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Our Eternal Life is Useless to Us if We Do Not See the Beauty Around Us, the Creation of Mortals Everywhere!
In Humility the Quest is to be Begun: in Even Greater Humility it is to be Fulfilled
All the Rapture and Pain I Had Known in these Past Month Came Together Inside Me–I Never Promised My Soul to the Devil for this!
But no matter, only so many children can be made by one in a century. And new offspring will be weak. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing. The rule of the old covens had wisdom in it that strength should come with time. And then again, there is the old truth: you might make titans or imbeciles, no one knows why or how. Whatever will happen will happen, but choose your companions with care. Choose them because you like to look at them and you like the sound of their voices, and they have profound secrets in them that you wish to know. In other words, choose them because you love them. Otherwise you will not be able to bear their company. Make sure before you select a mate that they have some lifetime before you choose them. Never let loneliness drive you to fall in love with someone because their helplessness will be so completely your fault. Remember, beware of that power, and the power you have over those who are dying. Loneliness in us, and that sense of power can be a strong combination. What relation does this pattern of passivity/madness that we have seen in Treasure have to do with the violence in our society, which has become such a critical problem for contemporary men and women? #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
A friend of mine, not in analysis or psychotic in any way, tells us how it feels to be in a rage after a quarrel with his wife: How close this rage is to a temporary psychosis! As I walk down the street on a sidewalk that seems very far away, I cannot think; I am in a daze. However, it is foggy only externally—inside I am hyperalive, hyperaware of every thought and feeling, as though I am in an illuminated World, everything very real. The only trouble is that this inner illumination has practically no connection with the outside World. I feel slightly ashamed in relation to the outside World—ashamed and defenseless. If people made fun of me or suddenly demanded something important of me (say an accident occurred on the street). I would not be able to respond. Or if I did respond, I would have to get out of my “mad”; it would be broken through. The streets are foreign; they seem empty though people are walking on them just as always. I do not know the streets very well (though I have seen them thousands of times). I walk on as though I am drunk, picking up my feet and self-consciously putting down. I go into a restaurant, Wan Li at Renaissance Beijing Wangfujing Hotel, afraid the cashier girl will not recognize me—I am in a different skin—or she will think something is wrong. (She does recognize me and is friendly as always. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
I go to the men’s room ; I read the graffiti over the urinal without any emotion. I am still afraid someone will require something of me, attack me, and I could not defend myself. I come back to my seat, staring out the window at the far end of the restaurant. I feel only a vague relation to the World. Food is brought me; I am not much interested in eating or taste; I go vaguely through the motions. I try to recall the details of our quarrel, without much success—two or three things stand out with great vividness; the rest is a jumble. I eat my favorite cuisine, a little chicken egg foo young, with rice and gravy, and a bit of my shrimp egg roll, as I sipped on a little jasmine tea. A waiter comes up, a middle-aged Chinese gentleman, and he says to me: “I can see you think too much,” he pointed to his forehead. “You got some problem?” I smiled and nodded. He went on: “These days everybody got some problem.” His words were strangely comforting. He went away, shaking his head. This was the first breakthrough of the outside World. It made me laugh to myself, and helped me much more than one would think. I could understand how, when this state is relatively permanent, people do themselves harm, step in front of a motor car for example. They do this mostly out of a lack of awareness of the real World about them. They do it also out of revenge. Or they get a gun and shoot somebody. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
The experience of being caught up in such a rage is very close to the historical experience of being “mad.” What, for example, is the meaning of “mad” in such statements as the following made by a young African American man in Harlem: The White cops, they have a damn sadistic nature…We do not need them here in Harlem! They start more violence than any other people start…When we’re dancing on the street because we can’t go home, here comes one cop, he’ll want to chase everyone. And he gets mad. I mean he gets mad! He comes into the neighborhood aggravated and mad. In this statement, this African America man is saying that there is a relationship between the “mad” of the policeman and violence in Harlem. Does the policeman, by inciting a violent reaction, use his own rage as a stimulus to preserve what he feels is law and order? Is this one of the reasons a man would choose to become a police officer in the first place? Does he seize upon a culturally accepted psychosis and use it to ally himself with the status quo, thereby giving himself the right, in line of duty, to carry a club and gun with which to let out his own violence? #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
