and the impoverishment of ourselves and our relationships, which are both cause and result, are rampant in our times. We experience the despair of being unable to communicate to others what we feel and what we think, and the even greater despair of being unable to distinguish for ourselves what we feel and are. Underlying this loss of identity is the loss of cogency of the symbols and myths upon which identity and language is based. The breakdown of language is graphically pictured in Orwell’s 1984, in which the people not only go through the doublethink process but use word to mean exactly their opposites—for instance, war means peace. In Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, we are similarly gripped when Pozzo, the industrialist, commands his slave Lucky, the intellectual, to “Think, pig!….Think!” Lucky beings to orate a word salad of lengthy phrases strung together without a period that continues for three full pages. He finally collapses in a faint on the stage. It is a vivid portrayal of the situation that exists when language communicates nothing at all expect empty erudition. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

The breakdown is shown in the students’ protest against the “words, words, words” to which they must listen, in their sickness of heart at hearing the same things mouthed over and over again, and in their readiness to accuse faculty and others of “word garbage” or “verbal masturbation.” This is generally meant as a criticism of the lecture method, but it also represents what the television news has become. However, what they really are—or ought to be—talking about is a particular kind of lecture that does not communicate being from one person to another. It must be admitted that all too often this has been a characteristic of academic life, which makes the student protest against irrelevant education distinctly more relevant. The shelves of college libraries are weighed down with books that were written because other books were written because still other books were written—the meat of the meal getting thinner and thinner until the books seem to have nothing to do with the excitement of truth but only with status and prestige. And in the academic World, these last two values can be powerful indeed. Small wonder the young poets are disillusioned with talk, and they hold, as they did in the San Francisco love-in, that the best poem is a blank sheet of paper. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

At such a time, in our alienation and isolation, we long for a simple, direct expression of our feelings to another, a direct relation to one’s being, such as looking into one’s eyes to see and experience one or standing quietly beside one. We yearn for a direct expression of one’s and our moods and emotions with no barriers. We seek a kind of innocence that is as old as human evolution but some to us as something new, the innocence of children in paradise again. We long for a direct expression through our bodies of intimacy to short-cut the time of knowing the other that intimacy usually takes; we want to speak through our bodies, to leap immediately into identification with the other, even though we know it is only partial. In short, we yearn to bypass the whole symbols/verbal-language hang-up. Thus the great trend toward action therapies in or day in contrast to talking, and the conviction that truth will emerge—if it ever will—when we are able to live out our muscular impulses and experiences rather than get lost in dead concepts. Hence encounter groups, marathons, nude therapy, the use of barbiturates and other illicit substances. This is, in short, the bringing of the body into a relationship when there is no relationship. Whatever relatedness there is is ephemeral: it springs up multicolored and bright today, and often will be but a damp place where sea foam has evaporated on our hand tomorrow. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

My aim is not to derogate these forms of therapy nor to disparage the use of the body. My body remains one way in which my self can express itself—in this sense I am my body—and surely it is to be appreciated. However, I am my language as well. And I wish to point out the destructive trend represented in action therapies precisely in their implicit attempt to bypass language. For these action therapies are closely related to violence. As they become more extreme, they hover at the edge of violence, both in the activity within the group itself an in the preparation of the participants or anti-intellectualism outside. The longing for them really has its seat in despair—the despondent fact of not being understood, of not being able to communicate or to love. It is the endeavoring to jump over that period of time required for intimacy, the trying to immediately feel and experience the other’s hopes and dreams and fears. However, intimacy requires a history, even though the two people have to create history. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

We forget at our peril that beings are a symbol-making creature; and if the symbols (or myths, which are a pattern of symbols) seem arid and dead, they are to be mourned rather than denied. The bankruptcy of symbols should be seen for what it is, a way station on the path of despair. The distrust of language is bred into by experiencing the medium is the message phenomenon. Most of the words coming over TV are lies not in the sense of outright falsehood (that would imply a still remaining respect for the word) but in the sense that the words are used in the service of selling the personality of the speaker rather than in communicating some meaning. This is the more subtle form of emphasizing not the meaning of the word but the public-relations value of it. Words are not used for authentic, humanistic goals: to share something of originality or personal warmth. The medium is then the message with a vengeance; as long as the medium works, there is no message. The phrase “credibility gap,” which is conspicuous in wartime but is present in other times as well, goes much deeper than anyone’s mere intention to deceive. We listen to the news dispatches and find ourselves wondering where the truth really lies and why the reporters and anchors constantly lie, spread rumors, and distort the truth. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

In our day it often seems that deception has been accepted as the means of communication. That is why the fake news media pushed their Russia election conspiracy, to cover up the fact the TV news is full of lies and wants to confuse them people and not present the truth so they can influence the elections. In this confusion, there is a more serious aliment in our public life: language bears less and less relationship to the item being discusses. There is a denial of any relationship to underlying logic. The fact that language has its roots in a shared structure is entirely ignored. The way language is used by the fake news media often denies the whole structure of communication. There is relationship in their reports to the question asked. In extreme and persistent form, this is one species of schizophrenia; but in our day it is simply called news and politics. And suddenly the lid is torn off. The picture of Death appears, unveiled, in a thousand forms. As in the late Middle Ages the figure of Death appears in news, pictures, poetry, politics, and the Dance of Death with every living being is painted and sung, so our generation—the generation of World wars, information, technology, revolutions, and mass migrations—rediscovers the reality of death. We have seen millions die in war, hundreds of thousands die illegally migrating all over the World, hundreds of thousands in revolutions, tens of thousands in persecutions and systematic purges of underrepresented groups. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

Multitudes as numerous as whole nations still wander over the face of the Earth or perish when they are turned away, in boat or by foot, from the countries they want to enter; in them is embodies a part of these tremendous events in which Death has again grasped the reins which we believed it has relinquished forever. Such people carry in their souls, and often in their bodies, the traces of death, and they will never completely lose them. You who have never taken part yourself in this great migration must receive these others as symbols of a death which is a component element of life. Receive them as people who, by their destiny, shall remind us of the presence of the End in every moment of life and history. Receive them as symbols of the finiteness and transitoriness of every human and living being concern, of every human and living being’s life, and of every created thing. We have become a generation of the End and those of us who have been refugees and exiles in our own communities or in the greater World should not forget this when we have found a new beginning here or in another land. The End is nothing external. It is not exhausted by the loss of that which we can never regain: our childhood homes, the people with whom we grew up, the country, the things, the language which formed us, the goods, both spiritual and material, which we inherited or earned, the friends who were torn away from us by sudden death. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

The End is more than all this; it is in us, it has become our very being. We are a generation of the End and we should what we are. Perhaps there are some who think that what has happened to the and to the whole World should now be forgotten. Is it not more dignified, truer and stronger to say “yes” to that which is our destiny, to refuse to cover the signs of the End in our lives and in our souls, to let the voice of Death be heard? Amid all the new possibilities offered to us, must we not acknowledge ourselves to be that which destiny has made us? Must we not confess that we are symbols of the End? And this End is of an age which was both great and a lie. It is the End for all finitude which always becomes a lie when it forgets that it is finite and seeks to veil the picture of death. However, who can bear to look at this picture? Only one who can look at another picture behind and beyond it—the picture of Love. For love is stronger than death. Every death means parting, separation, isolation, opposition and not participation. So it is, too, with the death of nations, the end of generations, and the atrophy of souls. Our souls become poor and disintegrate insofar as we want to be alone, insofar as we bemoan our misfortunes, nurse our despair and enjoy out bitterness, and yet turn coldly away from the physical and spiritual need of others. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

Love overcome separation and creates participation in which there is more than that which individuals involved can bring to it. Love is the infinite which is given to the finite. Therefore we love in others, for we d not merely love others, but we love the Love that is in the and which is more than their or our love. In mutual assistance what is most important is not the alleviation of need but the actualization of love. Of course, there is no love which does not want to make the other’s need its own. However, there is also no true help which does not spring from love and create love. Those who fight against death and disintegration through all kinds of relief agencies know this. Often very little external help is possible. And the gratitude of those who receive help is first and always gratitude for love and only afterwards gratitude for help. Love, not help, is stronger than death. However, there is no love which does not become help. Where help is given without love, there new suffering grows from the help. It is love, human and divine, which overcomes death in nations and generation and in all the horror of our time. Help has become almost impossible in the face of the monstrous powers which we are experiencing. Death is given power over everything finite, especially in our period of history. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

