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

August 14, 2019 10:32 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Good Health Generally Means the Ability to Resolve Contradictions—It is a Synthesis Like Breathing!

August 6, 2019 12:14 am

God created the Universe and Time. Well, we were astonished, and we were also enthralled! Absolutely enthralled. God said to us, “Watch this, because this will be beautiful and will exceed your conceptions and expectations, as it will Mine.” It is all garbled, in countless texts throughout the World. There are texts which are irretrievable now which contained amazingly accurate information about cosmology; and there are texts that mortals know; and there are texts that have been forgotten but which can be rediscovered in time. “And when he had sent the multitudes away, he went up into a mountain apart to pray: and when the evening was come, he was there alone,” reports Matthew 14.23. He was there alone. So are we. Beings are alone because they are mortal! In some way every creature is alone. In majestic isolation every star travels through the darkness of endless space. Each tree grows according to its own law, fulfilling its unique possibilities. Animals live, fight, and die for themselves alone, confined to the limitations of their bodies. Certainly, they also appear as male and female, in families and in flocks. Some of them are gregarious. However, all of them are alone! Being alive means being in a body—a body separated from all other bodies. And being separated means being alone. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

This is true of every creature, and it is more true of humans than any other creature. One is not only alone; one also knows that one is alone. Aware of what one is, one asks the question of one’s aloneness. One asks why one is alone, and how one can triumph over one’s being alone. For this aloneness one cannot endure. Neither can one escape it. It is one’s destiny to be alone and to be aware of it. Not even God can take this destiny away from one. In the story of paradise we read—“Then the Lord God said, It is not good that man should be alone.” And as we pondered, as we opened our arms and sang and tried to comfort them, while stepping invisibly and artfully through the material of Earth, something momentous made itself known to us, shocking us out of our explorations. Before our very eyes, the Twelfth Revelation of Physical Evolution was upon us! It struck us like the light from Heaven; it distracted us from the cries of the covert invisible! It shattered our reason. It caused our songs to become laughter and wails. The Twelfth Revelation of Evolution was that of the female of the human species had begun to look more distinctly different from the male of the human species by margin so great that no other anthropoid could compare! #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

The female grew pretty in our eyes, and seductive; the hair left her face, and her limbs grew graceful; her manner transcended the necessities of survival; and she became beautiful as flowers are beautiful, as the wings of birds are beautiful! What had risen, a female tender-skinned and radiant of face. And God created the woman from the body of Adam. Here an old myth is used to show that originally there was no bodily separation between man and woman; in the beginning they were one. Now they long to be one again. However, although they recognize each other as flesh of their own flesh, each remains alone. They look at each other, and despite their longing for each other, they see their strangeness. In the story, God himself makes them aware of this fact when he speaks to each of them separately, when he makes each one responsible for one’s own guilt, when he listens to their excuses and mutual accusations, when he pronounces a separate curse over each, and leave them to experience shame in the face of their nakedness. They are each alone. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

The creation of the woman has not overcome the situation which God describes as not good for man. He remains alone. And the creation of the woman, although it provides a helper for Adam, has only presented to the one human being who is alone another human being who is equally alone, and from their flesh all other beings, each of whom will stand alone. We ask, however—is this really so? Did not God accomplish something better? Is not our aloneness largely removed in the encounter of the genders? Certainly it is during hours of communion and in moments of love. The ecstasy of love can absorb one’s own self in its union with the other self, and separation seems to be overcome. However, after these moments, the isolation of self from self is felt even more deeply than before, sometimes ever to the point of mutual repulsion. We have given too much of ourselves, and now we long to take back what was given. Our desire to protect our aloneness is expressed in the feeling of shame. When our intimate self, mental or bodily is opened, we feel ashamed. We try to cover our vulnerability, as did Adam and Eve when they became conscious of themselves. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

Thus, man and woman remain alone even in the most intimate union. They cannot penetrate each other’s innermost center. And if this were not so, they could not be helpers to each other’ they could not have human community. This is why God himself cannot liberate mortals from their aloneness: it is human’s greatness that one is centered within one’s own being. Separated from one’s World, one is thus able to look at it. Only because one can look at it can one know and love and transform it. God, in creating one the ruler of the Earth, had to separate one and thrust one into aloneness. Humans are also therefore able to be spoken to by God and by other beings. One can ask questions and give answers and make decisions. One has the freedom for good or evil. Only one who has an impenetrable center in oneself is free. Only one who is alone can claim to be a human. This is the greatness and this is he burden of being. “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.” From this primal decree millions of human beings are now liberated. More and more beings have more and more leisure. The working day grows shorter, the week end longer. More and more women are released at an earlier age from the heavier tasks of the rearing of children, in the small family of today, when kindergarten and school and clinic and restaurant come to their assistance. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

More and more people are freed for other things, released from the exhaustion of their energies in the mere satisfaction of elementary wants. No longer is the pattern so simple as that of Longfellow’s blacksmith, who something attempted, something done, had earned a night’s repose. Released from what? When necessity no longer drives, when people own long hors in which to do what they want, what do they want to do? Where necessity is heavy upon beings, they yearn for the joys of leisure. Now many have enough leisure. What are the joy they find? The shorter working day is also a different working day. Nearly all people work for others, not for themselves—not the way a person works who has one’s own little plot of Earth and must give oneself up to its cultivation. For many, work has become a routine—not too onerous, not too rewarding, and by no means engrossing—a daily routine until the bell rings and sets them free again. For what? It is a marvelous liberation for those who learn to use it; and there are many ways. It is the great emptiness for those who do not. People of a placid disposition do not know the great emptiness. When the day’s work done, they betake themselves to their quiet interests, their hobbies, their gardens or their amateur workbenches or their stamp collecting or their games or their affairs or their church activities or whatever it be. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

When they need more sting in life, they have a mild “fling,” taking a little “moral holiday.” Some find indulgence enough in the vicarious pleasure of snidely malicious gossip. Their habits are early formed and they keep a modicum of contentment. However, the number of the placid is growing less. The conditions of our civilization do not encourage that mood. For one thing, the old-time acceptance of authority, as God-given or nature-based, is much less common. Religion is for very many an ancient tale, a tale of little meaning, though the words are strong, reduced to ritual or the moral precepts of the Sunday pulpit. There is little allegiance to the doctrine that every being has allotted place. How could there be when competition has become a law of life? There is incessant movement and disturbance and upheaval. And with the new leisure there come new excitations, new stimuli to unrest. So the new leisure has brought its seeming opposite, restlessness. And because these cannot be reconciled the great emptiness comes. Faced with the great emptiness, unprepared to meet it, most people resort to one or another way of escape, according to their kind. Those who are less conscious of their need succeed in concealing it from themselves. They find their satisfaction in the great new World of means without ends. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

Those who are more conscious of their need cannot conceal it; they only distract themselves from the thought of it. Their common recourse is excitation, and they seek it in diverse ways. The first kind are the go-getters. When they are efficient or unscrupulous or both, they rise in the World. They amass things. They make some money. They win some place and power. Not for anything, not to do anything with it. Their values are relative, which means they are no values at all. They make money to make more money. They win some power that enables them to seek more power. They are practical beings. They keep right on being practical, until their unlived lives are at an end. If they stopped being practical, the great emptiness would engulf them. They are like planes that must keep on flying because they have no landing gear. The engines go fast and faster, but they are going nowhere. They make good progress to nothingness. They take pride in their progress. They are outdistancing other beings. They are always calculating the distance they have gained. It shows what can be done when you have the know-how. They feel superior and that sustains them. They stay assured in the World of means. What matters is winning. “But what good cam of it at last?” Ouoth little Peterkin. “Why that I cannot tell,” said he, “But ’twas a famous victory.” Victory for the sake of the winning, means for the sake of the acquiring, that is success. So the circle spins forever means without end, World without end. Amen. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

One will find that the onset of insight will not be at all like the picture of it which one had previously and erroneously formed. When one awakens to truth as it really is, one will have no occult vision, one will have no astral experience, no ravishing ecstasy. One will awaken to it in a state of utter stillness, and one will realize that truth was always there within one and that reality was always there around one. Truth is not something which has grown and developed through your efforts. It is not something which has been achieved or attained by laboriously adding up those efforts. It is not something which has to be made more and more perfect each year. And once your mental eyes are opened to truth they can never be closed again. The discovery of one’s true being is not outwardly dramatic, and for a long time no one may know of it, except oneself. The World may not honour one for it: one may die as obscure as one lived. However, the purpose of one’s life has been fulfilled; and God’s will has been done. There is nothing melodramatic about realization of Truth. Those who look for marvels look in vain, unless indeed its bestowal of singular serenity is a marvel. No one really knows ho this enlightenment first dawns on one. One moment it was not there, the next moment one was somehow in it. No announcements tell the World that one has come into enlightenment. No heralds blow the trumpets proclaiming being’s greatest victory—over oneself. This is in fact the quietest moment of one’s whole life. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

To find out that one’s way does lie through cults, in the hope of finding one to suit one, ventures into a danger-beset field, where lunacy is often mistaken for illumination and where exaggerated claims substitute for solid facts. The desire for power over others, for authority, is a form of personal ambition which has, in the past, mixed easily with a spiritual glimpse. A new sect, a new movement, has then come to birth. The seeker after truth who comes in contact with it would be far safer to take some of the teaching without sacrificing one’s freedom, without joining the group. If any work, institution, or organization is centered in the Overself it cannot fall into the base, negative, or selfish currents which, in the historic past, have polluted, poisoned, and sometimes destroyed so many tasks and enterprises. The fears which repression serves to overcome may also be overcome by keeping the hostility under conscious control. However, whether one controls or represses hostility is not a matter of choice, because repression is a reflex-like process. It occurs if in a particular situation it is unbearable to be aware that one is hostile. In such a case, of course, there is no possibility of conscious control. The main reasons why awareness of hostility may be unbearable are that one may love or need a person at the same time that one is hostile toward one, that one may not want to see the reasons, such as envy or possessiveness, which have promoted the hostility or, that it may be frightening to recognize within one’s self hostility toward anyone. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