In the verbatim reports in Violent Men, by professor of criminology Hans Toch, we can consider these questions in greater detail. Dr. Toch believes, for example, that: The African American and the European American officers and suspects—their pride, their fear, their isolation, their need to prove themselves, above all their demand for respect—are strangely alike: victims both, prisoners of an escalating conflict they did make and cannot control. As shown by their own reports, the policemen feel they have to uphold “law and order,” and they identify this with their own individual self-esteem and masculinity. Time after time it is clear that the policeman is fighting an impotence-potency battle within himself that he expands and projects on the concept of “law and order.” Affronts to themselves the police interpret as affronts to the law of the land. They have to insist, then, that the suspects respect their authority and power. They feel their manhood or womanhood is being challenged and their reputation, on which their self-respect is based, is at stake. However, this is understandable when you look at the record number of police killings in Brazil’s state of Rio de Janerio. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
In 2016, out of 46,000 officers, 147 of them were killed and numbers are expected to climb. Majority of the killings happen in the less affluent areas. These figures help to illustrate an institutional failure to protect police, and they highlight the systematic shortcomings in training and the use of lethal force, which has made Brazil’s police a major actor in violence that plagues that country. Some people say that the conflict starts with a culture of physical and psychological torture in Brazil’s military police training, which has also directly impacted the way in which these officers serve society and in turn are treated by society. Military police officers in Brazil are critical of their training regimen, in which physical, psychological, and disciplinary abuses are allegedly committed by their superiors and are thought to be commonplace. “Sometime, it was lunchtime and my superiors would shout at me that I was a monster, a parasite,” Ex-soldier Darlan Menezes Abrantes explains. “It was as if they were training a dog. A soldier is trained to only be afraid of his superiors. The training was just meant to mess with your feelings, so that you leave the barracks as a pit bull, wanting to bite someone.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
“How am I going to serve society being trained like that? It’s ridiculous,” Ex-soldier Darlan Menezes Abrantes adds. “Police have to learn quick thinking, the ability to make decisions. But right now they train police as they would a dog for a street fight. The officers can do anything and the soldiers just have to bow their heads. You are only trained to be afraid of the officers, that’s it. A soldier who sees an officer, even from far off, trembles with fear.” The school of hard knocks is the rule rather than the exception when training military police officers. Courses are concerned with imprinting the military culture on the future soldiers, with little theoretical teaching on topics such as criminal law or human rights. Over 21,000 public security personnel from various federal agencies were interviewed, over 50 percent of whom were military police. Of these officers, 83 percent said they received a full year of training before beginning work; 39 percent said they were victims of physical or psychological torture during training; 64 percent stated they had been humiliated or disrespected by their superiors. However, officers are prohibited from talking about negative experiences, and they have little opportunity to report violations. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
The institutionalization of human rights violations within the military police during training has a direct impact on how police interact with the general population. A typical instance of an officer who, responds to a call of a family fight, sees a man sitting in a car who he thinks can tell him something about the altercation: The officer asks the man to step out of the car. The man response, “You can’t do this to me, I’m on private property.” He seemed obnoxious, the officer reported, his “attitude bothered me.” The man eventually got out of the car, but kept his hands in the pocket of his trench coat. This continued to bother the officer, who asked him to take his hands of out his pocket. Meeting with continued refusal, he called another policeman and they forced the hands out. The policeman sees this as an unforgivable defiance of his authority. He must assert police authority at all costs…(“I felt it was imperative that I take the man’s hands out of his pockets…He became abusive as we took hold of him…We arrested him and put him in the back seat of the patrol car, where he threatened to urinate on the seat, kicked and pounded on the glass.”) Police explain that they go out with batons in hand and wearing shorts and military police shirts, so that they can give the population a sense of security. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