However, death is given no power over love. Love is stronger. It creates something new out of the destruction caused by death; it bears everything and overcomes everything. It is at work where the power of death is strongest, in war and persecution and homelessness and hunger and physical death itself. It is omnipresent and here and there, in the smallest and most hidden ways as in the greatest and most visible ones, it rescues life from death. It rescues each of us, for love is stronger than death. Use the power inside you. Do not abhor it anymore. Use that power! And when they see you in the streets above us, use that power to make your face a mask and think as you gaze on them as on anyone: beware. Take that word is if it where an amulet given to you to wear about your neck. And when your eyes meet with your enemy’s eyes, or the eyes of anyone else, speak to them politely what you will, but think of that word and that word only. It is an icon of love. Feel the love. Not physical love, you must understand. True love is what a student and teacher share. Knowledge would never be withheld by a real teacher. No geographical limits ought to be set for the sources whence a being draws spiritual sustenance. Why exclude other lands and remain shut in with India alone? #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

Nor should any temporal limits be set for it. Why exclude the modern Word and remain shut in with the ancient one alone? Enlightened individuals have been born all through history, have contributed their ideas beliefs experiences and revelations, and all through the social scales. This is so, must be so, because Truth, Reality, Goodness, and Beauty, in their best sense, are in the end got from within. God is in your very being. To know him as something apart or far-away in time and distance or as an object outside yourself, separate from you—that is not the Way—impossible. Jesus gave away the secret: he is within you. It is surprising how widely people have ignored Jesus’ message (“The kingdom of Heaven is within you”) when its means is so clear, its phrasing so strong. If a being lives in harmony with the divine World-Idea, one may also live in trust that one will receive that which belongs to one. This will be brought about either by guiding one to it or guiding it to one. “All things whatsoever the Father hath are mine.” That which you need is yours now—if only you could raise yourself to the recognition of your true relation to your Overself. The heart, which abandons itself to the Supreme Mind, finds itself related to all its works, and will travel a royal road to particular knowledges and powers. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

We Seek Truth for Various Reasons—One is Because it Possesses Certitude that Gives Us Anchorage and Rest!

July 4, 2019 12:06 am

The great façade of the cathedral rose in a dark mass opposite the square, but the doors were open and I could see a soft, flickering light within. It was Saturday evening early, and the people were going to confession for Sunday Mass and Communion. Candles burned dim in the crystal chandeliers. At the far end of the nave the altar loomed out of the shadows, laden with white flowers. It was to the old church on this spot that they had brought my brother. Has that solidarity declined? Recent development in the New and Old World suggest that with greater prosperity the militancy of working-class movements has fallen sharply. If not true of the older generation, still loyal to the slogans of yesteryear, it seems to be particularly true of working-class youth. Some young of the World workers today is a new type: apolitical, or democratic, hedonistic, individualistic; in short, a far cry from the militant radicals of their grand father’s generation. However, decay of the working-class culture, which was itself a defense against alienation, has not necessarily led to greater integration. Along with the middle-class contemporaries, young workers face a World without values. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

However, it is not only material possession which divide mortals and other beings. In a heterogenous society like ours there are numerous and sometimes overlapping underrepresented groups or out-groups. Because our is a multi-racial, multi-ethic, and multi-cultural population, we are most likely to think of such groups in terms of color, hair textures, gender, sexuality, and religious affiliation since these distinctions are among the most powerful of all social barriers. However, it seems legitimate to broaden the concept of the underrepresented groups to include other section of the population who, because of some distinguishing characteristic, are rejected by the community. Among these groups are the young, the aged, the physically limited, intellectually disabled, those who are celibate, and homosexuals and transgenders, and it is also changing, too, to include White men (people discriminate against them just because of their status). We do not mean to suggest that all of them face equally serious patterns of prejudice and discrimination. Majority attitudes may range from ill-concealed hate and violence at one extreme to pity at the other; and barriers to solidarity and integration differ. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

African Americans and Black Americans, for example, are segregated in enormous transient communities; while homosexuals inhabit half-Worlds with no physical boundaries. Nevertheless, all such out-groups face a certain degree of isolation from society: they are in the community but not of it. As a result, they tend to form more or less distinct subcultures of their own. Although these subcultures offer some security and protection, common to most of them is a striving for integration with the majority groups on top. Furthermore, it is only natural for underrepresented groups to acquire some of the prevailing attitudes toward them. When this becomes self-hatred for sharing the despised or feared characteristic, we have perhaps the most extreme form which this pattern of alienation takes: alienated from others, they become alienated from themselves. We began by saying that many beings today are estranged from others as well as from themselves. However, others means not only the social communities in which they live; it also refers to the natural and supernatural World beyond. Thus, if we speak of a being’s alienation from nature, we do not mean nature in any metaphysical sense—although fairly serious metaphysical problems are involved; all we mean is that men and women today are not as close to land, air, sea, wind and mountain as their ancestors or their contemporaries who have yet to be blessed with an industrial and urban civilization. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

The World is too much with us; late and soon, getting and spending, we lay waste our powers: little we see in Nature that is ours. However, there is another aspect to this debate. About 70 years ago, there was no social media, communities were small, more intimate and far more conservative. People could leave their doors unlocked and towns were built around corporations. So the people in the communities did not travel far, all new each other, and they could afford to live were they worked. Private business was not disclosed in the streets. But as people became more mobile, new challenges arose, wives went to work and were home less often, husbands traveled father and were exposed to more people. And with social media people are exposed to thousands of more people than they were used to and it seems that everyone is already occupied with someone or your marriage and relationship is harder to maintain because there is now so much more competition. It is not as easy to date because some people like being alone and others are far more selective than in the past. Conversely, in some part of Africa, there are still tribes who hunt and gather and sometimes they eat a lot of meat or a lot of sugar and the diet works for them, they do not have cancers, heart disease or any other diseases that people in developed nations have. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

Although conceptions of the external World vary widely, many primitive societies and those areas still influenced by Eastern mysticism, feel themselves in fairly close unity with nature. In the pre-scientific Western World also people and nature were considered related parts of a more or less harmonious whole. Whether nature was considered hostile or friendly, people felt close to it. For leading thinkers in the West however this intimate relationship began to end with the seventeenth-century revolution in science and philosophy, and for ordinary citizens, with the industrial revolution that followed. To understand and control nature—the goals of modern science and technology—people first had to separate or alienate themselves from it. Nature, in scientific thought had its laws formulated without any reference to dependence on individual observers. The radical separation of people (as subject or observer) from nature (as object or external World) is likely due to the dawn of modern scientific discovery. What were the consequences of this division nature and people? First of all, it led to what we now call the scientific attitude, with its spirit of detachment, a spirit which has become the keynote of our age. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

For as science redeveloped, it became more abstract and increasingly remote from common life to the point science is the view of life where everything human is excluded from the prospect. It is of intention inhuman, supposing, strange as it may seem, that the further we travel from ourselves the nearer we approach the truth the further from our deepest sympathies, from all we car for, the nearer we are to reality, the stony heart of the scientific Universe. The flowering of science and technology gave beings enormous power to control nature and thereby transform society. Note the word control; for the language we use offers a clue to the new relationship between mortals and nature. Thus when we speak of our power over nature we reveal a certain antagonism between people and the external World, with nature regarded as something to be conquered—or even destroyed. The greater that power, the more we are alienated from nature and from ourselves. Estrangement from nature is the common experience. Industrialism created the first cities in which nature played little or no part. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

The towns are now losing their last glimpse of nature. Formerly men and women who lived in the English town were never far from the open country: their town life was fringed with orchards and gardens like Cresleigh Rocklin Trails. However, as the Industrial Revolution advanced, the towns were growing up in which working people would find it harder and harder to escape out of the wide web of smoke and squalor that enveloped their daily lives. Civilization was rapidly painting the green spaces black on the industrial map. The Angel Meadows were no longer meadows, old Meadowview lost much of its charm, and the only Angel that came near them was the Angel of Death. Life in such a town brought no alleviation of the tyranny of the industrial system; it only made it more real and somber to the mind. There was no change of scene or colour, no delight of form or design to break its brooding atmosphere. Town, tree, building, sky, all have become part of the same unrelieved picture. The men and women who left the mill and passed along the streets to their homes did not become less but more conscious of that system as a universal burden, for the town is so constructed and so governed as to enforce rather than modify, to reiterate rather than soften the impressions of an alien and unaccommodating power. One would call this ancient history need only explore the spreading blight of modern American cities to see that the damage done to nature has been long-lasting, perhaps permanent. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

That the damage was not intentional is beside the point. Ironically, contemporary scientists and philosophers today, particularly those of the existentialist school, reject the Cartesian dualism between living beings as subject and nature as object. However, for ordinary citizens, many of them living in grim prisons of concrete and steel, the damage has already been done: the technology that classical science produced has erected almost insurmountable barriers between them and the natural World. We have put many stages of artifice and device, of manufacture and alteration, between ourselves and the rest of nature. The ordinary city-dweller knows nothing of the Earth’s productivity; one does not know the Sunrise and rarely notices when the Sun sets (changes angles in the sky, actually for the Sun does not really rise nor set); ask one in what phase the Moon is, or when the ide in the harbor is high, or even how high the average tide runs, and likely as not one cannot answer you. Seed-time and harvest are nothing to one. If one has never witnessed an Earthquake, a great flush flood, a hurricane, tsunami, blizzard, or heatwave, one probably does not feel the power of nature as a reality surrounding one’s life at all. Nature, as living beings, animated and apparently unanimated, has always known it, knows no more. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