In such circumstances repression is the shortest and quickest way toward an immediate reassurance. By repression the frightening hostility disappears from awareness, or is kept from entering awareness. I should like to repeat this sentence in other words, because for all its simplicity it is one of those psychoanalytic statements which is but rarely understood: if hostility is repressed the person has not the remotest idea that one is hostile. The quickest way toward a reassurance, however, is not necessarily the safest way in the long run. By the process of repression the hostility—or to indicate its dynamic character we had better use here the term rage—is removed from conscious awareness but is not abolished. Split off from the context of the individual’s personality, and hence beyond control, it revolves within one as an affect which is highly explosive and eruptive, and therefore tends to be discharged. The explosiveness of the repressed affect is all the greater because by its very isolation it assumes larger and often fantastic dimensions. As long as one is aware of animosity its expansion is restricted in a few different ways. First, consideration of the circumstances as they are in a given situation shows one what one can and what one cannot do toward an enemy or alleged enemy. Second, if the anger concerns one whom one otherwise admires or likes or needs, the anger will sooner or later become integrated into the totality of one’s feelings. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

Finally, inasmuch as a being has developed a certain sense of what is appropriate to do or not to do, personality being as it is, this too will restrict one’s hostile impulses. If the anger is repressed, then access to these restricting possibilities is cut off, with the result that the hostile impulses trespass the restrictions from inside and outside, though only in fantasy. If the chemist I mentioned yesterday had followed his impulses he would have wanted to tell others how Kirk had abused his friendship, or to intimate to his superior that Kirk had stolen his idea or kept him from pursuing it. Since his anger was repressed it became dissociated and expanded, as would probably have shown in his dreams; it is likely that in his dream he committed murder in some symbolic form, or became an admired genius, while others went disgracefully to pieces. By its very dissociation the repressed hostility will in the course of time usually because intensified from outside sources. For instance, if a high employee has developed an anger toward his chief, because the chief had made arrangements without discussing them with him, and if the employee represses his anger, never remonstrating against the procedure, the superior will certainly keep on acting over his head. Thereby new anger is constantly generated. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

The neurotic attitude calls forth a reaction of the environment, by which the attitude itself is reinforced, with the result that the person is more and more caught, and greater and greater difficulty escaping. This phenomenon is called Teufelskreia. Another consequence of repressing hostility arises from the fact that a person registers within oneself the existence of a highly explosive affect which is beyond control. Before discussing the consequences of this we have to consider a question which it suggests. By definition the result of repressing an affect or an impulse is that the individual is no longer aware of its existence, so that in one’s conscious mind ones does not know that one has any hostile feelings toward another. How then can I say that one registers the existence of the repressed affect within oneself? The answer is possessed in the fact that there is no strict alternative between consciousness and unconscious, but that there are several levels of consciousness. Not only is the repressed impulse still effective—one of the basic discoveries of Dr. Freud—but also in a deeper level of consciousness the individual knows about its presence. Reduced to the most simple terms possible this means that fundamentally we cannot fool ourselves, that actually we observe ourselves better than we are aware of doing, just as we usually observe others better than we are aware of doing—as shown, for example, in the correctness of the first impression we ger from a person—but we may have stringent reasons for not taking cognizance of our observations. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

For the sake of saving repetitive explanations I shall use the term register when I mean that we know what is going on within us without our being aware of it. These consequences of repressing hostility may themselves be sufficient to create anxiety, provided always that the hostility and its potential danger to other interests are sufficiently great. States of vague anxiety may be built in this way. More often, however, the process does not come to a standstill at this point, because there is an imperative need to get rid of the dangerous affect which from within menaces one’s interest and security. A second reflex-like process sets in: the individual projects one’s hostile impulses to the outside World. The first pretense, the repression, requires a second one: one pretends that the destructive impulses come not from one but from someone or something outside. Logically the person on whom one’s own hostile impulses will be projected is the person against whom they are directed. The result is that this person now assumes formidable proportions in one’s mind, partly because in any danger the degree of potency depends not only on the factual conditions but also on the attitude taken toward them. The more defenseless one is the greater the danger appears. The anxiety with which we react to a danger does not depend mechanically on the realistic greatness of the danger. An individual who has developed mechanically an attitude of helplessness and passivity will react with anxiety to a comparatively small danger. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

As by-function the projection also serves the need for self-justification. It is not the individual oneself who wants to cheat, to steal, to exploit, to humiliate, but the others want to do such things to one. A wife who is unaware of her own impulses to ruin her husband and subjectively convince ed that she is most devoted may, because of this mechanism, consider her husband to be a brute wanting to harm her. The process of projection may or may not be supported by another process working to the same end: a retaliation fear may get hold of the repressed impulse. In this case a person who wants to injure, cheat, deceive others has also a fear that they will do the dame to him. How far the retaliation fear is a general characteristic ingrained in human nature, how far it arises from primitive experiences of sin and punishment, how far it presupposes a drive for personal revenge, I leave as an open question. Beyond doubt it plays a great role in the minds of neurotic person. These processes brought about by repressed hostility result in the affect of anxiety. In fact, the repression generates exactly the state which is characteristic of anxiety: a feeling of defenselessness toward what is felt an overpowering danger menacing from outside. “Tell them to fear not, for God will deliver them, yea, and also all those who stand fast in that liberty wherewith God hath made them free,” Alma 6.21. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

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

In Humility the Quest is to be Begun: in Even Greater Humility it is to be Fulfilled

June 29, 2019 1:14 am

I held fast against him. Instinctively. I felt my eyes becoming opaque as if a wall had gone up to seal off the windows of my thoughts. And yet I felt such a longing for him, such a longing to fall into him and follow him and be led by him, that all my longings of the past seemed noting at all. He was all mystery to me as Magnus had been. Only he was beautiful, indescribably beautiful, and there seemed in him an infinite complexity and depth which Magnus had not possessed. While people like Hegal saw alienation as a metaphysical problem, Marx gave it a sociological frame of reference. In his essay of 1844 he wrote that under the system of private property the worker was alienated from the product of his labor and also from the means of production—both of which had become things “not belonging to one.” The worker thus separated from his product is alienated from oneself, since one’s labors are no longer one’s own but the property of another. Finally, one is alienated from other mortals, since one’s chief link with them now is the commodities they exchange or produce. Marx was the first to describe this process of reification (or converting an abstraction into something real) by which capitalist society transforms all personal relations between mortals into objective relations between things or money for the substitute for commodities. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

Later, in Captial, Marx referred to this process as the fetishism of commodities and wrote: “The labor of the individual asserts itself as part of the labor of society, only by means of the relations which the act of exchange establishes directly between the products, and indirectly through them, between the producers. To the latter, therefore, the relations connecting the labor of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relationships between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things.” According to Marx, the disintegrative or negative character of capitalist society ay chiefly in its alienation of human labor and in its denial of opportunities for mortals to fulfill themselves in meaningful work. The industrial revolution and its subsequent transformation of human labor into a commodity are among the manor alienating forces in the capitalist World. However, our picture of that World is not complete. To administer their complex technology and labor markets mortals developed elaborate social structures or bureaucracies which are no less impersonal in their effects than machines. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

Indeed, that is their aim; and the attempt further to rationalize the conduct of human affairs by subjecting it to rules, regularity and a hierarchy of command—the distinguishing characteristics of bureaucracy as described by Max Weber—has enormously increased the power of alien forces over mortals. Marx’s analysis of the new conditions of labor under capitalism was complemented half a century late by Weber’s studies of bureaucracy. As Weber wrote, bureaucracy became particularly appropriate for capitalism because “the more bureaucracy depersonalizes itself, the more completely it succeeds in achieving the exclusion of love, hatred, and every purely personal, especially irrational and incalculable, feeling from the execution of official tasks. In the place of the old-type ruler who is moved by sympathy, favor, grace and gratitude, modern culture requires for its sustaining external apparatus the emotionally detached, and hence rigorously professional expert.” Bureaucracies typify not only government—as many believe—but also industry, armies and navies, education, philanthropy, banking, communications media, and all other activities that require organized effort. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

For the increasing numbers who work in bureaucratic settings, the consequences are much the same as for persons directly involved in the machine process. Thus Weber extended the concept of alienated labor to all organized or institutionalize work situations and one described a universal bureaucratic trend in which soldiers, scientists, civil servants—all “were separated or alienated from their respective means of production or administration in the same way as capitalist enterprise has separated the workers from theirs.” However, bureaucracy is not just significant because of its impersonal character or because it transforms a means—efficiency—into an end. Precisely because it represents a concentration of power, its effect, as C. Wright Mills observes, is to coerce, to manipulate. “Organized irresponsibility, in this impersonal sense, is a leading characteristic of modern industrial societies everywhere. On every hand the individual is confronted with seemingly remote organizations; he feels dwarfed and helpless before the managerial cadres and their manipulated and manipulating minions.” How industrial and bureaucratic machines alienate mortals can be seen most clearly in modern conditions of work. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

Although there has been considerable amelioration of the harsh conditions of early capitalism, thanks to the drive for a shorter working day and the abolition of child labor, the alienation of mortals from the means and ends of work as described by Marx and Weber characterizes most modern industrial societies. Increasing division of labor, greater mechanization, the growth of giant industrial and financial enterprises—these are the agents of our economic power and also of individual powerlessness. For evidence we need only look at mortals on the job. They must work, but how and for what? Few of them have known the pursuit of individual crafts. However, millions of men and women labor in large scale enterprises where work is monotonous and repetitious and where the decreasing need for skilled workers and an increasing division of labor place both in process and the products of work far beyond their control. To illustrate, in a recent survey workers’ attitudes it has been shown that work is not a central life interest. Nor do many of them value the informal associations with fellow workers that jobs offer. Not only is the workplace relatively unimportant as a place of preferred primary human relationships, but it cannot even evoke significant sentiments and emotions in its occupants. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

Other observers of work life have made it abundantly clear that most workers are not happy in their jobs, that they feel trapped and degraded by their working conditions, that they have a powerful desire to escape from their careers, and that what drives them on is the incessant demands of our consumption economy. However, far from escaping, growing numbers of workers and their families are forced to take on additional jobs in order to keep up with the rising costs of living. The result has been a serious fall in morale. It is a measure of the boring conditions of work in modern industry that management now gives so much attention to human relations. For many years it was believed that if mortals could not obtain satisfaction in their job, then their informal associations with follow workers would make up for the loss. The famous Hawthorne experiments at Western Electric seemed to show that increases or decreases in output were related not to physical conditions but rather to the strength of informal associations or cliques among workers. To raise morale and increase efficiency (the real goal) desperate and sometime ludicrous measure were taken by management. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