However, on the streets barbarism prevails: petty theft, harassment, weed-smoking, everything you can imagine. “When we got hold of the suspects, it was only beating, beating, beating, and pepper spray, a lot of pepper spray. That was the first time I came into contact with the torture techniques used by the military police,” says Rodrigo Nogueira Batista—a Navy graduate who is currently serving a 30-year prison sentence for several crimes, including attempted homicide—who had been chosen to participate in a summar operations, two months after joining the military police. The culture of violence is born through the dehumanization of the military police during training. The police are created in order to guarantee a hierarchy and discipline within the community and to create a certain image of the force. Some believe they were not made to protect neither the police nor the population. The man with his hands in his pockets we talked about earlier, saw the police as the arm of the government and the enemy of the people, and he was humiliated. And, indeed, he is right in the sense that the policeman must cow him to preserve his own authority. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
Blue Power in this instance is the opposite side of the coin of Power to the people. Each is engaged in protecting one’s own self-image, one’s own sense of being a human being. However, the police man, by virtue of one’s identification with law enforcement and one’s gun and badge, has a special advantage. However, there is also a special morality that police officers must follow even in their private lives. An officer cannot do things that most humans do: drink alcohol, tell a lie, fall into debt. An officer can actually be punished for these things. This creates the image of a superhuman that does not exist. The police are also forbidden from speaking in a foreign language, except when it is required as a function of their roles as an officer. The human rights of police officers are frequently violated with these rules. Yet we want them to respect the rights of the citizens when they do not have their own rights respected. Police cannot publish things on social media about the internal workings of the organization without having to respond to them. Some are under investigation and responding to various inquires for having expressed themselves on social media. Sometimes they are sent to Internal Affairs because of a comment that someone made on a website and it can be boring and embarrassing. The military police cannot question a superior. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
Because of the way the police are trained and the history of the country, suspects regularly feel that the cards are stacked against them, that no matter what they say they are going to jail, will be found guilty or killed. Their opponent in the dual are protected with a badge and gun, and often the suspect will challenge the officer to take off his or her badge and settle differences “man to man.” The placing on of hands, the physical contact, and the other aspect of touching are especially significant. The suspect has to protect the inviolability of their body. The police officer feels he or she has to assert their authority. And when it comes to asking for identification, it is a highly personal thing. Psychologically, demanding identification is like requiring a person to undress physically; it gives a person who has already been told he or she is inferior an added feeling of personal humiliation. To provokes the suspect’s sense of outrage, and the police officers finds that these situations can sometimes be pushed to the brink of a riot over a simple proof of identity. Noteworthy in these events is that often the mortal who ends up in jail was simply trying, through one’s act, to defend one’s self-image or one’s reputation or one’s rights. Both officer and suspect and almost everyone else is struggling to some for or other to build or protect one’s self-esteem, one’s sense of significance as a person. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