In the Western World most of us are the city dwellers, and one need not be a mystic to recognize that something is missing from our lives. Are we not poorer for it? There is a time, an appointed hour, for all things under Heaven. And in fourteen contrasts one embraces the whole of human existence, showing that everything has its time. What does this mean? This too is vanity and striving for the wind. The fact that everything has its appointed time only confirms one’s tragic view. Things and actions have their time. Then they pass and other things and actions have their time. However, nothing new comes out of this circle in which all life moves. Everything is timed by an eternal law which is above time. We are not able to penetrate into that meaning of this timing. For us, it is mystery and what we see is vanity and frustration. God’s timing is hidden to us, and our toiling and timing are of no ultimate use. Any human attempt to change the rhythm of birth and death, or war and peace, of love and hate and all the other contrast in the rhythm of life is in vain. This is the first but it is not the whole meaning of that statement that everything has appointed hour. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

If the Preacher says that there is a time to plant and a time to uproot, a time to kill, a time to heal, a time to break down and a time to build, a time to mourn and a time to dance, a time to speak and a time to be silent, he asks us to be aware of the right time to be silent, he asks us to be aware of the right time, the time to do one thing and not to do another thing. After he has emphasized that everything is timed by an unsurmountable destiny, he asks us to follow this timing from above and to do out own timing according to it. As a teacher of wisdom who gives many wise rules for our acting, he requests right timing. He knows that all our timing is dependent on the timing from above, from the hidden ruler of time; but this does not exclude our acting at the right and not as the wrong moment. The whole ancient World was drive by the belief that for everything we do there is an adequate hour: If you want to build a house or to marry, if want to travel or to begin a war—for any important enterprise—you must ask for the right moment. You must ask somebody who knows—the priest or the astrologer, the seer or the prophet. On the ground of their oracles about the good season you may or may not act. This was a belief of centuries and millennia. It was one of the strongest forces in human history, from generation to generation. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

The greatest beings of the past waited for the oracle announcing the appointed hour. Jesus himself says that his hour was not yet come and he went to Jerusalem when he felt that his hour had come. The modern mortals know of the need for timing as much as his predecessors. When in my early years in this country I had to discuss a certain project wit an influential American business man, and he said to me, “Do not forget that the first step to a successful action is the right timing.” Innumerable times, when reading about political or commercial actions, I was reminded of these words. In many conversations about activities and plans the problem of timing came up. It is one of the most manifest patters of our culture, of our industrial civilization. People ask: What about the I-You relationship between beings? Is this always entirely reciprocal? Could it be, is it permitted to be? Is it not, like everything human, subject to the limitations of our inadequacy, and is it not limited further by the inner laws that govern our life with one another? The first of these two obstacles is surely familiar enough. Everything, from your own experience of looking day after day into the eyes of your neighbour who needs you after all but responds with the cold surprise of a stranger, to the melancholy of the holy men who repeatedly offered the great gift in vain—everything tells you that complete mutuality does not inhere in a being’s life with one another. It is a form of grace for which one must always be prepared but on which one can never count. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

Yet there are also many I-You relationships that by their very nature may never unfold into complete mutuality if they are to remain faithful to their nature. Elsewhere I have characterized the relationship of a genuine educator to one’s pupil as being of this type. The teacher who wants to help the pupil to realize one’s best potentialities must intend one as this particular person, both in one’s potentiality and in one’s actuality. More precisely, one must know one as a mere sum of qualities, aspirations, and inhibitions; one must apprehend one, and affirm one, as a whole. However, this one can only do if one encounters one as a partner in a bipolar situation. And to give one’s influence unity and meaning, one must live through this situation in all its aspects not only from one’s own point of view but also from that of one’s partner. One must practice the kind of realization that I call embracing. It is essential that one should awaken the I-You relationship in the pupil, too, who should intend and affirm one’s educator as this particular person; and yet the educational relationship could not endure if the pupil also practiced the art of embracing by living through the shared situation from the educator’s point of view. Whether the I-You relationship comes to an end or assumes the altogether different character of friendship, it become clear that specifically educational relationship is incompatible with complete mutuality. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

Another, no less instructive example of the normative limits of mutuality may be fund in the relationship between a genuine psychotherapist and one’s patient. If one is satisfied to analyze one’s patient—that is, to being to light unconscious factors from one’s microcosm and to apply to a conscious project the energies that have been transformed by this emergence—one my successfully accomplish some repairs. At best, one may help a diffuse soul that is in poor structure to achieve at least some concentration and order. However, one cannot absolve one’s true task, which is the regeneration of a stunted personal center. That can be brought off only by a being who grasps with the profound eye of a physician the buried, latent unity of the suffering soul, which can be done only if one enters as a partner into a person-to-person relationship, but never through the observation and investigation of an object. In order to promote coherently the liberation and actualization of this unity in a new situation in which the other person comes to terms with the World, the therapist, like educator, must stand not only at one’s own pole of the bipolar relationship but also at the other pole, experiencing the effects of one’s own actions. Again the specific healing relationship would end as soon as the patient decided to practice the art of embracing and actually succeeded in experiencing events also from the doctor’s point of view. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

Healing, like educating, requires that one lives in confrontation and is yet removed. The most striking example of the normative limits of mutuality could probably be found in the work of those charged with the spiritual well-being of their congregation: here any attempt at embracing from the other side would violate the consecrated authenticity of the mission. Every I-You relationship in a situation defined by the attempt of one partner to act on the other one so as to accomplish some goal depends on a mutuality that is condemned never to become complete. The ultimate Knower is supra-personal, divine pure consciousness, the knowing and understanding of the Self, God who is the Soul’s Creator and only Beatitude. All this is higher than the ego, the person, the individuality, the being. The Omnipresence of the Infinite Mind carries great meaning for us individuality. For it signifies that this Mind is not less present and not less active too. To realize the Self through the householder’s life shall be the grand ideal of the future of the World. It is not by giving up all, but by realizing the Self in all, that one has to realize the object of the World-evolution and be free. #RnandolphHarris 14 of 15

The path is not through negation of the Universe to the affirmation of the Supreme Self, but through affirmation of the Supreme Self to the mergence of the Universe in the Supreme Self. The mission this time is educational and not religious. Spread education in the name of the Highest Truth enshrined in the Bible and religions will grow of themselves on the sure foundation of the Highest Truth. I am weary of arguing with you. Hell is hatred, people living together in eternal hatred. We are not in Hell. You can take the present or not, I do not care. It does not matter. Only let us have an end to all this. The great adventure of our lives. When you can live until the end of the World, what does it mean to die? And what is the end of the World except a phrase, because who knows even what is the World itself? I have now lived in two centuries, seen the illusions of one utterly shattered by the other, been eternally young and eternally ancient, possessing no illusions, living moment to moment in a way that made me a picture of a silver clock ticking in a void: the painted face, the delicately craved hands looked upon by no one, looking out at no one, illuminated by a light which was not a light, like the light by which God made the World before he had made light. Ticking, ticking, ticking, the precision of the clock, in a room as vast as the Universe. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

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This Whole Person is Architect and Developer, Tenant, and Landlord, Apollo and Dionysus in the House of Human Nature!