Thus in one American factor a picture of the finished product was installed on the assembly line so that worker performing their restricted tasks might better identify themselves with it! However, despite the great stress placed by management on human relations, evidence of workers’ continued dissatisfaction multiplies. It is reflected in restriction of output, wildcat strikes, outright sabotage and, perhaps most common, in feelings of detachment from the entire work process. There is a growing number of workers who find themselves alienate from work. There is an army of salaried or white-collar workers facing conditions which is more pleasant physically are no less disruptive psychologically. The powerlessness of blue collar workers is matched by the powerlessness of white collars. However, bureaucracy must not be seen as alienating only when it is huge, or because it aims at ever greater efficiency. A cruel work situation is bound to evoke anger or rage, however repressed. But even under ideal conditions of bureaucratic order—where there are neither great creative incentives nor disruptive tensions—the result is an isolated, remote Word of conformists, or what Mills calls the “cheerful robots.” Like industrial management, bureaucracy does not simply turn men and women into automations; it also wants them to like the process and to co-operate in it. #RandolphHarris #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

Since many giant bureaucracies are chiefly selling and marketing institutions, it is not just brain work that is being consumed but personalities as well. Here in the personality market, bureaucracy goes mere industry one better in making a commodity of mortals. The personality market, the most decisive effect and symptom of the great salesroom, underlies the all-pervasive distrust and self-alienation so characteristic of metropolitan people. Without common values and mutual trust, the cash nexus that links one mortal to another in transient contact has been made subtle in dozen ways and made to bite deeper into all areas of life and relations. People are required by the sales person’s ethic and convention to pretend interest in others in order to manipulate them. Mortals are estranged from one another as each secretly tries to make an instrument of the other, and in time a full circle is made: one makes an instrument of oneself, and is estranged from it also. Modern conditions of work under capitalism are alienating largely because the individual worker has lost—or is unable to gain—control over one’s technical and social machines. However, there is more to it. Mortals who experience disorder in their careers must inevitably find disorder in the community life. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

Most people never experience the joys of a life plan because most work situations do not afford the necessary stable progression over the worklife. There is a good deal of chaos in modern labor markets, chaos intrinsic to urban-industrial society. Rapid technological change dilutes old skills, makes others obsolete and creates demand for new ones; a related decentralization of industry displaces millions, creating the paradox of depressed areas in prosperous economies; metropolitan deconcentration shifts the clientele of service establishments, sometimes smashing or restructuring careers; recurrent crises such as wars, depressions, recession, coupled with the acceleration of fad and fashion in consumption, add a note of unpredictability to the whole. The result is retreat from both work and community. 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. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

However, when we think about indifference, the outburst of anger and jealousy, the hidden and often poisonous hostility we experience in ourselves as well as in 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 an 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 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 decision, that we have started on the wrong road, that we are failing before mortals and before ourselves. Yet, someone may ask, do we not have higher concerns than those of our daily life? And does not Jesus himself witness to them? When he is moved by the misery of the masses does Christ not consecrate the social concern which has grasped many people in our time, liberating them from many worries of their daily lives? #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

When Jesus is moved by pity for the sick and heals them, does he not thereby consecrate the concern shared by medical and spiritual healers? When Christ gathers around him a small group in order to establish community with it, does he not thereby consecrate the concern about all communal life? When Jesus says he has come to bear witness to the truth, does he not consecrate the concern for truth, and the passion for knowledge which is such a driving force in our time? When Jesus is teaching the masses and his disciples, does he not consecrate the concern for leaning and education? And when he tells the parables, and when he pictures the beauty of nature and creates sentences of classic perfection, does he not consecrate the concern for beauty, and the elevation of mind it gives, and the peace after the restlessness of our daily concerns? However, are those noble concerns the one thing that is needed and the right thing that Mary has chosen? Or are they perhaps the highest forms of what Martha represents? Are we will, like Martha, concerned about many things even when we are concerned about great and noble things? Are we really beyond anxiety when we are socially concerned and when the mass of misery and social injustice, contrasted with our own favored position, falls upon our conscience and prevents us from breathing freely and happily while we are forced to heave the sighs of hundreds of people all over the World? #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

And do you know the agony of those who want to heal but know it is too late; of those who want to educate and meet with stupidity, wickedness and hatred; of those who are obliged to lead and are worn out by people’s ignorance, by the ambitions of their opponents, by bad institutions and bad luck? These anxieties are greater than those about our daily life. And do you know what tremendous anxiety is connected with every honest inquiry, the anxiety about falling into error, especially when one takes new and untrod paths of thought? When you turned from a great work of art to the demands, ugliness and worries of your daily life, have you ever experienced the almost intolerable feeling of emptiness? Even this is not the one thing we need as Jesus indicated when he spoke of the beauties of the Temple being doomed to destruction. Modern Europe has learned that the millennia of human creativity of which it boasted were not that one thing needful, for the monuments of these millennia now lie in ruins. Why are the many things about which we are concerned connected with worry and anxiety? We give them our devotion, our strength, our passion and we must do so; otherwise we would not achieve anything. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

Why, then, do they make us restless in the deepest ground of our hearts, and why does Jesus dismiss them as not ultimately needed? Degeneration of religions means the degeneration of prayer in them: the relational power in them is buried more and more by objecthood; they find it ever more difficult to say You with their whole undivided being; and eventually mortals must leave their false security for the risk of the infinite in order to recover this ability, going from the community over which one sees only the vaulting dome of the temple and no longer the firmament into the ultimate solitude. This impulse is most profoundly misunderstood when it is ascribed to subjectivism: life before the countenance is life in the one actuality, the only true objectivum; and the mortal that goes forth desires to find refuge in that which has true being, before the merely apparent, illusory objectivum that one flees has disturbed one’s truth. Subjectivism is psychologization while objectivism is reification of God; one a false fixation, the other a false liberation; both departures from the way of actuality, both attempts to find a substitute for it. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

God is close to his forms when mortals do not remove them from him. However, when the spreading movement of religion holds down the movement of return and removes the form from God, then the countenance of the form is extinguished, its lips are dead, its hands hang down, God does not know it any more, and the house of the World built around its altar, the human cosmos crumbles. The decomposition of the word has occurred. The word is present in revelation, at work in the life of the form, and becomes valid in the dominion of the dead form. Thus the path and counter-path of the eternal and eternally present word in history. The ages in which the living word appears are those in which the association of I and World is renewed. The ages in which the active and effective word reigns are those in which the understanding between I and World is preserved; the ages in which the word becomes valid are those in which the deactualization, the alienation of I and World, the emergence of doom takes place—until the great shudder appears, the holding of breath in the dark, and the preparatory silence. However, the path is not a circle. It is the way. Doom becomes more oppressive in every new eon, and the return more explosive. #RandolpHarris 14 of 15

And the theophany comes ever closer, it comes ever closer to the sphere between beings—comes closer to the realm that hides in our midst, in the between. History is a mysterious approach to closeness. Every spiral of its path leads us into deeper corruption and at the same time into more fundamental return. However, the God-side of the event whose World-side is called return is called redemption. Whether a mortal stays within the household and secular society or whether one enters the monastic and ascetic one, one’s enlightenment is neither guaranteed by the second choice nor blocked by the first one. The God within one is one’s secret watcher, be one layperson or hermit. One can defile or purify oneself in either state, grasp the truth or miss the point whether active in the World (as most of us have to be) or enclosed in a religious order, ashram, or temple. “And they are as the Angels of God, and if they shall ray unto the Father in the name of Jesus they can show themselves unto whatsoever mortal it seemeth them good. Therefore, great and marvelous works shall be wrought by them, before the great and coming day when all people must surely stand before the judgment-seat of Christ,” reports 3 Nephi 28.30-31. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

Justice Without Love is Always Injustice Because it Does Not Do Justice to the Other One, Nor to Oneself, Nor to the Situation in Which We Meet!

April 26, 2019 10:57 pm

I stood on the hilltop in the Moonlight and I tried not to see this paradise. I tried to picture those I loved. Were they gathered still together in that fairy-tale wood of beautiful trees? If only I could see their faces or hear their voices. I looked on these verdant green valley, now patched with beautiful contracted Cresleigh homes, a picture book World with flowers blooming in profusion, the red poinsettia as tall as trees. And the clouds, ever changing, borne like the tall sailing ships on brisk winds. What had the first Europeans thought when they looked upon this fecund land surrounded by the sparkling sea? That this was the Garden of God? Even the most uneducated people would not dare to affirm that compassion, gratitude, love of the beauty of the World, love of religious practices, and friendship belonged exclusively to those centuries and countries that recognize the Church. These forms of love are rarely found in their purity, but it would even be difficult to say that they were met with more frequently in those centuries and countries than in the others. To think that love in any of these forms can exist anywhere Christ is absent is to belittle him so grievously that it amounts to an outrage. It is impious and almost sacrilegious. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

These kinds of love are supernatural, and in a sense they are absurd. They are the height of folly. So long as the soul has not had direct contact with the very person of God, they cannot be supported by any knowledge based either on experience or reason. They cannot therefore rest upon any certainty, unless the word is used in a metaphorical sense to indicate the opposite of hesitation. In consequence it is better that they should not be associated with any belief. This is more honest intellectually, and it safeguards our love’s purity more effectively. On this account it is more fitting. In what concerns divine things, belief is not fitting. Only certainty will do. Anything less than certainty is unworthy of God. During the period of preparation, these indirect loves constitute an upward movement of the soul, a turning of the eyes, not without some effort, toward higher things. After God has come in person, not only to visit the soul as he does for a long time beforehand, but to possess it and to transport its center near to his very heart, it is otherwise. The chicken has cracked its shell; it is outside the egg of the World. These first loves continue; they are more intense than before, but they are different. One who has passed through this adventure has a deeper love than every for those who suffer affliction and for those who help one in one’s own, for one’s friends, for religious practices, and for the beauty of the World. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