Both police and suspects are fighting an impotence-potency battle within themselves. Each interprets this in one’s own, though diametrically opposite, way. True, this power battle can be blown up to paranoid proportions, the offense simply being imagined; or it can take the infantile form of bullying or some other deviation. However, in order to see the roots of violence we must go below these psychological dynamics and seek its source in the individual’s struggle to establish and protect one’s self-esteem. This, in essence, a beneficial need—it is potentially constructive. Prisons do not deter criminals. Prisons unman and dehumanize; violence rests on exploitation and exploitativeness, and prison is a power-centered jungle. There seems to be growing evidence that the police and guards on one side and the incarcerated mortals on the other are of the same personality type. Our research indicated that ranks of law enforcement contain their share of violent men and women. The personalities, outlooks and actions of these officers are similar to those of the other people in our lives. They reflect the same fears and insecurities, the same fragile, self-centered perspectives. They display the same bluster and bluff, panic and punitiveness, rancor and revenge, pride and shame as do others. And whereas much police violence springs out of adaptation to police work rather than out of the problems of infancy, the result, in practice, is almost the same. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
The need for potency, which is another way of phrasing the struggle for self-esteem, is common to all of us. We see its beneficial form in the rebellion at the Attica, New York, prison, where the leader of the revolting inmates proclaimed: “We don’t want to be treated any longer as statistics, as numbers…We want to be treated as human beings, we will be treated as human beings.” Another inmate, older than the first, took a more realistic view: “If we cannot live as people, we will at least try to die as men.” History records that twenty-eight of them did die several days later when the troopers charged into the prison, shooting. However—such is the strange partnership between guards and prisoners, both being in prison and both being of the same personality types—history records that some prisoner died using their bodies to protect their prison guards from the shots. It seems necessary therefore to distinguish between alienating conditions on the one hand and estranged states on the other, although the distinction may be difficult, there being no question here of a simple stimulus-response situation. It also seems appropriate to limit the term alienation to mean an individual feeling or state of dissociation from self, from others, and from the World at large. Such states, although functions of the conditions that produce them, should not be confused with the conditions themselves. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
Alienation refers to different kinds of dissociation, break or rupture between human beings and their objects, whether the later be other persons, or the natural World, or their own creations in art, science and society; and subjectively, the corresponding states of disequilibrium, disturbance, strangeness and anxiety. One of the concepts linked with alienation is the idea of anomie to describe the conditions of normlessness, the collapse of rules of conduct. The notion of anomie, like that of alienation itself, has been used to refer to a wide array of social and personal disorders. Anomie is a breakdown in the cultural structure, occurring particularly when there is an acute disjunction between the cultural norms and goals and the capacities of members of the group to act in accord with them. The breakdown of values causes people to respond to this conflict between ends and means in various deviant ways; and of those individual adaptations one in particular—retreat from the struggle to get ahead (as in the case of harlots of addicts)—is worth mentioning here. Anomie is a social condition rather than a psychological state, we can identify it as an important cause of alienation, particularly when the response takes the form of retreat; but we should not confuse it with alienation as a state of mind. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
Similar considerations apply to other concepts which are often confused with alienation. For example, social isolation may lead to a state of estrangement, but not all isolates are alienated. Indeed, alienation may result from the social pressures of group, crowd or mass. By the same token alienation should not be confused with social disorganization, since, as we shall see, estrangement may also result in highly organized bureaucracies. Alienation is often associated with loneliness; but again, not all lonely people are estranged. Loneliness can be a creative part of human experience and another form of loneliness is self-rejection which is not really loneliness but anxiety; people who try to overcome or escape loneliness will end only by becoming self-alienated. What we have here are important conditions or correlates of alienation. Any one of these conditions may have different effects on men and women of varying personalities in different social situations, predisposing some more and others less to alienated states. Thus one mortal retreats from life, another rebels; and each of these in turn exhibits many different modes of behavior. Whatever the approach, central to the definition of alienation is that idea that mortals have lost their identity or selfhood. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