July 1, 2019 11:42 pm

If the aged are increasingly isolated from community life, theirs is a fate which many groups share in an urban civilization. Not only does the city weaken the traditional kinship group; it also tends to atomize the individual by freeing one from old bonds. The anonymity and hence the alienation of the city dweller have never been more graphically described than by the following words: The restless and noisy activity of the crowded streets is highly distasteful, and it is surely abhorrent to human nature itself. Hundreds of thousands of men and women drawn from all classes and ranks of society pack the streets of most major cities. Are they not all human beings with the same innate characteristics and potentialities? And do they not all aim at happiness by following similar methods? Yet they rush past each other as if they had nothing in common. They are tacitly agreed on one thing only—that everyone should keep to the right of the pavement so as not to collide with the stream of people moving in the opposite direction. No one even thinks of sparing a glace for one’s neighbors in the streets. The more that city folk are packed into a tiny space, the more repulsive and disgraceful becomes the brutal indifference with which they ignore their neighbors selfishly concentrate upon their private affairs. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

We know well enough that this isolation of the individual—this narrow-minded egotism—is everywhere the fundamental principle of modern society. However, nowhere is this selfish egotism so blatantly evident as in the frantic bustle of the great cities of New York, London, Tokyo, Shanghai, and San Francisco. The disintegration of society into individuals, each guided by one’s private principles and each pursuing one’s own aims has been pushed to its furthest limits in many of these World Class Cities and others. Here indeed human society has been split into its component atoms. And although some of these cities features have softened, they are still basically the same: mechanical, atomistic, impersonal, predatory. The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of one’s existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, notably life in a great city where one has become a mere cog in a machine. Today in an increasingly citified World, these pressures have mounted and mortals find it difficult to preserve their identity. “I fear lest the Spirit of the Lord hath ceased striving with them. For so exceedingly do they anger that it seemeth me that they have no fear of death; and they have lost their love, one towards another; and they thirst after blood and revenge continually,” reports Moroni 9.4-5. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

With the rise of corporate America and the financial districts came another historical development in the breakdown of traditional community bonds: the antagonism of social classes. The globalization caused a social dislocation of stupendous proportions, and the problem of poverty is merely the economic aspect of this event. Those at the bottom were not the only ones affected, although in the early industrial period huge masses of the laboring population resembled more the specters that might haunt a nightmare than human beings. However, if the workers were physically dehumanized, the owning classes were morally degraded. The traditional unity of a Christian society was giving place to a denial of responsibility on the part of the well-to-do for the conditions of their fellows. The Two Nations were taking shape. To the bewilderment of thinking minds, unheard-of wealth turned out to be inseparable from unheard-of poverty. Scholar proclaimed in unison that a science had been discovered which put the laws governing mortal’s World beyond any doubt. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

It was at the behest of these laws that compassion was removed from the hearts, and a stoic determination to renounce human solidarity in the name of the greatest happiness of the greatest number gained the dignity of secular religion. “Pray for them, my children, that repentance may come unto them. However, behold, I fear lest the Spirit hath ceased striving with them; and in this part of the land they are also seeking to put down all power and authority which cometh from God; and they are denying the Holy Ghost,” reports Moroni 8.28. The class struggles that have raged in Europe, Asia, Africa, Mexico, Australia and North America may then be regarded, at least from the point of view of those at the bottom, as not just an effort to secure a larger slice of the economic pie but also as a desperate attempt to restore a lost community. If this struggle is less violent today than in the past and if the workers of Europe and America have made considerable material progress, it would be naïve to assume that they have found that community. The two nations may not be far apart as in the nineteenth century, but the gap between them still exits. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

There is a sharp division between “them” (those on top: bosses, lawyers, doctors, judges, police, professors, civil servants) and “us” in the working class. “They” are the people at the top, the higher-ups, the people who give you your dole, call you up, tell you to go to war, fine you, made you split the family up, control your legal status and health and safety and education. The rapid inflation in the economy has intensified working class solidarity because of severe distress. However, if working people have a keen sense of them and us they also have strong commitments as members of a group with common interest and needs. That is, if alienated from the larger society, least they felt they belonged to their own class, which was not necessarily a matter of class consciousness, but rather a sense of sharing problems with kin and neighbors whose work and living arrangements were similar. The class conscious political parties and labor movements that grew up in these World Class Cities are products, not the cause, of these common experiences. Many members of the new generation are discovering for themselves that impulses of spirit are more precious than the Worldly goods they inherit from their parents. Their discover is of tremendous value indeed, and no one would argue with it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

However, here, again, a kind of trading on innocence comes in to confuse the picture. To a greater or lesser extent, youths of today, like the rest of us, use and enjoy the benefits of technology, no matter how simplified their lives may be. Our culture’s affluence, often to be found in the life styles of parents of the more radical young people, is what makes it possible for them to indulge in their radicalism and, many times, form communities. Here they get scattering wheat on unploughed, hard, dry ground, insisting: “It will grow.” All one proves is that without some knowledge of the agriculture, all the good intentions in the World cannot prevent the members of the community from starving when Winter comes. The fact, of course, that many of these communities fail and all have a difficult time does not lighten their moral value as a testimony to the voice of nature; and they are a sharp reminder to all our consciences of the divisive baggage of Worldly possession. However, the high purpose is not enough. One observer of a number of communities says that those doomed to failure are the ones with no other purpose than the self-improvement of the group, whereas those that succeed have some goal or value—a special religious commitment, for example—that transcends the members themselves. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

This saves them from the innocence of believing that what they want will come out of their wanting it, that nature will renounce its age-old neutrality and fit their mortality (as it was in the Garden of Eden), and that somehow one escapes the tragedies and complexities of life simply by being simple. We have seen that innocence cuts across generations. Faced with the multitude of choices and sensing our essential impotence, we cry for some shield, for some protection from this insoluble dilemma, for someone or some technique to take the impossible responsibility from us. One defense is innocence. Innocence is real and loveable in the child; but as we grow we are required by the fact of growth not to close ourselves off, either in awareness or experience, to the realities that confront us. Innocence as a perpetuation of earlier attitudes—the innocence of the flower children, of the too easy program of loving everyone, of wearing one’s birthday suit without anxiety or guilt, of oversimplification of honesty and sincerity as though one were still a child—all these may be charming but they are also radically nonadaptive in our contemporary World. It is an innocence that shows itself in the clear, open, pure visage of a Larry, an innocence that expects nature to hear our need and forsake her ancient condition of neutrality in order to protect us from harm. It is an innocence without responsibility. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

This type of innocence is a defense against having to confront the realities of power, including such external forms of power as war machine or such inner forms of power as status and prestige. The fact that innocence is used for such extrainnocent purposes is what makes it suspect. Innocence as a shield from responsibility is also a shield from growth. It protects us from new awareness and from identifying with the sufferings of humankind as well as with the joys, both of which are shut off from the pseudo innocent person. The person of independent temperament cannot fit easily into monastic existence with its formal patterns and clock-timed bell-signalled regularity. The solution of the World’s problems does not lie in renouncing the Worldly life itself. If every man became a priest or every woman a nun, they would merely exchange one set of problems—Worldly ones—for another set—monastical ones. It is probably correct to say that the first kind are harsher and grimmer than the second kind. However, whatever type of life is adopted, problems will inescapably be there. Whether the ideal is a hermit’s existence or a householder’s the same qualities have to be developed. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

How can a person escape from the World-Mind since one is indissolubly united with it? Through the Overself one is a very part of it, one’s consciousness could not work without it. The Godlike deepest Self in us knows and feels on its own level; therefore the intellect’s reasoning and the aesthetic feeling are reflections on a lower level of spiritual activities. So many human sufferings are the consequences of human errors, and so many of these errors arise from human ignorance. The supreme ignorance of all which leads to the greatest sins and sufferings is that one does not know one is an individualized part of a greater consciousness. Although this consciousness shines through one’s ego it is apart from the ego, for it stands in its own right and exists as an entity by itself. It is this consciousness which enables a mortal to act and think in the physical body and it is one’s diviner part. Blinded by the error of materialism, one identifies with the body itself. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

The self of every create is divine Being, the ultimate Consciousness, but only when evolution brings it to the human level does it have the possibility of discovering this fact. It is true that the human mind makes it own World of experience, but it is not true that it makes it by itself; for behind the individual mind is the Cosmic Mind. If the World is but an idea there must be a mind which conceived it. Although my individual mind has so largely contributed to its making, it has not contributed to its original conception. Such a mind must be an undivided universal one in which my own is rooted. It must indeed be what mortals commonly call God. Thus the World-mind originates our experience for us but we ourselves mold it. It supplies the karmic-forces material and we as individuals supply the space-time shape which this material takes. Thus there is a union of the individual with the universal. Whether we think of this mysterious origin as manifesting itself in waves of energy or in particles of the same force, it is and must be there for the deeply reflective atomic scientist. Whether we think of it as God the Creative Universal Mind or as God the inaccessible all-transcending Mind remote from human communion, it is and must be there for the intuitive. However, in both cases his entire Universe is but a thought in the Universal Mind. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

Every object and every creature is simultaneously included in this thought: therefore every human being too. Through this relationship it is possible for a mortal to attain some kind of communion with IT. This is what the quest is all about. Let us consider once more what has here been said about encounters with what is natural and with what is spiritual. The question may be asked at this point whether we have any right to speak of a reply or address that comes from outside the sphere to which in our consideration of the orders of being we ascribe spontaneity and consciousness as if they were like a reply or address in the human World in which we live. Is what has here been said valid except as a personalizing metaphor? Are we not threatened by the dangers of a problematic mysticism that blurs the borderlines that are drawn, and necessarily have to be drawn, by all rational knowledge? The clear and firm structure of the I-You relationship, familiar to anyone with a candid heart and the courage to stake it, is not mystical. To understand it we must sometimes step out of our habits of thought, but not out of the primal norms that determine mortal’s thoughts about what is actual. Both in the realm of nature and in the realm of spirit—the spirit that lives on in sayings and works and the spirit that strives to become sayings and works—what acts onus may be understood as the action of what has being. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