However, one’s love in all these forms had become a movement of God himself, a ray merged in the light of God. That at least is what we may suppose. These indirect loves are only the attitude toward beings and things here below of the soul turned toward the Good. They themselves have not any particular good as an object. There is no final good here below. Thus strictly speaking we are no longer concerned with forms of love, but with attitudes inspire by love. In the period of preparation the soul loves in emptiness. It does not know whether anything real answers its love. It may believe that it knows, but to believe is not to know. Such a belief does not help. The soul knows for certain only that it is hungry. The important thing is that it announces its hunger by crying. If we suggest to a child that perhaps there is no bread, the child does not stop crying. It goes on crying just the same. The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry. It can only persuade itself of this by lying, for the reality of its hunger is not a belief, it is a certainty. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

We all know that there is no true good here below, that everything that appears to be good in this World is finite, limited, wears out, and once worn out, leaves necessity exposed in all its nakedness. Every human being has probably had some lucid moments in one’s life when one has definitely acknowledged to oneself that there is no final good here below. However, as soon as we have seen this truth we cover it up with lies. Many people even take pleasure in proclaiming it, seeking a morbid joy in their sadness, without ever having been able to bear facing it for a second. Mortals feel that there is a mortal danger in facing this truth squarely for any length of time. That is true. Such knowledge strikes more surely than a sword; it inflicts a death more frightening than that of the body. After a time it kills everything within us that constitutes our soul. In order to bear it we have to love the truth more than life itself. Those who do this turn away from the fleeting things of time with their souls. They do not turn toward God. When they are in total darkness, how could they do so? God himself sets their faces in the right direction. He does not, however, show himself to them for a long time. It is for them to remain motionless, without averting their eyes, listening ceaselessly, and waiting, they know not for what; deaf to entreaties and threats, unmoved by every shock, unshaken in the midst of every upheaval. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

If after a long period of waiting God allow them to have an indistinct intuition of his light or even reveals himself in person, it is only for an instant. Once more they have to remain still, attentive, inactive, calling out only when their desire cannot be contained. If God does not reveal this reality, it does not rest with the soul to believe in the reality of God. In trying to do so it either labels something else with the name of God, and that is idolatry, or its belief in God remains abstract and verbal. Such a belief prevails wherever religious doctrines are taken for granted, as is the cause with those centuries and countries in which it never enters anyone’s head to question it. The state of nonbelief is then what Saint John of the Cross calls a night. The belief is verbal and does not penetrate the soul. At a time like the present, if the unbeliever loves Go, if one is like the child who does not know whether there is bread anywhere, but cries out become one is hungry, incredulity may be equivalent to the dark night of Saint John of the Cross. When we are eating bread, and even when we have eaten it, we know that it is real. We can nevertheless raise doubts about the reality of bread. Philosophers raise doubts about the reality of the World of the senses. Such doubts are however purely verbal; they leave the certainty intact and actually serve only to make it more obvious to a well-balanced mind. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

In the same way one to whom God has revealed his reality can raise doubts about this reality without any harm. They are purely verbal doubts, a form of exercise to keep one’s intelligence in good health. What amounts to criminal treason, even before such a revelation and much more afterward, is to question the fact that God is the only thing worthy of love. That is a turning away of our eyes, for love is the soul’s looking. It means that we have stopped for an instant to wait and to listen. Queen Akasha did not seek Lestat, she waited for him. When she was convinced that he no longer existed, and that nowhere in the whole World was there anything that could be Lestat, she did not on that account return to her former associates. She drew back from them with greater aversion than ever. She preferred the absence of Lestat to the presence of anyone else. Lestat awakened her from her statue state, from her cold slumber. She no longer hoped for that. However, never for an instant did dream of employing another method which could obtain a luxurious and honored life for her—the method of reconciliation with her kith and kin. Akasha did not want wealth and consideration unless they came with Lestat. She did not even give a thought to such things. However, she wanted to turn Earth into a Heaven. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

At that moment Lestat could hold out no longer. He could not help declaring himself. He gave certain proof that he was Lestat. Akasha saw him, she heard him, she touched him. There would be no more question for her not as to whether her savior was in existence. One who has had the same adventure as Akasha, one whose soul has seen, heard, and touched for itself, one will recognize God as the reality inspiring all indirect loves, the reality of which they are as it were the reflections. God is pure beauty. This is incomprehensible, for beauty, by its very essence, has to do with the senses. To speak of an imperceptible beauty must seem a misuse of language to anyone who has any sense of exactitude: and with reason. Beauty is always a miracle. However, when the soul receives an impression of beauty which, while it is beyond all sense perception is no abstraction, but real and direct as the impression caused by a song at the moment it reached our ears, the miracle is raised to the second degree. Everything happens as though, by a miraculous favor, our very sense themselves had been made aware that silence is not the absence of sound, but something infinitely more real than sounds, and the center of a harmony more perfect than anything which a combination of sounds can produce. Furthermore there are degrees of silence. When compared with the silence of God, there is a silence in the beauty of the Universe which is like noise. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

God is, moreover, our real neighbor. The term of person can only be rightly applied to God, and this is also true of the term impersonal. God is one who bends over us, afflicted as we are, and reduced to the state of being nothing but a fragment of inert and bleeding flesh. Yet at the same time he is not some sort of victim of misfortune as well, the victim who appears to us as an inanimate body, incapable of thought, this nameless victim of whom nothing is known. The inanimate body is this created Universe. If we were able to attain it, the love we owe to God, this love that would be our crowning perfection is the divine model both of gratitude and compassion. God is also the perfect friend. So that there should be between him and us, bridging the infinite distance, something in the way of equality, he had chosen to place an absolute quality in his creatures, the absolute liberty of consent, which leaves us free to follow or swerve from the God-ward direction he has communicated to our souls. He has also extended our possibilities of error and falsehood so as to leave us the faculty of exercising a spurious rule in imagination, not only over the Universe and the human race, but also over God himself, in so far as we do not know how to use his name aright. He has given us this faculty of infinite illusion so that we should have the power to renounce it out of love. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

In fact, contact with God is the true sacrament. We can, however, be almost certain that those whose love of God has caused the disappearance of the pure loves belonging to our life here below are no true friends of God. After the soul has had direct contact with God, our neighbor, our friends, religious ceremonies, and the beauty of the World do not fall to the level of unrealities. On the contrary, it is only then that these things become real. Previously they were half dreams. Previously they had no reality. “In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of Heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all peoples, nations, and mortals of every language worshipped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed,” reports Daniel 7.11. Could God possibly forgive people without at least demanding their conversation and some ritual observances? People, at any time, can return and be accepted by God. God can at any time forgive those who repent. Many people say we live in a sick society—and the quality of life might be changed radically by the development of a new sense of community. If every person returns from one’s evil way and from the violence on one’s hands, who knows, God may return. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

Modern mortals are voracious readers who have never learned to read well. Part of the trouble is that one is taught to read drivel that is hardly worth reading well. (There was a time when children learned to read by reading the Bible.) One ends up by reading mainly newspapers and magazines—ephemeral, anonymous trash that one scans on its way to the garbage can. One has no wish to remember it for any length of time; it is written as if to make sure that one will not; and one reads it in a manner that makes doubly sure. There is no person behind what one reads; not even a committee. Somebody wrote it in the first place—if one can call that writing—and then various other people took turns changing it. For the final result no one is responsible; and it rarely merits a serious response. It cries out to be forgotten soon, like the books on which one is learned to read, in school. They were usually anonymous, too; or they should have been. In adolescence students are suddenly turned loose on books worth reading, but generally do not know how to read them. And if, untaught, some instinct prompts them to read well, chances are that they are asked completely tone-deaf questions as soon as they have finished their assignment—either making them feel that they read badly after all or spoiling something worthwhile for the rest of their lives. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

We must learn to feel addressed by a book, by the human being behind it, as if a person spoke directly to us. A good book or essay or poem is not primarily an object to be put to use, or an object of experience: it is the voice of You speaking to me, requiring a response. “So whatever you wish that mortals would do to you, do so to them; for this is the law and the prophets,” reports Matthew 7.12. Recently I have had to think about the relation of love to justice. And it occurred to me that among the words of Jesus there is a statement of what is called the “Golden Rule.” The Golden Rule was well known to Christians and Greeks, although mostly in a negative form: What you do not want that mortal should do to you, do not so to them. Certainly, the absolute for is richer in meaning and nearer to love, but it is not love. It is calculating justice. How, then, is it related to love? How does it fit the message of the kingdom of God and the justice of the kingdom as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount where the Golden Rule appears? Let us think of an ordinary day in our life and of occasions for the application of the Golden Rule. We meet each other in the morning, we expect a friendly face or word and we are ready to give it although our minds are full of anxious anticipation of the burdens. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

Somebody wants a part of our limited time, we give it, having asked somebody else to give us a part of one’s time. We need help and we give it if we are asked, although it includes sacrifice. We are frank with others, expecting that they will be frank with us even if it hurts. We are fair to those who fight against us expecting fairness from them. We participate in the sorrows of our neighbors, certain that they will participate in ours. All this can happen in one day. All this is Golden Rule. And if somebody has violated this rule, consciously or unconsciously, we are willing to forgive as we hope to be forgiven. It is not astonishing that for many people the Golden Rule is considered as the real content of Christianity. It is not surprising that in the name of the Golden Rule criticism is suppressed, independent action discouraged, serious problems avoided. It is even understandable that statesmen ask other nations to behave toward their own nations according to the Golden Rule. And does not Jesus himself say that the Golden Rule is the law and the prophets? However, we know that this is not the answer of the New Testament. The great commandment as Jesus repeats it and the descriptions of love in Paul and John’s tremendous assertion that God is love, infinitely transcend the Golden Rule. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