We acquire a self or identity through interaction with others. However, if one acquires a self by communicating with others, especially through language, then anxiety about or loss of selfhood is a social as well as an individual problem. What this means is that the person who experiences self-alienation is not only cut off from the springs of one’s own creativity, but is thereby also cut off from groups of which one would otherwise be a part; and one who fails to achieve a meaningful relationship with others is deprived of some part of oneself. The self can only be preserved by identification with God, godless mortal’s essential bread at being dominated by an alien power which threatens our dissolution—by which the anxiety that loss of self can be produced is realized. Despair about loss of self is called a sickness unto death. The World dominated by a giant technological and bureaucratic apparatus of one’s own creation has caused much of this alienation. The price we pay for progress is anxiety, a dread of life perhaps unparalleled in its intensity and increasing to such a pitch that the sufferer may feel oneself to be nothing more than a lost point in empty space, inasmuch as all human relationships appear to have no more than a temporary validity. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Alienation is defined as loss of identity and is illustrated by men and women who trouble over the simple yet complex question, “Who am I?” In the Untied States of American today the literature of psychoanalysis is rich in its descriptions of such cases. Alienation is the remoteness of the neurotic from one’s own feelings, wishes, beliefs, and energies. It is the loss of the feeling of being an active, determining force in one’s own life. It is the loss of feeling oneself as an organic whole. Or, the alienated mortal is one who does not experience oneself as the center of one’s World, as the creator of one’s own acts—but one’s act and their consequences have become one’s masters, whom one obeys, or whom one may even worship. The alienated person is out of touch with oneself as one is out of touch with any other person. Implicit in most approaches to alienation is the ideal of an integrated mortal and of a cohesive society in which one will find meaning and satisfaction in one’s own productivity and in one’s relations with others. A person in solidarity society will no longer find the only aim of one’s conduct in oneself and, understanding that one is the instrument of a purpose greater than oneself, one will see that one is not without significance. We may well ask, was there ever such a society? Romantic notions about our own past or about primitive culture do not help us here. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
I have an love of spiritual freedom and intellectual independence, and think it is important to keep away from all restrictive, limiting, and narrowing groups, organization, and institutions. I have seen so many lost to the cause of Truth by such constrictions of the mind and heart, so much of its good undone by this harm, that I shrink from the idea of becoming tagged as some one man’s disciple or as a member of some ashram, society, or church. If this man has found the Right, why not let one’s natural expression of it—whether in writing, art, or life—be enough? Why create a myth around one, to befog others and falsify the goal? Why not let well alone? Having no official connection with any group, sect, organization, or church leaves me free to help anyone, anywhere. A strongly individualistic temperament cannot be at ease in the collective membership of an organization where strict and rigid doctrines are set up like the Great Wall of China and where patriotism rejects salvation for those outside. Such a temperament needs the free air of unfettered thinking and uncircumscribed good will. It can sympathize intellectually with many different points of view without losing itself in any one of them, but it can do so only because it belongs to none. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
The routine devotions of an institution do not appeal to this type of temperament—sensitive, moody, and independent as it is. The mortal who has seen the light and experienced its warmth will prefer one’s own way of living if it is the consequence of one’s awakening. One’s mind is bound by no religious doctrines, one’s conduct by no prohibitions or commandments. However, this does not mean one is free to do what one pleases. One mortal and one God are all the organizations needed. More is a superfluity. The seeker who cherishes one’s independent path and individual thought cannot comfortably fit into a group where all alike must be pressed into the same shape. It seems historically inevitable that every spiritual movement should sooner or later become organized and institutionalized. In that way it reflects the need and serves the tendency of average human nature. However, where a person is not average and refused to be taken up into it by that means, preferring to keep one’s independence and one’s allegiance, one is just as much entitled to do so. Those who feel tempted to do so, may study the public cults and listen to the public teachers but it would be imprudent to join any of the first or follow any of the second. It would be wiser to remain free and independent or they may be led astray from the philosophical path. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