Human existence is challenged and charged by the perils and prices of everyday existence. “Every thing has it appointed hour, there is a time for all things under Heaven: a time for birth, a time for death, a time to plant, and a time to uproot, a time to terminate, and a time to heal, a time to break down, and a time to build, a time to cry, a time to laugh, a time to mourn, a time to dance, a time to scatter and a time to gather, a time to embrace, a time to refrain, a time to embrace, a time to refrain, a time to see, a time to lose, a time to keep, a time to throw away, a time to tear, a time to sew, a time for silence and a time for speech, a time for love, a time for hate, a time for war, a time for peace,” reports Ecclesiastes 3.1-8. You have read words of a man who lived about 200 yeas before the birth of Jesus; a man nurtured in Jewish piety and educated in Greek wisdom; a child of his period—a period of catastrophes and despair. He expresses this despair in words of a pessimism that surpasses most pessimistic writings in World literature. Everything is in vain, he repeats many times. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

It is vanity, even if you were King Solomon who not only controlled the means for any humanly possible satisfaction but who also could use them with wisdom. However, even such a man must say: All is in vain! We do not know the name of the writer of this book who is usually called the Preacher, although he is much more a teacher of wisdom, a practical philosopher. Perhaps we wonder how his dark considerations of mortal’s destiny could become a Biblical book. It took indeed a long time and the overcoming of much protect before it was accepted. However, finally synagogue and church accepted it; and now this book is in the Bible besides Isaiah and Matthew and Paul and John. This “all is in vain” has received Biblical authority. I believe that this authority is deserved, that it is not an authority produced by a mistake, but that it is the authority of truth. His description of the human situation is truer than any poetry glorifying mortals and their destiny. His honesty opens our eyes for those things which are overlooked or covered up by optimist of all kinds. So if you meet people who attack Christianity for having too many illusions tell them that their attacks would be much stronger if they allied themselves with the Preacher. The very fact that this book is a part of the Bible shows clearly that the Bible is a most realistic book. And cannot be otherwise. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

For only on this background the message of Jesus as the Christ has meaning. Only if we accept an honest view of the human situation, of mortal’s old reality, can we understand the message that in Christ a new reality has appeared. One who never has said one’s life vanity of vanities, all is vanity cannot honestly say with Paul, “In all these things we are more than conquerors through one who loved us.” This view would enrich psychology by embracing literary sources, humanistic values, and the power of myth. Clinicians can utilize existential principles to empower clients in a wealth of ways: to cope more effectively and respond to life’s demands, to achieve a deeper understanding of the situational forces operating on them, and to gain a sense of how the individual’s interpretation of life creates new possibilities and realities of existence. Existential-integrative psychology and religion aspires us to guide others toward personal liberation, an inner sense of freedom one that absorbs and transforms experiential challenges. Rather than retreat from the onslaught of traumatic experiences or exploit them for personal gains, the client, and all of us, can live most fully, be optimally functional, by developing the mental flexibility to be on the moment, meaningfully rooted in the past, with viable options for the future. This whole person is architect, developer, tenant and landlord, Apollo and Dionysus in the House of Human Nature. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14

A Passionate Eagerness to Find God is a Necessary Basis for all the Other Qualifications in its Purist

June 30, 2019 1:28 am

We moved slowly across the dark court, my distress almost unbearable. People entering the labor market today not only face the prospect of disorderly work careers, but also of work for no significant reason beyond consumption. Most people no longer produce useful things; they do make wasted and wasteful commodities and services. (In the Untied States today there are actually more people employed in providing services than in the production of goods.) The impact of these conditions on rising generations is that economically and vocationally, a very large proportion of the young people are in a more drastic plight than anything so far mentioned. In our society as it is, there are not enough worthy jobs. However, is our society, being as it is, were run more efficiently and soberly, for a majority there would soon not be any jobs at all. There is at present nearly full employment and there may be for some years, yet a vast number of young people are rationally unemployable, useless. Useless because as crafts and craftsmanship have declined, the job opportunities open to them have increasingly become variations on the theme of boondoggling—whether they become organized people or, more likely, semi-skilled retail operatives. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

In any case, the work available to them in unlikely to ennoble them or their society. It is hard to grow up when there is not enough work to sustain a household. Will it be any easier to grow up in the future? As the age of automation is underway, promising untold wealth and leisure, the forces separating humans from the means and end of work will inevitably grow stronger. Indeed, as far as conditions of work are concerned, the submission of workers to machines will be complete. Today, a person can stop a machine or wreck it: one has the remnants of power over it. However, with automation that power will be lost for good, expect perhaps for a small elite of engineers who will be busy designing and tending the machines of the future. Modern mortals have already depersonalized themselves so effectively that they are no longer human enough to stand up to their machines. Looking ahead, by the perfection of the automaton mortal will become completely alienated from their World and reduced to nullity—the kingdom and the power and the glory now belong to the machine. Everyone expects to witness scientific advance made in these modern times, but only a few have the mental courage to expect spiritual advances let alone seek it. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

Fantasy? Already the uncanny power of machines has entered into the delusions that mark psychotic disturbances. In time past, delusions took either human or superhuman forms; but today what is so new in the hopes and fears of the machine age are that the savior and destroyer are no longer clothed in the image of mortals; no longer are the figure that we imagine can save and destroy us direct projections of our human experiences. What we not hope will save us, and what in our delusions we fear will destroy us, is something that no longer has human qualities. That device or projection is the machine, and not surprisingly psychoanalysts refer to a characteristic delusion, the influencing machine, a device which some insane persons believe exerts an extraordinary and evil power over them against their will. The psychotic person ends up feeling controlled by mechanical devices that no longer resemble anything human or even animal-like. Thus modern mortals, when one is haunted, whether sane or profoundly disturbed, is no longer haunted by other mortals or grandiose projections of mortals, but by machines like Alexa smart home devices, robots replacing TV News anchors, self-check out in the supermarket, and driverless cars. This, while at the same time relying for one’s protection or salvation on machines. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

If we have placed such great stress on our machine age an on the conditions and purposes of work, it is not because we accept the metaphysical view that mortal’s self is most crucially expressed in work-activity. Rather, it is because of the fundamental break in our society between work and other activities. This break has had enormous consequences. Mortals are dehumanized not only by the work situation but also by the ends for which our society uses work, chiefly consumption of its own sake. As capitalism began to accumulate greater surpluses of wealth (especially for those on top) the unproductive acquisition and accumulation of goods became the primary means of achieving social status in the community. Ownership has grown into a human institution on grounds unrelated to the subsistence minimum. The dominant incentive was from the outset the invidious distinction attaching to wealth, and, save temporarily and by exception, no other motive has usurped the primacy at any later stage of the development. Under the regime of individual ownership the most available means of visibly achieving a purpose is that afforded by the acquisition and accumulation of goods; and as the self-regarding antithesis between mortal and mortal reaches fuller consciousness, the prosperity for achievement—the instinct of workmanship—tend more and more to shape itself into a straining to excel other in pecuniary achievement. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

If consumption then becomes conspicuous it was become in an increasingly heterogeneous and differentiated society there is no other ready means of achieving status expect by spending money and acquiring goods. However, such consumption is essentially wasteful and in conflict with what is considered a universal trait in mortals, the instinct of workmanship. The industrial revolution replaced all workmanship with labor and the result has been that the things of the modern World have becomes labor products whose natural fate is to be consumed, instead of work products which are there to be used. The process of consumption, reaching its highest form in the United State, is alienating in still another way. We are surrounded by things whose nature and origin we know nothing. We consume, as we produce, without any concrete relatedness to the objects with which we deal. Moreover, the volume of consumption is determined to a large extent by the artificial stimulants of a giant advertising industry; and if consumers learn to manipulate things, they in turn manipulated by the propagandist of commerce. The strategy of planned obsolescence—by which things are made to wear out quickly and then be replaced—may stimulate the economy, but it can hardly be said to serve human needs. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

Working chiefly to consume, consuming to achieve status, accumulating things that have no meaning, wasting on a gigantic scale—these are the conditions in which we live. The result is a wasteland of junk and of human aspirations. However, what other important forces shape the architecture of our lives? We have to be prepared with rational plans and sensible blueprints to guide progressions of seemingly orderly experiences in the direction of wise decisions. We must look at the very structure of human existence for keys to unlock the resources human beings need to confront the recurring cries in our lives. Those keys are fabricated in the mold of phenomenology. Understanding comes through sharing the perspective of the experiencing person, entering into the life space of the tenant, so to speak, rather than identifying with the authoritative analysis of the landlord. Phenomenology created a subjective, descriptive context for beginning to make sense of the vicissitudes of being and becoming. Its tower of understanding stands alongside the traditional social scientists’ tower of objectivity and quantifiability, deemed essential for erecting a science of prediction and control. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