The Golden Rule must be transcended, for it does not tell us what we should wish that mortal would do to us. We wish to have freedom from heavy duties. We are ready to give the same freedom to others. However, someone who loves us refuses to give it to us, and one oneself refuses to ask us for it. And if one did, we should refuse to give it to one because it would reduce our growth and violate the law of love. We wish to receive a fortune which makes us secure and independent. We would be ready to give a fortune to a friend who asks us for it, if we had it. However, in both cases love would be violated. For the gift would ruin us and the other individual. We want to be forgiven and we are ready to do the same. However, perhaps it is in both cases an escape from the seriousness of a personal problem, and therefore against love. The measure of what we shall do to mortals cannot be our wishes about what they shall do to us. For our wishes express not only our right but also our wrong and our foolishness more than our wisdom. This is the limit of the Golden Rule. This is the limit of calculating justice. Only for one who knows what one should wish and who actually wishes it, is the Golden Rule ultimately valid. Only love can transform calculating justice into creative justice. Love makes justice just. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

Justice without love is always injustice because it does not do justice to the other one, nor to the oneself, nor to the situation in which we meet. For the other one and I and we together in this moment in this place are unique, unrepeatable occasion, calling for a unique unrepeatable act of uniting love. If this call is not heard by listening love, it is not obeyed by the creative genius of love, injustice is done. And this is true even of oneself. One who loves listens to the call of one’s own innermost center and obeys this call and does justice to one’s own being. For love does not remove, it establishes justice. It does not add something to what justice does but it shows justice what to do. It makes the Golden Rule possible. For we do not speak for a love which swallows justice. This would result in chaos and extinction. However, we speak for a love in which justice is the form and structure of love. We speak for a love which respects the claim of the other one to be acknowledged as what one is, and the claim of ourselves to be acknowledged as what we are, above all as persons. Only distorted love, which is a cover for hostility or self-disgust, denies that which united love. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

Love makes justice just. The divine love is justifying love accepting and fulfilling one who, according to calculating justice, must be rejected. This justification of one who is unjust is the fulfillment of God’s creative justice, and of God’s reuniting love. Knowing that the ultimate meaning of freedom will elude us, let us still endeavor to define the term as best we can. The first definition is on the psychological level, the domain of everyday actions: Freedom is the capacity to pause in the face of stimuli from many directions at once and, in this pause, to throw one’s weight toward this response rather than that one. This is the freedom we experience in a store when we pause over the purchase of a necktie or a shirt. We summon up in our imaginations the image of how we will look in this or that tie, what so-and-so will say about it, or how the color will fit such and such a suit. And then we buy the tie or we move on to something else. This is freedom of doing, or existential freedom. This freedom is shown most interestingly in the supermarket, when we push our carts through the aisles between the tumultuous variety of packages and cans of food on the shelves, each one silently shouting through its bright-colored label “Buy me!” We see the shoppers with expressions of hesitancy, vacuity, wonder, pausing for some inspiration as to which of all these foods will be good for dinner tonight. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

The shopper seems hypnotized, charmed, preoccupied. Like patients on a ward in a mental hospital, they do not see me as I walk directly across their line of vision. The expressions of wonder and hesitancy are a readiness, an invitation, an openness to some stimulus on the shelves to persuade them to throw the balance this way of that in making their choice. This first freedom is experienced by each of us hundreds of times every day. It is decked up in respectable terms like decision/choice when we discuss freedom in psychology classes—if we ever discuss freedom in psychology classes at all. The most profound illustration of this kind of freedom is our ability to ask questions. Take, for example, my asking a question after listening to a lecture. The very fact that the question comes up in my mind at all implied that there is more than one answer. Otherwise there would be no point in asking the question in the first place. This is freedom; it implies that there is some possibility, some freedom of selection in what I ask. The speaker then pauses for a few seconds after I have asked it, turning over in his or her mind the possible answers. We sense that there is, in asking and answering questions, a good deal more going on, and it is of a richer nature, than the mere responding to various stimuli and selecting a response. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

Each person who lights this candle within one’s own mind will soon begin to attract other mortals like moths to a flame burning by a fire—not all mortal nor many mortals but only those who are groping for a way out of their darkness. Can a scrupulously impartial search through World-thought and experience lead to discovery of truth? “Wilt thou be made whole?” asked Jesus. Questioning implies some value judgment, some investment of the person’s life, some invitation to share, to make contact, some challenge to consider a new idea. Regrettably, in recent decades our very idea of freedom has been diminished and grown shallow in comparisons with previous ages; it has been relegated almost exclusively to freedom from outside pressure, to freedom from state coercion—to freedom understood on the juridical level, and no higher. Only when this search for a higher life has becomes an absolute necessity to a mortal, has one found even the first qualification needed for the Quest. “And the Lord God doth work by means to bring about his great and eternal purposes; and by very small means the Lord doth confound the wise and bringeth about the salvation of many souls,” reports Alma 37.7. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

Christ Taught Us that the Supernatural Love of Our Neighbor is the Exchange of Compassion and Gratitude

April 20, 2019 12:45 am

My gentlemen parents are forever reluctant to illuminate such simple matters. One would think it would be bad taste to dwell on such subjects Louis looks puzzled, then miserable, before he returns to the evening paper. And Lestat, he smiles and plays a little Mozart for me, then answers with a shrug: “It was the day you were born to us.” Just as some people live primarily in the past, others avoid the present by living in the future. Some of us spend most of our time getting ready to do something. Perhaps we say, “Someday I am going to spend a whole Summer traveling through Europe.” However, always we manage to find good and sufficient reasons why now is not the time to do it. Perhaps we manage this by making “The Plan” so grandiose and unrealistic that excuses for postponing its fulfillment will always seem overwhelming. One single, elementary professor had the dream, as she put it, of going to Ireland to find a leprechaun. She sold her Cresleigh home at Rocklin Trails and, at the expressed dismay of a number of friends and relatives, took part of the proceeds and went one Summer to Ireland. She reported on her return that she had not completely found her leprechaun. She discovered, for example, that she could sometimes be lonely and depressed even in that exquisitely beautiful and mystical country, but she missed her Cresleigh home so much. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

However, at least she did not live out her years in the frustrated thought that she could be happy if she could just get to the promised land, and maybe one day she can buy another Cresleigh home. If the Christian life were nothing more than a way of forgetting the dark sorrows of Earthly life, a means of escaping the hard problems of Earthly life, it would still be worthwhile. If its emotional raptures were nothing more than make-believe, it would still be worthwhile. We do not disdain theatres and books, films, and music merely because the World into which they lead us is only one of glorious unreality. However, the fact is that mysticism does seek reality, albeit an inner one. We are not only actors giving a performance on the World-stage. We are also people who must learn to live in the still centre of our being. This is the higher purpose of life; to this mortals must in the end dedicate themselves: for this they must work, study, and pray. Our whole life on Earth is in the end nothing else than a kind of preparation for this quest. Often time people reflect on their families as they grow and evolve. One man describes his father as a sometime guy. “His whole life revolved around this word of his,” says the son. “When I was a child he started to add a room to the house, and he is still living in that house with the skeleton of a room attached, which he is going to finish sometime.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

As we advance on our quest, our values may change. This is partly because we learn by experience what every mortal has to learn, quester or not, that all is passing and nothing is absolute, that the fruits of desire may turn to truth, and every day brings us closer to reaching our goals. Probably all of us lives in the future to some extent. Often it takes the form of doing more planning and more organizing than we need to do. We spend the time now planning the things we will do for the coming week. When the time comes to do what we planned we no longer feel free to let ourselves be aware of whether that is really what we want to do at that moment. So we keep ourselves in a constant state of planning or fulfilling plans and leave ourselves little room to be open and responsive to our feelings of the moment. When we work so hard at it, it is no wonder we sometimes feel trapped. So to live in the present—not in the past, not in the future is very important. It means being sensitive and responsive to our own selves. However, for many people any movement in the direction of spontaneity must be preceded by a rediscovery of the capacity to be self-aware, since many of us have become virtually unaware of the self. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

One man, Armand, who grew up in a Christian household where he gained the impression that he must always be totally unselfish and subjugate any of his desires to those of everyone around him, tells how he woke up the morning after his first visit to a psychotherapist and broke into tears, sobbing for forty-five minutes or an hour. In describing the feeling that he had that mornings, he says, “Somehow that therapist got through to me the fact that I have a self—a self that is separate from anyone else. And it was such a new and reassuring idea to me that I could not stop crying from the relief I felt.” It is not surprising that Armand, like many others, had to go through a considerable retraining effort to become sensitively aware of his feelings. All of his childhood training had been in the other direction. He has been taught to be sensitively aware of and responsive to the needs and desires of others and to turn off any awareness of one’s own desires, which would automatically be regarded as selfish and therefore sinful. The lack of self-awareness often takes the form of being disconnected to the feelings that are unacceptable and frightening to us. This would probably account, for example, for the almost total absence of enjoyable relationships for some men and women. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

The same would be true of the individual whose anger never some into focus, or the one whose anger has a long fuse, so that awareness always comes some time later when the anger producing situation, along with the opportunity for expressing the anger, has become past history. It is not mental slowness but emotion slowness that presents us from thinking until it is too late of just the right angry words we would have liked to have been able to say at the right moment. And now let us look once more at those whom we have described as the righteous ones. They are really righteous, but since little is forgiven them, they love little. And this is their unrighteousness. It is not possessed on the moral level, just as the unrighteousness of Job was not possessed on the moral level where his friends sought for it in vain. It is possessed on the level of the encounter with ultimate reality, with the God who vindicates Job’s righteousness against the attacks of his friends, with the God who defends himself against the attacks of Job and his ultimate unrighteousness. The righteousness of the righteous ones is hard and self-assured. They, too, want forgiveness, but they believe that they do not need much of it. And so their righteous actions are warmed by very little love. They could not have some people seeking forgiveness and acceptance, and they cannot help us, even if we admire them. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

Why do children turn from their righteous parts and husbands from their righteous wives, and vice versa? Why do Christians turn away from their righteous pastors? Why do people turn away from righteous neighborhoods? Why do many turn away from righteous Christianity and from the Jesus it paints and the God it proclaims? Why do they turn to those who are not considered to be the righteous ones? Often, certainly, it is because they want to escape judgment. However, more often it is because they seek a love which is rooted in forgiveness, and this righteous ones cannot give. Many of those to whom they turn cannot give it either. Jesus gave it to the woman who was utterly unacceptable. The Church would be more the Church of Christ than it is now if it did the same, if it joined Jesus and not Simon in its encounter with those who are rightly judged unacceptable. If more were forgiven one, if one loved more and if one could better resist the temptation to present oneself as acceptable to God by one’s own righteousness, each of us who strives for righteousness would be more Christian. Helping individuals recapture self-awareness is often one of the most useful services the competent therapist can provide. It seems likely, however, that the person who is not seriously emotionally damaged can make considerable progress without such help. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