By rejecting the easy way of joining a particular sect, a labeled group, one rejects at the same time the withdrawal of sympathy or understanding from all other groups which usually or often accompanies the joining. If the universal character of truth requires one to keep one’s mind uncorralled, the personal need of strength confirms the requirement. What is it that is eternal: the primal phenomenon, present in the here and now, of what we call revelation? It is mortal’s emerging from the moment of the supreme encounter, being no longer the same as one was when entering into it. The moment of encounter is not a living experience that stirs in the receptive soul and blissfully rounds itself out: something happens to mortals. At times it is like feeling a breath and at times like a wresting match; no matter: something happens. The mortal who steps out of the essential act of pure relation has something More in one’s being, something new has grown there of which one did not know before and for whose origin one lacks any suitable words. Whereever the scientific World orientation in its legitimate desire for a causal chain without gaps may place the origin of what is new here: for us, being concerned with the actual, no subconscious and no other psychic apparatus will do. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
Actually, we receive what we did not have before, in such a manner that we know: it has been given to us. In the language of the Bible: “Those who wait for God will receive strength in exchange.” Being faithful one accepts, one does not ask who gives. Mortals receives, and what one receives is not a content but a presence, a presence as strength. This presence and strength includes three elements that are not separate but may nevertheless be contemplated as three. First, the whole abundance of actual reciprocity, of being admitted, of being associated with one is altogether unable to indicate what that is like with which one is associated, nor does association make life any easier for us—it makes life heavier but heavy with meaning. And this is second: the inexpressible confirmation of meaning. It is guaranteed. Nothing, nothing can henceforth be meaningless. Questions about the meaning of life has vanished. However, if it were still there, it would not require an answer. You do not know how to point to or define the meaning, you lack any formula or image for it, and yet it is more certain for you than the sensations of your sense. What could it intend with us, what does it desire from us, being revealed and surreptitious? It does not wish to be interpreted by us—for that we lack the ability—only to be done by us. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
It does not wish to be interpreted by us—for that we lack the ability—only to be done by us. This comes third: it is not the meaning of another life, but that of this our life, not that of a beyond but of this our World, and it wants to be demonstrated by us in this life and this World. The meaning can be received but not experienced; it cannot be experienced, but it can be done; and this is what it intends with us. The guarantee does not wish to remain shut up within me, it wants to be born into the World by me. However, even as the meaning itself cannot be transferred or expressed as a universally valid generally acceptable piece of knowledge, putting it to the proof in action cannot be handed on as a valid ought; it is not prescribed, not inscribed on a table that could be put up over everybody’s head. The meaning we receive can be put to the proof in action only by each person in the uniqueness of one’s being and in the uniqueness of one’s life. No prescription can lead us to the encounter, and none leads from it. Only the acceptance of the presence is required to come to it or, in a new sense, to go from it. As we have nothing but a You on our lips that we are released from it into the World. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
That before which we live, that in which we live, that out of which an into which we life, the mystery—has remained what it was. It has become present for us, and through its presence it has made itself known to us as salvation; we have known it, but we have no knowledge of it that might diminish or extenuate its mysteriousness. We have come close to God, but no closer to an unriddling, unveiling of being. We have felt salvation but no solution. We cannot go to others with what we have received, saying: This is what needs to be known, this is what needs to be done. We can only go and put to the proof in action. And even this is not what we ought to do: rather we can—we cannot do otherwise. This is the eternal revelation which is present in the here and now. I neither know of nor believe in any revelation that is not the same in its primal phenomenon. I do not believe in God’s naming himself or in God’s defining himself before mortals. The word of revelation is: I am there as whoever I am there. That which reveals is that which reveals. That which has being is there, nothing more. The eternal source of strength flows, the eternal touch is waiting, the eternal voice sounds, nothing more. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
A Teacher—When Will God Send Me One with Truth and of Boundless Benevolence?