As psychological science advances models drawn from physics and biology, the phenomenological rush of existentialism is more toward humanities, philosophy, and the arts. The former probes human nature vertically, the latter explores its horizontal connections to illuminate the breadth of humanity. Existential-humanist psychology refuses either to reduce the complexity of human beings to ever more refined variable or to glorify them as masters of their destiny. This approach recognizes that we are all vulnerable to powerful yet subtle situational forces that can bend—and sometimes break—the will of the best and the brightest of us. Interestingly, this view is echoed by social psychologists who contend that social psychology’s major take-home message is that situation exert more powerful influences on our thoughts, feelings, vales, and actions than we acknowledge or dare to recognize. This view does not make us pawns of environmental forces or autumn leaves at the mercy of existential winds. Humans are negotiating continually between realities and illusions, old paths and new destinations, given clouds, constraints and freedoms, calibrations and creations. How are human experiences challenged and charged by the perils and the prizes of every day existence? #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

Obviously, no sweeping answer can be given to this question. Instead of considering nature as a single whole, as we usually do, we must consider its different realms separately. Mortals once tamed animals, and they are still capable o bringing off this strange feat. One draws animal into one’s own sphere and moves them to accept them, a stranger, in an elementary manner and to accede to one’s ways. One obtains from them an often astonishing active response to one’s approach, to one’s address—and on the whole this response is the stronger and more direct, the more one’s relation amounts to a genuine You-saying. Not infrequently animals, like children, see through feigned tenderness. However, outside the tamed circles, too, we occasionally encounter a similar contact between mortals and animals: some mortals have deep down in their being a potential partnership with animals—most often persons who are by no means animalic by nature but rather spiritual. Animals are not twofold, like mortals: the twofoldness of the basic words I-You and I-It is alien to them although they can both turn toward another being and contemplate objects. We may say that in them twofoldness is latent. In the perspective of our You-saying to animas, we may call this sphere the threshold of mutuality. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

It is altogether different with those realms of nature which lack the spontaneity that we share with animals. It is part of our concept of the plant that it cannot react to our actions upon it, that it cannot reply. Yet this does not mean that we meet with no reciprocity at all in this sphere. We find here not the deed of posture of an individual being but a reciprocity of being itself—a reciprocity that has nothing expect being. The living wholeness and unity of a tree that denies itself to the eye, not matter how keen, of anyone who merely investigates, while it manifest to those who say You, is present when they are present: they grant the tree the opportunity to manifest it, and now the tree that had being manifest it. Our habits of thought make it difficult for us to see that in such cases something is awakened by our attitude and flashes toward us from which has being. What matters in this sphere is that we should do justice with an open mind to the actuality that opens up before us. This huge sphere that reaches from the stones to the stars I should like to designate as the prethreshold, meaning the step that comes before the threshold. #RandolpHarris 9 of 18

The notion that one who marries, has children, lives across the same road, and catches the commuter’s train is unfit to receive the grace of God, whereas a mortal who wear a priest’s dress or a monk’s robe is alone fit, is one of those idea sedulously fostered by priests and monks themselves. The fact is that grace is no respecter of clothes, status, or social activities, that is happens to alight on those whose hearts and minds seek it most, and in the right way; that today Christ is militant, is working inside mortals wherever one may be and whatever garments one wears and however one easily distinguishable by any outer labels, but are easily measurable by their own conscience, in their degree of consciousness. They are not professional exhibitionists eager to display their spirituality, to talk about it and impress other with it. They may be passive in a monastery or in an office—that is not the point. What is going on inside them? There is no special superiority in either of the two conditions of life—the monastic or the householding. Whoever praises the monk’s state as being the highest open to human beings, errs. Whoever praises the householder’s as being the best, also errs. What can right be said is that for certain persons at certain times and under certain circumstances, one or the other state is better. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

For the same person at different times and in different circumstances either may be worse. So it is the setting up of universality, the claiming that one alone is the most spiritual or the mot satisfactory ideal, which is wrong. Each must find the way uniquely ordained for one, and not passively, imitatively, accept the way ordained for another mortal. Although it is true that some have realized the goal while living a normal life in the World, married and active, others have been able to do so only while freed from the World’s ways. It I therefore essential for one to be oneself, an individual, and let one’s own inner voice guide one to the particular path suited on one’s destiny. The common explanation of the contemporary unrest as due to a failure to preserve law and order, the favorite rallying cry of politicians. It illustrates our innocence in two ways. One, that each act of violence or aggression can be dealt with by the tried-and-true method, following the nineteenth-century myth in America, of throwing in more hardware and personnel in the form of police, national guard, and soldiers. The naivete of this is shown by our experience in the Middle East, to continual shock to our own narcissism. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

The second and more important expression of innocence is possessed in the bland identification of law with the particular order that happens to exist at the moment in the society. My order becomes, therefore, right; it is as eternal as the law with which it is coupled; it is God’s will. Law can also be used, when coupled with injustice, as a creative set of principles unfolding continuously toward greater public good. However, law coupled with order, in the shibboleth law and order, becomes regularly a justification to the status quo. And in a transitional age such as ours, the one thing that must, at all costs, be avoided is rigid adherence to the status quo; for that is just what has to be changed and reformed by the transition. The only way to live out a transitional period is with flexibility to adapt to change—and, unfortunately, that is what most people, in their anxiety at the dizzy speed of change, feel they do not have. Emphasis on law and order can be destructive to a person’s self-esteem and self-respect. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

When President proposed a greater effort to get crime off the streets by building a wall along the board of Mexico to halt illegal immigration, he received the largest and loudest ovation of any time in the whole speech; which means that law and order, which is the meaning of Trump’s phrase, appeals tremendously to congressional members of both houses. However, the emphasis on law and order can itself contribute to violence and can be one of the things that makes an ultimate revolution more bloody. Human pride and esteem are offended by a show of force. One of the things that can abet a riot is precisely the lining up of a hundred law enforcement officers on a street. It offends both those who are being protected and those who are protected against; for it makes u all faceless Others.” The bitterness that goes into the phrase law and order often has as one of its sources a reaction formation to one’s own guilt. For example, some may have acquired their money by questionable quasi-legal means, and now they come out as a staunch citizen for law and order to prevent others from taking it away from them. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

In its best sense and by itself, order ought to mean the forms and conventions by which we live and work together; order ideally is freedom from disturbing interruption of peace, physical safety which in turn gives the psychological security for the pursuit of intellectual, emotional and spiritual aims. However, when coupled with law, it implies a rigid clinging to old forms of acting, a prevention of the very changes made necessary by our transitional age. It is primarily the older generation that adheres to law and order so innocently. However, innocence is obviously used by the new generation as well as a way to avoid facing its powerlessness. There are so many absurd aspect of the so-called battle between the generations—youth’s continuous confession of the sins of teachers and parents, the endless blaming of others, the over thirty shibboleth—that one is in danger of overlooking the deeper meaning of the conflict. Now that the younger generation has not plenty of reason for accusing its elders. People inherited from their parents’ generation the experience of a massive intrusion of criminal violence into politics—they learned in high school and in college about concentration and extermination camps, about genocide and torture, about the wholesale slaughter of civilians in war. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

However, does it not confuse the whole picture to make this conflict of youth versus age? What would they have done in their father’s place, given the historical situation in which their fathers were born and working with what they had to use? It is an anti-historical viewpoint to insist that the mere fact of having been born a generation later guarantees any rightness in itself. Furthermore, it is a taking over, in masqueraded form, of one of the least noble of our culture’s myths—the adulation of youth, the falsehood of believing that everything is better in earlier years. However, all our concerns eventually come to an end; they are all finite. The span of our lives many of them have already disappeared and new ones have emerged which also will disappear. Many great concerns of the past have vanished and more will come to an end, sooner or later. The melancholy law of transitoriness governs even our most passionate concerns. The anxiety of the end dwells in the happiness they give. Both the things about which we are concerned and we ourselves come to an end. There will be a moment—and perhaps it is not far away—when we shall no longer be concerned about any of these concerns, when their finitude—of our own end. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

However, we maintain our preliminary concerns as if the were ultimate. And if we try to free ourselves from them, they keep us in their grasp. When young people are pressed for a statement of their values, and one asks what they would make the center of a new World, one is often left with picayune or self-revolving items like never stepping on insects or never throwing away anything made of plastic. This is a blatant use of innocence. We look—often in vain—for a serious, responsible confrontation with the real problems: power, organization in national groups, fidelity in personal life. One feels that the younger generation gets particular gratification out of simply attacking the establishment as such. Is it a reaction-formation to their own unease at the affluence of their parents and to their own guilt at their dependency on their parents for sustenance? However, if for no other reason than that the establishment is dying anyway, this is an uneasy battle. The present college generation was born in an era when practically all mooring post—for instance, in pleasures of the flesh, in marriage, in religion—are threatened or already lost. We have a new morality, most obviously in the areas of pleasures of the flesh, marriage, and the role of woman. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