This growth involves learning to listen to one’s self—not shutting out those signals we have become accustomed to ignoring. Often a good way to start is to allow the simplest physical feelings to come through. When we do not let our minds perceive, our bodies may be aware. In an awkward social situation, for example, when we are frightened and want to run even though we have suppressed the fear from conscious awareness, our legs may tense up. Here again a group of intimates can be invaluable. If there are those with whom we can develop sufficient confidence that we can increasingly be ourselves, it will be surprising to us how quickly we can learn to be aware of a wealthy of various feelings we have hitherto suppressed. This is one of the values of group psychotherapy in the professional setting, but the experience need not be limited to therapy groups. Increasing self-awareness opens the door to the possibility of living more spontaneously, but the result is by no means automatically achieved. As we have seen, the possibility of freedom is frightening to us and we build many defenses against the natural life. We may bust ourselves compulsively and develop meaningless rituals to occupy our hours and limit our opportunity for spontaneity; or we may live by rules and put more emphasis than is necessary on the need for self-control; or we may make love seem like slavery. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

To begin to give up these defenses is frightening, because they take mist of the ambiguity out of life and help us keep life cut and dried and our response to life’s situations predictable. We know pretty much what we will do. Our lives are full of activity, the rules are laid out, and we are in tight control of ourselves most of the time. If it were something other than a convention, it would be at least practically human and not totally divine. A real convention is a supernatural harmony, taking the word harmony in the Pythagorean sense. Only a convention can be the perfection of purity here below, for all nonconventional purity is more of less imperfect. That a convention should be real, that is a miracle of divine mercy. We are all conscious of evil within ourselves; we all have a horror of it and want to get rid of it. Outside ourselves we see evil under two distinct forms, suffering and sin. However, in our feeling about our own nature the distinction no longer appears, except abstractly or through reflection. We feel in ourselves something which is neither suffering nor sin, which is the two of them at once, the root common to both, defilement and pain at the same time. This is the presence of evil in us. It is the unattractiveness in us, the uneducated aspect of our being. The more we feel it, the more it fills us with horror. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

The soul rejects evil in the same way we experience emesis. By a process of transference we pass it on to the things that surround us. These things, however, thus becoming blemished and unattractive in our eyes, send us back the evil that we had put into them. They send it back after adding to it. It this exchange the evil in us increases. It seems to us then that they very places where we are living and the things that surround us imprison us in evil, and that it becomes daily worse. This is a terrible anguish. Jesus Christ experienced what he did because no mortal could bare it. When the soul, worn out with this anguish, ceases to feel it any more, there is little hope of its salvation. It is thus that an invalid conceives hatred and disgust for one’s room and surroundings, a prisoner for one’s cell, and only often a worker for one’s factory. It is useless to provide people in this state with beautiful things, for there is nothing which does not eventually become spoiled and sullied by the process of transference, until it ends up as an object of horror. Perfect purity alone cannot be defiled. If at the moment when the soul is invaded by evil the attention can be turned toward a thing of perfect purity, so that a part of the evil is transferred to it, this thing will be in no way tarnished by it, nor will it send it back. Thus each minute of such attention really destroys a part of the evil. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

What the Hebrews tried to accomplish, by means of a kind of magic, in their rite of scapegoat, can only be carried out here on Earth by perfect purity. The true scapegoat is the Lamb. The day when a perfect being was to be found here below in human form, the greatest possible amount of evil scattered around one was automatically concentrated upon one in form of suffering. At that time, throughout the Roman Empire, the greatest misfortune and the greatest crime among mortals was slavery. That is why one suffered the death which was the extremity of affliction possible for a slave. In a mysterious manner this transference constitutes the Redemption. It is the same when a human being turns one’s eyes and one’s attention toward the Lamb of God present in the consecrated bread, a part of the evil which one bears within one is directed toward perfect purity, and there suffers destruction. It is a transmutation rather than a destruction. The contact with perfect purity dissociates the suffering and sin which has been mixed together so indissolubly. The part of evil in the soul is burned by the fire of this contact and becomes only suffering, and the suffering is impregnated with love. In the same way when all the evil diffused throughout the Roman Empire was concentrated on Christ it became only suffering to one. If there were not perfect and infinite purity here below, if there were only finite purity, which contact with evil eventually exhausts, we could never be saved. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

Penal justice affords a frightful illustration of this truth. In principle it is something pure which has goodness for its object. It is, however, an imperfect, finite, human purity. Therefore, uninterrupted contact with a mixture of crimes and affliction wears away this purity and outs in its place a defilement about equal to the totality of crimes, a defilement far exceeding that of any particular criminal. Mortals fail to drink from the source of purity. If this spring did not well up wherever there is crime and affliction, creation would however be an act of cruelty. If there had been no crime in affliction in the centuries further back than two thousand years, and in the countries untouched by missions, we might think that the Church had the monopoly of Christ and the sacraments. How can we bear the thought of a single crucified slave twenty-two centuries ago, how can we help accusing God, if we think that at that time Christ was absent and every kind of sacrament unknown? It is true that we hardly think at all about slaves crucified twenty-two centuries ago. When we have learned to look at perfect purity, the shortness of human life is the only thing to prevent us from being sure that unless we play false we can attain perfection even here on Earth. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

For we are finite being and the evil that is within us is finite too. As sad as it is, we are not immortal because we are not yet perfect and living thousands of years would give some people too much time to cultivate evil and too much power and the World would not be a place worth living in. As it stands now, we know our time is limited and that if we are good beings we will go to Heaven with God and experience not immortality, but eternal life. The difference is eternal life will be different, have other attributes, and we will not be vulnerable to death, starvation, lack, limitation, no more crime, no more tears, unless they are tears of joy. So knowing our years on Earth are limited is a blessing because we are constantly reminded to be good so we can receive all the things God has promised us. The purity that is offered to our eyes is infinite. However little evil we were to destroy at each look, we could be certain, if our time were unlimited, that by looking often enough, one day we should destroy it all. We should then have reached the end of evil magnificently. We should have destroyed evil for the Lord of Truth and we should bring one truth, as the Egyptian Book of the Dead says. One of the principal truths of Christianity, a truth that goes almost unrecognized today, is that looking is what saves us. The bronze serpent was lifted up so that those who lay maimed in the depths of degradation should be saved by looking upon it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

It is at those moments when we are, as we say, in a bad mood, when we feel incapable of the elevation of soul that benefits holy things, it is then that it is most effectual to turn our eyes toward perfect purity. For it is then that evil, or rather mediocrity, comes to the surface of the soul and is in the best position for being burned by contact with the fire. It is however then that the act of looking is almost impossible. All the mediocre part of the soul, fearing death with a more violent fear than that caused by the approach of the death of the body, revolts and suggests lies to protect itself. The effort not to listen to these lies, although we cannot prevent ourselves from believing them, the effort to look upon purity at such times, has to be something very violet; yet it is absolutely different from all that is generally known as effort, such as doing violence to one’s feelings or an act of will. Other words are needed to express it, but language cannot provide them. The effort that brings a soul to salvation is like the effort of looking or of listening; it is the kind of effort by which a fiancée accepts her lover. It is an act of attention and consent; whereas what language designates as will is something suggestive of muscular effort. The will is on the level of the natural part of the soul. The right use of the will is a condition of salvation, necessary no doubt but remote, inferior, very subordinate and purely negative. The weeds are pulled up by the muscular effort of the less affluent, but only Sun and water can make the corn grow. The will cannot produce any good in the soul. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

Efforts of the will are only in the right place for carrying out definite obligations. Wherever there is no strict obligation we must follow either our natural inclination or our vocation, that is to say God’s command. Actions prompted by our inclination clearly do not involve an effort of will. In our acts of obedience to God we are passive; whatever difficulties we have to surmount, however great our activity may appear to be, there is nothing analogous to muscular effort; there is only waiting, attention, silence, immobility, constant through suffering and joy. The crucifixion of Christ is the model of all acts of obedience. Also, there is a supernatural union of opposites, harmony in the Pythagorean sense. That we have to strive after goodness with an effort of our will is one of the lies invented by the mediocre part of ourselves in its fear of being destroyed. Such an effort does not threaten it in any way, it does not even disturb its comfort—not even when it entails a great deal of fatigue and suffering. For the mediocre part of ourselves is not afraid of fatigue and suffering; it is afraid of being killed. There are people who try to raise their souls like an athlete continually taking standing jumps in the hopes that, if one jumps higher every day, a time may come when one will no longer fall back but will go right up to the sky. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

Thus occupied one cannot look at the sky. We cannot take a single step toward Heaven. It is not in our power to travel in a vertical direction. If however we look Heavenward for a long time, God comes and takes us up. He raises us easily. There is no effort in what is divine. There is an easiness in salvation which is more difficult to us than all our efforts. However, the way we busy and over-busy ourselves, whether in work, pleasure, or movement deserves attention. Few take life easily; most take it uneasily. Few go through its daily business serenely; most go through it nervously, hurriedly, and agitatedly. Our activities are so numerous they suffocate us. It is a life without emotional poise, bereft of intellectual perspective. We are intoxicated by action. We moderns give ourselves too much to activity and movement, to little passivity and stillness. If we are to find a way out of the troubles which beset us, we must find a middle way between these two attitudes. The need of silence after noise, peace after feverishness, thought after activity, is wide and deep today. Amid all the nostrums and panaceas offered to humanity there is little evidence of the realization of this need. Indeed, because so many are discouraged and oppressed by the reality of time and do not perceive its true nature, a turning toward the spiritual life is a hope for the immediate present and the near fear. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