When I turned around, Marius was gone. The sack was gone. However, Nicki’s violin and my valise of belongings lay on a stone table in the middle of the room. We know in psychotherapy that often despair is essential to the discovery on the part of the client of his or her hidden capacities and basic assets. The function of despair is to wipe away our superficial ideas, our delusionary hopes, our simplistic mortality. There are some misguided therapists who feel that they must reassure the patient at ever point of despair. However, if the client never feels despair, it is doubtful whether one ever will feel any profound emotion. Apropos of considering Voltaire’s remark “Despair has often gained battles,” a friend wrote this limerick: There once was a man named Voltaire who found his best hope in despair. If that sounds perverse, it could have been worse. Voltaire could declare, “I do not care.” There is surely value in the client’s experience that one has nothing more to lose anyway so one may as well take whatever leap life requires to make of one. I suggest that this is what is meant by that sentence in folklore “Despair and confidence both banish fear.” #RandolphHarris 1 of
Since there are a number of signs that we in America may be on the threshold a period as a nation when we shall no longer be able to camouflage or repress our despair, it is important to remind ourselves of the points that despair and confidence both banish fear. Those who can feel healthy despair are often those who also can at the same time experience the most intense pleasure and joy. Sartre was talking about a life-enhancing despair when in his play The Flies, after Zeus has pointed out al the despair Orestes will face, Orestes asserts against Zeus, “Human life begins on the far side of despair!” He could as well have said that human freedom and human joy also begin on the far side of despair. This is why we believe more firmly in the dignity and the nobility of being human after seeing a performance of tragedy rather than comedy: the character and the tragic downfall of Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, or even Harry in The Iceman Cometh give us a conviction of the significance of life. As we leave the theater, we are not only relieved, we are inspired. The despair we have felt in the drama highlights its opposite, the nobility of life. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Despair is a desperate refusal to be oneself. There different levels of despair at not willing to be one’s self, or still lower, despair at not willing to be a self’ or lowest of all, despair at willing to be another then one’s true self. Despair is a failure of spirit, a spiritlessness. When mortals are characterized as a spirit-less has become a talking-machine, and there is nothing to prevent one from learning a philosophical rigmarole just as easily as a confession of faith and a political recitative repeated by rote. Again: Despair is a qualification of spirit, it is related to the eternal in mortals. In unconsciousness of being in despair a mortal is furthest from being conscious of oneself as spirit. This thing of despairing is inherent in mortals; but if one were not a synthesis of finite and infinite, and this is what makes despair possible. One also emphasizez that the worst condition of all is to boast about never having been in despair, for that means that the person has never been authentically conscious of oneself. This leads us to another characteristic of seeing, the most significant of all. We never see only what we see; we always see something else with it and through it! Seeing creates, seeing unites, and above all seeing goes beyond itself. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
If we look at a stone we see directly only the colors and forms of the side which is turned toward us. However, with and through this limited surface we are aware of the roundness, of the extension and mass of the structure of the whole thing. We see beyond what we see. If we look at an animal we see directly the colors and forms of its skin. However, with it and through it we are aware of the tension and power of its muscles, of its inner strivings which are covered as well as revealed by the skin. We see not color sports, but a living being. If we look at a human face, we see lines and shades, but with it and through it we see a unique, incomparable personality whose expressions are visible in one’s face, whose character and destiny has left traces which we understand and in which we can even read something of one’s future. With and through colors and forms and movements we see friendliness and coldness, hostility and devotion, anger and love, sadness and joy. We see infinitely more than we see when we look into a new depth. Again the language gives us a help when it speaks of con- templation. Con- templation means going into the temple, into the sphere of the holy, into deep roots of things, into their creative ground. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
We see the mysterious powers which we call beauty and truth and goodness. We cannot see them as such, we can see them only in things and events. We see them with and through the shape of a rose and the movements of the stars and the image of a friend. We can see them, but it is not necessary that we see them. We can close our eyes, we can become blind. Some are blind to any beauty which is more than a pleasant feeling, some are blind to any truth which is more than correct observation and calculation, some are bind to any goodness which is more than usefulness. And some are blind to any ground which is the unity of these powers and which we call holy. It is the ultimate, the last which we can see with and through all things; and therefore it is the end of all seeing. It is the light itself and therefore it is darkness for our eyes. Only with and through can we see it, through things and mortals, through events and images. This seeing and not seeing at the same time is what we call faith. Nobody can see God; but we can see him with and through. Here the conflict ends between seeing and hearing. He word tells us where to see and when we have seen we pronounce what we have seen and heard. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