Every concern is tyrannical and wants our whole heart and our whole mind and our whole strength. Every concern tries to become our ultimate concern, our god. The concern about our work often succeeds in becoming our god, as does the concern about another human being, or about pleasure. The concern about science has succeeded in becoming the god of the whole era in history, the concern about money has become an ever more important god of all. However, these concerns are finite, they conflict with each other, they burden our consciences because we cannot do justice to all of them. We may try to dismiss all concerns and to maintain a cynical unconcern. We determine that nothing shall concern us any more, expect perhaps casually, but certainly not seriously. We try to be unconcerned about ourselves and others, about our work and our pleasures, about necessities and luxuries, about social and political matter, about knowledge and beauty. We may even feel that this unconcern has something heroic about it. And one thing is true: It is the only alternative to having an ultimate concern, Unconcern or ultimate concern—those are the only alternatives. The cynic is concerned, passionately concerned, about one thing, namely, one’s unconcern. This is the inner contradiction of all unconcern. Therefore, there is only one alternative, which is ultimate concern. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

Here we get what cannot fail to be recognized as firsthand, insider’s account of that goal which makes sense of spiritual aspiration and inspires continued rational effort, day by day, toward stable and honest self-realization. Here we see a wisdom nourished, rather than challenged, by facts; a serenity comprehending, rather than at odds with, efficient practicality. Here, one can feel a need to complete enlightenment by a vivid updating, from modern mentalities, of what a mind continually attuned to God is like and offers its society, a convincing testimony that much of what the highest attainment means when it is working inside the human being. Power is not our own and is not human and is using us as its human instrument. We see plenty of evidence that the Universe is not mindless, and therefore there is a Universal Mind related to it—that is to say, related to us, who are parts of the whole. It might well be said that I am connected with God on the one hand, with the World on the other hand, but both connections are highly ingenious inventions. God is literally in me. His “I” makes my “I” possible. My own sense of being is immersed in God’s archetypal thought. The individual mind not only exists within the World-Mind, it is born of the World-Mind. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18 D8zFSZBV4AAWYRj

The Spirit’s Beauty Has Lured Mortals on Like a Dream of Unfound Gold for the Heart of Mortals is always Seeking this World of Treasure!

June 27, 2019 12:13 am

And gradually I realized that I possessed a new concept of loneliness, a new method of measuring a silence that stretched to the end of the World. And all I had to interrupt it were those menacing recorded preternatural voices which carried no images as their virulency increased. It is always and forever the struggle: to perceive somehow our own complicity with evil is a horror not to ne borne. It is much more reassuring to see the World in terms of totally innocent victims and totally evil instigators of the monstrous violence we see all about. At all costs, never disturb our innocence. However, what is the most innocent place in any country? It is not the insane asylum? The perfection of innocence, indeed, is madness. Rocklin charmed me, subdued me somewhat. Almost Venetian, it seemed, the somber multicolored mansions rising wall to wall over the narrow black streets. Irresistible the lights sprinkled over hilltop and value; and the brilliant manicured lawns and plush trees shooting up like a fairy-tale forest into a misty blue sky. We live at the end of an era. The age that began with the Renaissance, born out of the twilight of the Middle Ages, is now at a close. The era that emphasized rationalism and individualism is suffering an inner and outer transition; and there are as yet only dim harbingers, only partly conscious, of what the new age will be. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

Recall those towering individuals of the Renaissance, explorers of the Earth like Columbus and Magellan, and explorers of the Heavens like Copernicus. Our comparable exploration is the recent trips to the Moon and robots deployed on Mars. However, practically no one remembers the names of the astronauts who walked on the Moon. What we do remember is the machinery; the hero of the moon trip was not an individual but a projectile, and the mortals were tenders of this projectile. Let no one conclude from this, however, that in the new age mortals will be subordinate to technology. It may be just the opposite: the development of technology, filling a role similar to that of the ancient slaves, may force us to find intellectual and spiritual content to fill the vacuum of our days and nights. In the present gap between ages, power is disengaged from its hereditary lines, confused, and up for grabs. Those who have occupied the numbing position of subordinate groups—the African Americans, and Chicanos, women, the less affluent, students, mental patients, convicts—are springing to life, announcing their existence, and presenting their demands. Power becomes a new and urgent issue not only for these groups, but for every individual in our culture who is trying to get one’s bearings and fine one’s pace amid the turbulence. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

Power lessens in such periods—often called by its alternate names, alienation and helplessness—become very painful. There is one way, however, of confronting one’s powerlessness by making it a seeming virtue. This is the conscious divesting on the part of an individual of one’s power; it is then a virtue not to have it. I call this innocence. The word is derived from the Latin in and nocens, literally, not harmful, to be free from guilt or sin, guileless, pure; and in actions it means without evil influence or effect, or not arising from evil intention. To start with, we must distinguish between two kinds of innocence. One is innocence as a quality of imagination, the innocence of the poet or artist. It is the preservation of a childlike clarity in adulthood. Everything has a freshness, a purity, newness, and color. From this innocence spring awe and wonder. It leads toward spirituality: it is the innocence of Saint Francis in his Sermon to the Birds. When Jesus said: “Only as ye become like little children shall ye enter the kingdom of Heaven,” it is assumedly what he had in mind. It is the preservation of childlike attitudes into maturity without sacrificing the realism of one’s perception of evil, one’s complicity with evil. This is authentic innocence. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

Such innocence can be a real protection in time of need. If one would keep free from influences that would take away the ideals which one has specifically set up for it to follow, one must try to keep one’s own life in one’ own hands. If one values freedom one must refuse to put one’s self in a position where one will be compelled to echo the views of those who do not share one’s ideas. One may have to choose between the trials of sturdy independence and the temptations of enervating security. It does not ask one to make harsh sacrifices but it does ask one to make reasonable ones. If they seem harsh to one that is only because one has been kept until then in a state of so-called normality by the powerful suggestions of organized society. His normality is merely the pooling of common ignorance and the sharing of common weakness. If the mind is to engage with success in the quest for truth, it must be unfettered and then unprejudiced. It requires moral strength or mental power to refuse the gregarious support of the crowd—be it sectarian church, a mystical group, or some other combination. It requires faith in oneself and the courage to resist the pull of others and be an individual. To venture so far afield from the common way and yet keep quite sane and practical, and not become a human oddity, a social freak, is something indeed. One has to pick one’s way through mistaken teachings, among provisional standpoints, and between ambitious gurus. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

There is another kind of innocence. A type of innocence which does not lead to spirituality but rather consists of blinders—Pseudoinnocence, in other words. Capitalizing on naivete, it consists of a childhood that is never outgrown, a kind of fixation on the past. It is childishness rather than childlikeness. When we face questions too big and too horrendous to contemplate, such as the dropping of the atomic bomb, we tend to shrink into this kind of innocence and make a virtue of powerlessness, weakness, and helplessness. This pseudoinnocence leads to utopianism; we do not then need to see the real dangers. With unconscious purpose we close our eyes to reality and persuade our unconscious purpose we close our eyes to reality and persuade ourselves that we have escaped it. This kind of innocence does not make things bright and clear, as does the first kind; it only makes them seem simple and easy. It wilts before our complicity with evil. It is this innocence that cannot come to terms with the destructiveness in one’s self or others; and hence, it actually become self-destructive. Innocence that cannot include the soul because it becomes evil. This parallels the innocence in neurosis. It is a fixation in childhood, never lived through but clung to as the only protection against hostile, unloving, or dominating parents. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

A young man in therapy, who had developed an intricate pattern of capitalizing on such weakness, once dreamed himself as a rabbit being chased by wolves. It turned out that he had been a wolf in rabbit’s skin. Often the only strategy available to such persons, learned by necessity in childhood, consists of accepting the overt powerlessness their situation requires and then getting their power by covert means. In this sense, the perfection of innocence, indeed, is madness. There in the insane asylum people drift through life truly innocent, unable to see into themselves at all. However, it may not be an inability to see into themselves. Nor is it being truly innocent. Only when viewed from the outside it is an innocence. In their detached innocence, they talk with spirit because they cannot find anyone else who is willing and able to understand them. The tremendous growth of mechanical power since the eighteenth century—first steam, then electricity, and now atomic power—made possible a great increase, albeit not necessarily an equitable distribution, of social wealth. While the early stages of the industrial revolution actually improvised millions, by almost any material standards we are today better off then were our ancestors. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