Strong Family Cultures Will Help Our Children Live in the World

June 24, 2018 3:05 am

Some families are in jeopardy of being lost. Values are the prime target of the adversary, as well are the sanctity of marriage and the central importance of families. It is the duty of parents to teach their children to keep the commandments of God. Our morals and spiritual values provide an anchor and the safe harbor of a home where each child of a loving Heavenly Father can be influenced for food and acquire eternal values. People who feel the love and support of their parents are proud of the example they have set. This makes life so enjoyable for many families that the children want to follow in the footsteps of the parents, to continue on through experiencing the same joy that had been theirs in their younger days. Some parents always find the time to take the family on vacation and they can count on fun experiences. As a result of such a solid background, the children are not able to turn from the teachings of their parents because their actions would reflect on their parents’ character. Culture is defined as the way of life of a people. There is a unique gospel culture, a set of values and expectations and practices common to all followers of God. This gospel culture, or way of life, comes from the plan of salvation, the commandments of God, and the teachings of living prophets. It is given expression in the way we raise our families and live our individual lives. #RandolphHarris 1 of 5

However, so much has changed during our lifetime. The effects of childhood trauma, including emotional neglect or abuse in childhood, can have alarmingly potent effect on our psyche as we enter adulthood, event to the extent of rewiring the brain. The children of narcissistic parents, those who meet the diagnostic criteria for Narcissistic Personality Disorder, know this all too well, having been raised by someone with a limited capacity for empathy and an excessive sense of grandiosity, false superiority and entitlement. Children of narcissistic parents are programmed at an early age to seek validation where there is one, to believe their worthiness is tied to the reputation of their families, and to internalize the message that they can only sustain their value by how well they can serve the needs of their parents. If given at all, they have lived an existence where love was rarely given. As the child of a narcissistic parent or parent, one is taught that they are not inherently worthy, but rather that there worth depended on what they could do for the narcissistic parent and how compliant one is. The emphasis on appearance, status, reputation is at an all-time high in households with a narcissistic parent. Due to the narcissistic parent’s grandiosity, false mask and need to be the best, children in these situations are probably part of a family that was presented in the best possible light, with neglect taking place behind closed doors. #RandolphHarris 2 of 5

There is something really disturbing about parents who compete with their kids. Women who strive to be as hot as their teenage daughters. Parents threatened by the success of their adult children. Men who date girls the same age as their son’s girlfriend or daughter. And men who actually date their son’s girlfriends. Some parents even conspire with the children’s enemies to hurt their own kids because they envy them so much. So how have we gotten to this place? We all know that times have changed—and parenting is much more difficult as a result. Some parents feel like they did not have a chance to live the life they wanted so they take out their anger usually on one child who reminds them of what they would like to be. Let us take a closet look and find a way out of this madness and toward a better way to parent. Shine a light on yourself, rather than on your child. Get out of the mindset that your child is the enemy and you must win. Win what? No matter how your child behaves, you must commit to parenting from thoughtfulness, not anxiety, jealousy, and reactivity. Keep in the forefront of your mind that even at times of high stress, you are an adult and your children are supposed to learn from you. You want your children to look back and think of you as someone who loved God, followed the laws, and did everything possible to protect them, instead of sabotaging their lives and setting them up to fail. #RandolphHarris 3 of 5

As adults, some people know that their parent or parents are bad and do not have their best interest at heart, but they still talk to them because they know their parents will not live forever and want to enjoy them while they are around, while secretly praying that their parent will repent and start showing them rest and unconditional love. Strong leaders focus on the preservation of their own integrity. They have a willingness to take responsibility for their own emotional well-being and do not try to make other people happy by changing their character. Being a strong leader is a quality that will actually help your child want to be led by you, rather than battle you. Remember that you are on your child’s team, not on the opposing side. You should not be sharing the personal business with their enemies who happen to be dangerous nor plotting to end the life of your own child. Some people saw that Casper the Ghost is a cautionary tale about Richie’s parents from Richie Rich killing him for insurance money. The Bible predicted that in the last days, “They will be divided, father against son and son against father, mother against daughter and daughter against mother, mother-in-law against daughter daughter-in-law and daughter-in-law against mother-in-law,” reports Luke 12.53. #RandolphHarris 4 of 5

Lessons taught in the home by goodly parents are becoming increasingly important in today’s World, where the influence of the adversary is so wide spread. As we know, he is attempting to erode and destroy the very foundation of our society—the family. In cleaver and carefully camouflaged ways, the wicked one is attacking commitment to family life throughout the World and undermining the culture and covenants of faithful believers in God. Parents must resolve that teaching in the home is a most sacred and important responsibility. We must train up our children in the way he or he should go, this responsibility ultimately rests on the parents. According to the great plan of happiness, it is goodly parents with the care and development of Heavenly Father’s children. Parents should also pray in earnest, asking our Eternal Father to help them love, understand, and guide the children the Lord sent to them. It is also a good idea to hold family prayer, scripture study, and family home evenings and eat together as often as possible, making dinner a time of communication and the teachings of values. Parents should also share their testimonies often with their children, commit them to keep the commandments of God, and promise the blessings that our Heavenly Father promises his faithful children. Our strengthened family cultures will be a protection for our children from the fiery darts of the adversary embedded in their peer culture, the entertainment and television news. #RandolphHarris 5 of 5

God is Looking for People Who Have Faith that is Demonstrated

March 5, 2018 10:25 pm

No one lives without accumulating stories. Many things in life offer useful guidance toward finding spiritual values in the World. The spirituality of a place might be marked with a well or drawing on the ground, or a monument, like a castle or mansion. When we place markers on historical battlefields or on houses where our ancestors were born, or where significant historical figures lives, we are performing a genuine spiritual act. We are honoring the special spirit that is attached to a particular place. Family is also a source and focus of spirituality. In many traditions a home shrine and special photographs honor family members. Rites of family gatherings, visits, storytelling, photographs albums, keepsakes, and even tapes of elderly relatives recording their recollections can be spiritual acts that nourish the soul. “The final state of the soul is to dwell with God or be cast out (1 Nephi 15.35).” The opportunity to voice memories to a person who both cares and understands is the most satisfying kind of completion. Story-telling is therefore far more valuable than it may seem. Realizing that such stories allow us to make an ending and find worth in the past elevates remembering and listening to their actual stature. We widen our solitudes by esteeming our memories and making use of them, instead of guarding them in a secret chess, disregarding them, or keeping them to ourselves. #RandolphHarris 1 of 7

Action and speech are indeed the two activities whose end result will always be a story with enough coherence to be told. The most important and challenging way to honor our ancestors is to fulfill our personal and potential life’s purpose here on Earth. It can take a lifetime to know our parents in their full humanness. As we get older, our respect for our parents’ achievements increases, as does our sympathy for their disappointments and letdowns. The more our own lives twist in unexpected and humbling directions, the more we realize that our parents had been similarly buffeted. We become our parents’ retrospective peers, seeing more of them as we attain each decade. To be fully understood, vulnerability has to be lived rather than merely witnessed. It is not easy to imagine that one’s own body, which is so fresh and often so full of pleasant feelings could slow down, become tired, and may not be as agile as it once was. One cannot imagine it and, in the end, one does not want to. Many of the realizations that rush upon us as we mature are simply not attainable earlier in life. When our parents need our help prior to passing into Heaven, the period after they pass away, and the time of life when we ourselves are weak and near passing, changes our perspective on life and what we scrutinize. #RandolphHarris 2 of 7

Indeed, it is this period of the relationship that is perhaps the most difficult and, at the same time, the most significant. However, knowing that there is a God who strongly protects against intrusion and violation might help nurture that spirit in our own lives and honor it in others. We may discover that there are ways to be spiritual that do not counter the soul’s needs for body, individuality, imagination, and exploration. Eventually, we might find that all emotions, all human activities, and all spheres of life have deep roots in the mysteries of the soul, and therefore are holy. As children, the chief illusion we project upon our parents are that they know what they are doing and that they have control over what happens. It does not occur to us that what appears to be inflexibility may actually be a cover for confusion, or what comes out of anger may stem from stress, or what seems to be neglect and a lack of concern may be the consequence of depression. If we allow them to account for themselves and to acknowledge the extent to which their actions stemmed from their own weaknesses, all of this can make sense later. The more hurtfully our parents treated us as children, the more crucial it is for us to try to ascertain the wounds of their upbringing. Otherwise, their weaknesses become holes into which we pointlessly pour or resentment. #RandolphHarris 3 of 7

Everyone of their failures has a story behind it, a history which has been carried forward and re-expressed rising out of a collective need for stronger union between the human and the divine. Exploring the implications of the soul allows us to learn our parents’ history and to see them as people, rather than to react blindly against them and risk replicating their hurts in our own lives. Turing the furor of our reactions into a reasonable quest for understanding is made easier when we are granted full access to our parents’ histories. Formal teachings, rites, and stories of religions provide an inexhaustible source of reflection on the mysteries of the soul. While listening to our mother or father, we might find ourselves standing in the powerful, streaming currents of time and fate. This may represent the stream of events and persons in which the individual finds one’s place. No one lives without making mistakes and incurring regrets, yet we all hope to be worthy of regard in the end. We learn from these formal sources how to understand and deal with the soul in special circumstances, and also how to understand similar images when they appear in dreams. We all hope that our parents survive into extended old age. Many cultures maintain that we each have a unique destiny to fulfill. #RandolphHarris 4 of 7

It is nice to have many generations in families being alive at the same time, leading to new opportunities for reworking and repairing relations between parents and children. This will also further the collective growth and maturation in the spirit realms. We are all children of parents, yet the ability to picture our parents as children can easily elude us. Like nothing else, such glimpses across generations permits us to comprehend those who shaped us and ultimately ourselves. We must find our soul’s purpose as an ethical and loving person. The ancestors are seen as allies in this process of remembering and a reservoir of power and backing to help us embody our potential in this lifetime. Conversely, when we have lost touch with a sense of greater purpose, if we are fortunate, the ancestors may bring about life changes aimed to guide us into greater contact with our soul’s longing and increased awareness of the agreements made before our birth. This may be an inspiring metaphor of the willingness to step courageously into the river of existence, instead of finding ways to remain safe, dry, and unaffected. The notion of reciprocity, of being helped and then helping in return, appeals to our basic requirement for balance and order. When children watch their parents take time out of their bust lives to help their parents, they learn that devotion can persist. #RandolphHarris 5 of 7

Children should realize that if they regret the longevity of their parents, they will actually be regretting their own future longevity. As we get to know our parents better, we have new opportunities for correcting old misconceptions. One young man was shocked by something his father did. His father never let anyone near his checkbook. However, he got a really bad trimmer in his hand, but still insisted on paying all his bills himself. One day, out of the blue, he called his son up and asked him to come over to help him write out checks. The son could not believe it. He was incredibly nervous when he sat down next to him to do it. Although he handles million-dollar budgets for his company, his hand also started to shake because he was so honored to help his father with his precious checkbook, as it was a bonding experience. In a way, the father was allowing his son to participate in the ritual of becoming the man of the house. His father’s trust was sweeter to this son than his achievement in the corporate World. Also, the father had the opportunity to see how important he was in his son’s life, despite his son’s having garnered every external success. #RandolphHarris 6 of 7

Extending leniency to our parents gives us hope that someone will do the same for us when we reach this position of physical need and spiritual reckoning. Even fumbled efforts at helpfulness and reconciliation are significant reckoning. Even fumbled efforts at helpfulness and reconciliation are significant for the hope that they instill and the example they set. People feel blessed to have their parents live so long and that hope is the essence of the commandment to honor our parents, making the prospect of living a long life less frightening. Whatever helps us to become more ethical, on even kilt, and open-hearted is one of the most powerful and sincere offerings we can make to our ancestors. An individual must take time every day to remind oneself that we are also spirits, that we are one with God, and to try to being about a deep realization that there is a power greater than oneself sustaining us; a wise counselor guiding us; a generous provider who is ready and willing to meet the needs of everyday life. We do not deny either the body or the mind, but we do affirm the spirit as the supreme presence and the superior principle of all life. We do come from this thing that we call life, or God, and we are fundamentally spiritual beings even while in the flesh. Therefore, in order to be whole, we must establish a right relationship within this trinity of our being, which is thought, feeling and action. #RandolphHarris 7 of 7

Get Ready Like Royalty—Feel Like Royalty!

February 25, 2018 11:05 pm

Open up your mind and it will sing to you. The love that goes out into our work comes back as love of self. Work is an important component of the spiritual life, it can be a path to holiness, and profoundly affects the soul. When we think of work, we only consider function, and so the soul elements are left to chance. However, the rituals that are taking place when one performs a task is the soul’s work: something of the soul is being created in the work of ritual. Ordinary actions, too, accomplish something for the soul. Yet, where there is no artfulness about life, there is a weakening of soul. It seems that the problem with most modern manufacturing is not a lack of efficiency, it is a loss of soul. If people had a deep sense of the truly magical nature of their product, they would take care of the souls of their products with sacred imagination. The same principle holds for all professions and for all forms of labor. We could say, then, that all work is sacred, whether you are building a castle, creating a beautiful stain glass window, or taking out the rubbish. A special window might help ritualize a house, or a dinning room table of a special design or select wood could transform the house into an arena that has imaginal depth that feels one’s soul. It may conjure up certain memories and fantasies that have significance. Or work may be a means of sorting out issues that have little to do with the work itself. It may be a response to fate. #RandolphHarris 1 of 8

We may find ourselves doing work that has been in the family for generations or working at a job that appeared after a number of coincidences and chance events. In this sense, all work is a vocation, a calling from a place that is the source of meaning and identity, the foundation of which are beyond human intention and interpretation. However, we can never do this unless we believe that we can, for the belief that we cannot binds us back to the antiquated precedents and compels us to accept only as much good as has been experienced in the past. If we can get firmly fixed in our mind that the principle of the soul is never bound by precedent, that the doing of new things in science through new discoveries always existed as a possibility, and there was nothing in nature which prohibited the larger experiences, we shall no longer be hypnotized by limitations of the past. It is possible that most of us go through life more or less hypnotized by what everyone has believed. We say that the good we desire cannot come to us because we have never experienced much of it, or there is not enough good to go around, of that God does not hear our prayers. Too often we turn over the possibilities of the individual life to the acceptance of the collective group. Not understanding soul, companies look to the work of other cultures and try to mimic their methods. #RandolphHarris 2 of 8

It is not possible to care for the soul while violating or disregarding one’s own moral sensibility. What we should break down is the hypnotic suggestions that bind us, and create new avenues in the mind for a fresh approach and a new outlook to the spirit. This is something every individual must do for oneself, but there must be a method or a way to begin. We have to start with the firm faith that we are dealing with power which is not bound. It is not limited. It is not only some power; it is all-power. It is not difficult to convince the mind of this, since plain reasoning compels one to accept such a viewpoint. Alchemy was a process in which raw material was placed in a vessel where it was heated, observed closely, heated some more, passed through various operations and observed once again. In the end, the result was an arcane product imagined mysteriously to be gold, the stone of the philosophers, or a potent elixir. Alchemy was a spiritual practice carried out for the benefit of the soul. Just like many of you work to benefit your family, who are part of your soul. Face it, the only reason many of you get out of bed everyday and go to work is because you believe that the qualities you produce are scared rituals which benefit your soul and are a way to honor God and the people and things you love. #RandolphHarris 3 of 8

You find your poetic inspiration in your home, family, garden, and furniture to keep going even when you are tired. We must assure ourselves that we have access to the power of God. We could never do this if we felt that the power was external to us, if it were something apart from or different from our own being. We discover that God is immediate and personal, a possibility latent within the self, and ready to be called upon and used. We could imagine our own everyday work alchemically in the same way. We work on the stuff of the soul by means of the things of life. This is an ancient idea. Ordinary life is the means of entry into higher spiritual activity. At the very moment we are hard at work on some Worldly endeavor, we are also working on a different plane. Perhaps without knowing it, we are engaged in the labours of the soul. The more deeply our work stirs imagination and corresponds to images that are sacred at the core of identity and fate, the more it will have soul. Having identified ourselves with the power which is law, and the presence which is the spirit, we must consciously increase our expectation and deepen our realization. This is done by prayer, communing with the divine, until gradually we so extend our concepts of life and the possibilities of living that we are no longer bound by our thought patterns of lack and limitation. #RandolphHarris 4 of 8

There are two ways of getting out of a trial. One is simply to try to get rid of the trial, and be thankful when it is over. The other is to recognize the trial as a challenge from God to claim a larger blessing than we have ever had, and to hail it with delight as an opportunity of obtaining a larger measure of divine grace. There is one life, that life is God, that life is my life now. This power, this presence, and this life are perfect, complete, whole, and happy. We identify the mind with this wholeness, happiness, and perfection, affirming its presence and embodying a certain feeling about it, and inward awareness. This practice must continue until the idea becomes real to us, not as though we were something apart from or approaching the reality, but as through we were operating from the very center of it, which of course we are. It is an extension or reflection of ourselves. When one concludes a successful business transaction, one feels good about oneself. When one builds their dream house or gets a new care, one stands back and contemplates it, feeling a surge of pride. However, if we allow ourselves to do bad work, the whole society suffers a wound to soul. When it is not possible to feel good about our work, then soulful pride, so necessary for creativity, turns into narcissism. Pride and narcissism are not the same thing; in a sense, they are opposites. #RandolphHarris 5 of 8

The product of our work should reflect a means of loving ourselves. However, if those products are not lovable, we are forced into a narcissistic place where we lose sight of the work itself and focus on our own personal needs. Love of the World and our place in it, attained largely by our work, turns into solipsistic craving for love. We will never achieve the flowing of our own natures until we find that piece of ourselves, that lovable twin, which lives in the World and as the World. Therefore, finding the right work is like discovering your soul in the World. There will be new thoughts, new ideas coming. We will open our whole consciousness to the influx of that which is larger and better, as we identify with inward peace and joy. At times, however, we may be confronted with negative arguments of set mental patterns which circumscribe, limit, and depress the mind. Our sense may try to insist that we follow the old established precedents as our true guide, since they have been adhered to by humankind from time immemorial. Contradict those vibes, they are so deceiving as the clouded heart. A major part of faith is trusting God when we do not understand why things happen the way they do. #RandolphHarris 6 of 8

We all know that God gives us opportunities. We have seen God give us favour, good situations, blessings, and promotion. That is the hand of God opening the World up for us. Right here, a certain amount of adventure, of imagination must be brought into play to create a feeling of acceptance which will break down those old thought patterns. We must understand that they are not the Truth of God’s Being, but merely monotonous repetitions of all the negative thought of the ages. We must know that our new declarations of truth have the power within themselves to completely destroy the old thought patterns. We are no longer hypnotized by the old thought patterns; we are no longer bound by negative precedents; we are no longer limited to what everyone has believed, because we know it has no truth, no reality, and no law to support it. It is but a phantom. It is obvious that climbing the ladder of success can easily lead to a loss of soul. Are there any moral problems in the job or workplace—making things detrimental to people or to the Earth, taking excessive profits or contributing to racial and sexist oppression? It is not possible to care for the soul while violating or disregarding one’s own moral sensibility. They will misconstrue your answers due to a lack of love. An alternative may be to choose a profession or projects with soul in mind. #RandolphHarris 7 of 8

Signs of love and therefore of soul are feelings of attraction, desire, curiosity, involvement, passion, and loyalty in relation to our work. When the soul is involved, the work is not carried out by a need for prestige alone; it raises from a deeper place and therefore is not deprived of passion, spontaneity, and grace. We are and always have been part of God’s Universe. Do not ask someone else to justify your belief, for this is confusion. We must in our own minds increase our faith, reaffirming its own position, which will awaken the mind to the greater influx of blessings. Just as surely as we do this, the prison walls of the lesser self begin to crumble, the horizon experiences begins to push itself father away, and, because more spiritual territory is taken in, greater experiences are bound to follow. “Fools mock at making amends for sin, but goodwill is found among the upright. Each heart knows its own bitterness, and no one else can share its joy. The house of the wicked will be destroyed, but the house of the upright will flourish (Proverbs 14.9-11).” Real satisfaction comes not in understanding God’s motives, but in understanding his character, in trusting in his promises, and in leaning on him and resting in him as the Sovereign who knows what he is doing and does all things well. Look at others with patient eyes, as some leave reality early due to the lack of love. #RandolphHarris 8 of 8

Randolph Harris II International

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In Humility the Quest is to be Begun: in Even Greater Humility it is to be Fulfilled

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