New mechanical power produced new wealth; but it also imposed rigid controls over human behavior. Thorstein Veblen was one of the first sociologist to interpret the broad cultural implications of mechanization: “Within the range of…machine-guided work, and within the range of modern life so far as it is guided by the machine process, the courses of things is given mechanically, impersonally, and the resultant discipline is a discipline in the handling of impersonal facts for mechanical effect.” Most directly affected are people who work with machines. Unlike the tools of workmanship, which at every given moment in the work process remain the servants of the hand, the machines demand that the laborer serve them, that one adjust the natural rhythm of one’s body to their mechanical movement. However, this discipline extends far beyond the workplace, affecting not only factory workers but the whole of society. Indeed, the clock rather than the steam engine became the foundation of the modern industrial system, for once machines were regulated by mechanical, or non-human, time, an impersonal new discipline was imposed on mortals. Today our lives are increasingly regulated by machines which set standards or performance and product, telling us when to start working, when to stop, what to do and how to do it. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

Also, the measure of our submission to mechanical controls is that we are largely unconscious of their influence. However, of their influence there can be no doubt. Historically, one of the first major results of mechanization was to transform labor: what had formerly been an integral part of human life became a means to an end. To feed and operate the machines of the new civilization required not just raw materials but free labor. Since industrialism was pioneered by capitalist this meant a special kind of freedom. This is described as the working principle of the early capitalist market economy: Production is interaction of mortals and nature; if this process is to be organized through a self-regulating mechanism of barter and exchange, then morals and nature must be brought into its orbit; they must be subject to supply and demand, this is, be dealt with as commodities, as goods produced for sale. However, for mortals to be treated as a commodity, a brutal operation was required: the freeing of labor from traditional bonds of craft, family and community. Thus one of the many tragic ironies of the early capitalist market economy: expected automatically to produce general welfare, it split the community in ways which survive to this day. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

To separate labor from other activities of life and to subject it to the laws of the market was to annihilate all organic forms of existence and to replace them by a different type of organization, an atomistic and individualistic one. When labor became a mechanically regulated commodity, mortals lost part of themselves. This returns to our major theme of alienation. The worker, having lost control over both the conditions of one’s labor and the fruit of one’s labor, became alienated from their soul. The spirit (or human mind) is at war with itself; in consequence, it has to overcome itself as its own most formidable obstacle. That development which in the sphere of Nature is a peaceful growth, is for the spirit, a severe, a mighty conflict with itself. What spirit really strives for is the realization of its Ideal being; but in doing so, it hides that goal from its own vision, and is proud and well satisfied in this alienation. Therefore, mortal’s own intellectual creations become independent of their creator and hence alienated to one. Human achievement is a dialectical process in which mortals can advance to higher forms only by overcoming or mastering oneself and cultural forces that one creates. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

Therefore, the history of mortals is a history of their alienation or frustration, and of one’s self-realization through the conquest of these frustrations. The self-sufficiency of one’s ideal, its remoteness from popular ways, may be boldly and openly expressed in action or kept as an interior and hidden thing. For most the first way may prove to be an imprudent course but for others it may be a necessity. Mentally one cannot fit oneself into any of the accepted categories which the society of one’s place and time provide, so an independent and solitary path attracts one. Physically, one may have to make an uneasy compromise with society, with the result that both benefit by their mutual services. Thus without doing violence to one’s chief principles one yet finds a way to live among those who have no use for them. “Now as they went on their way, he entered a village; and a woman named Martha received him into her house. And she had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to his teaching. But Martha was distracted with much serving; and she went to him and said, ‘Lord, do you not care that my sister has eft me to serve along? Tell her then to help me.’ But the Lord answered, ‘Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about may things; one thing is needful. Mary has chosen the good portion, which shall not be taken away from her,’” reports Luke 10.38-42. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

Before anyone can carry out an independent investigation of truth, one must first possess the capacity to do so. To develop this capacity where it is lacking, the philosophic discipline is prescribed. The words Jesus spoke to Martha belong to the most famous of all the words in the Bible. Martha and Mary have become symbols for two possible attitudes towards life, for two forces in mortal and humankind as a whole, for two kinds of concern. Martha is concerned about many things, but all of them are finite, preliminary, transitory. Mary is concerned about one thing, which is infinite, ultimate, lasting. Martha’s way is not contemptible. On the contrary, it is the way which keeps the World running. It is driving force which preserves and enriches life and culture. Without it Jesus could not have talked to Mary and Mary could not have listened to Jesus. Once I heard a sermon dedicated to the justification and glorification of Martha. This can be done. There are innumerable concerns in our lives and in human life generally which demand attention, devotion, passion. However, they do not demand infinite attention, unconditional devotion, ultimate passion. They are important, often very important for you and for me and for the whole of humankind. However, they are not ultimately important. And therefore Jesus praises not Martha, but Mary. She has chosen the right thing, the one thing mortals need, the only thing of ultimate concern for ever mortal. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

The hour of a church service and every hour of prayer and reading is dedicated to listening in the way Mary listened. Something is being said to us, to the speaker as well as to the listeners, something about which we may become infinitely concerned. This is the meaning of every sermon. It shall awaken infinite concern. What does it mean to be concerned about something? It means that we are involved in it, that a part of ourselves is in it, that we participate with our hearts. And it means even more than that. It points to the way in which we are involved, namely, anxiously. The wisdom of our language often identifies concern wit anxiety. Wherever we are involved we feel anxiety. There are many things which interest us, which provoke our compassion or horror. However, they are not our real concern; they do not produce this driving, torturing anxiety which is present when we are genuinely and seriously concerned. In out story, Martha was seriously concerned. Let us try to remember what gives us concern in the course f an average day, from the moment of awakening to the last moment before falling asleep, and even beyond that, when our anxieties appear in our dreams. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

We are concerned about our work; it is the basis of our existence. We may love it or hate it; we may fulfill it as a duty or as a hard necessity. However, anxiety grasps us whenever we feel the limits of our strength, our lack of efficiency, the struggle with our laziness, the danger of failure. We are concerned about our relationships to others. We cannot imagine living without their benevolence, their friendship, their love, their communion in body and soul. However, when we think about the indifference, the outbursts of anger and jealousy, the hidden and often poisonous hostility we experience in ourselves as well as those we love, we are worried and often in utter despair. The anxiety about losing them, about having hurt them, about not being worthy of them, creeps into our hearts and makes our love restless. We are concerned about ourselves. We feel responsible for our development towards maturity, towards strength in life, wisdom in mind, and perfection in spirit. At the same time, we are striving for happiness, we are concerned about our pleasures and about having a good time, a concern which ranks very high with us. However, when we look at ourselves in the mirror of self-scrutiny or of the judgments of others, our anxiety strikes us. We feel that we have made the wrong decisions, that we are failing before mortals and before ourselves. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

We compare ourselves with others and feel inferior to them, and we are depressed and frustrated. We believe that we have wasted our happiness either by pursuing it too eagerly and confusing happiness either by pursuing it too eagerly and confusing happiness with pleasure or by not being courageous enough to grasp the right moment for a decision which might have brought happiness. We cannot forget the most natural and most universal concern of everything that lives, the concern for the preservation of life—for our daily bread. There was a time in recent history in which large groups in the Western World had almost forgotten this concern. Today, the simple concern for food and clothing and shelter is so overwhelming in the greater part of humankind that it has almost suppressed most of the other human concerns, and it has absorbed the minds of all classes of people. However, there is a qualitative difference between historical ages. There are times of ripening when the true elements of the human spirit, held down and buried, grows ready underground with such pressures and such tensions that it merely waits to be touched by one who will touch it—and then erupts. The revelation that then appears seizes the whole ready element in all its suchness, recasts it and produced a form, a new form of God in the World. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

Ever new regions of the World and the spirit are thus lifted up into form, called divine form, in the course of history, in the transformations of the human element. Ever new spheres become the place of a theophany. It is not mortal’s own power that is at work here, neither is it merely God passing through; it is a mixture of the divine and the human. Whoever is sent forth in a revelation takes with one in one’s eyes an image of God; however supra-sensible it may be, one takes it along in the eyes of one’s spirit, in the altogether not metaphorical but entirely real visual power of one’s spirit. The spirit also answers by beholding. Although we on Earth never behold God without World but only the World in God, by beholding we eternally form God’s form. Form is a mixture of You and It, too. In faith and cult it an freeze into an object; but from the gist of the relation that survives in it, it turns ever again into presence. God is near his forms as long as mortals do not remove them from him. In true prayer, cult and faith are unified and purified into living relation. That true prayer lives in religions testifies to their true life; as long as it lives in them, they live. “And they did remember his words; and therefore they went forth, keeping the commandments of God, to teach the word f God among all the people,” reports Helaman 5.14. #RandolphHarris 15 or 15

Randolph Harris II International Institute