In the state which we call faith, sound and vision are united and perhaps this is the reason why the holy likes to be expressed in music more than in any other medium. Music gives wings to both, word and image, and goes beyond both of them. However, for a second time we are called down from the flight above to the lowliness of our human situation. Our Gospel calls us blind, all of us. And Jesus says that we are blind because we believe we see and do not know that we are blind; and Christ then threatens that we shall be thrown into more blindness if we insist that we are seeing. The question is: Where of all places can and shall we see into the ground of all Being? Who can lead our contemplation into the temple, into the holy itself? Seeing gives us a World, the order and unity of the many. However, we see within this order, disorder; within the unity, conflict threatening to explode the World itself and to being back the old darkness of the chaos. And order and chaos are so mixed with each other that we often feel dizzy, without ground and meaning, desiring to keep our eyes closed. Seeing unites us with what we see. However, we see so many things and beings with which we do not want to be untied, towards which we are indifferent or hostile, which are indifferent or hostile to us, which are repulsive and which we hate to see just because every seeing unites, even if it is through hate. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
And it may be even our own self that we do not want to see because we are repelled by our image and because we hate it if we see it. Not in love but in hate are we untied with ourselves, and perhaps we want to deprive ourselves of our eyes like Lestat in The Queen of the Damned, of our eyes which first did not see what they ought to see and now cannot stand to see what they must see. And is not that which we love to see and that which we hate to see so mixed that we often praise the poverty of not seeing? Seeing is seeing with and through beings into their depth, into the good and the true and into their holy ground. However, which are the beings and images that shall lead us to this temple? Those whom Jesus called blind believed they knew the way to the temple, to the holy and the holiest. Innumerable temples all over the World contain things and images with and through which we can see God. However, what we see are idols, fascinating, horrible, overwhelming in seductive beauty or destructive power, demanding what cannot be fulfilled, promising what cannot be given, giving what elevates and lowers at the same time. And this is so because they hold us fast to themselves and do not lead us beyond. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
Our eyes are bound by them, often bound by the demonic fascination they exercise and with which they take possession of us. We contemplate them, we go into their temples, we unite with them in self-surrender, and we leave them emptied, despairing, destroyed. This is the great temptation of seeing. This is the reason why hearing was put against seeing. It is the reason why images were destroyed again and again and every image forbidden, why the temples were burned and God was called the Infinite Void. However, this cannot be the last word. Emptiness can be both light and darkness; and we want light, the lights which is life and vision. Jesus also could have become an idol, a national and religious hero, fascinating and destructive. This is what the disciples and the masses wanted Christ to be. They saw him the good and the true, the holy itself. However, the succumbed to the temptation of seeing. They kept to that which must be sacrificed if God shall be seen with and through any mortal being. And when Christ sacrificed himself, they looked away in despair like those who image and idol is destroyed. However, he was too strong; he drew their eyes back to him, but now to Christ crucified. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
However, of hum it is true. Certainly Christ is not the only one to look at intuition and contemplation. We are not asked to stare at Christ, as some do. We are not asked to look away from everything for his sake, as some do. We are not asked to give up the abundance of his creation as some do. We are not asked to refuse union with what we see as some do. However, we are asked to see wit and through everything into the which Christ shows the way. We shall see into it unimpeded by that which tries to keep us, away from the last dept. And when we are tired of seeing the abundance of the World with all its disorder, its hate and separation, its demonic destruction, and if we are also unable to look into the blinding light of the divine ground, then let us close our eyes. And then it might happen that we see the picture of someone who looks at us with eyes of infinite human depth and therefore of divine power and love. And those eyes say to us “Come and see.” Human’s religious situation, existence in the presence, is marked by its essential and indissoluble antinomies. That is these antinomies are indissoluble constitutes their very essence. Whoever affirms the thesis and repudiates the antithesis violates the sense of the situation. Whoever tires to think a synthesis destroys the sense of the situation. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Whoever would settle the conflict between antinomies by some means short of one’s own life transgresses against the sense of the situation. It is the sense of the situation that it is to be lived in all its antinomies—only lived—and lived ever again, ever anew, unpredictably, without any possibility of anticipation or prescription. A comparison of the religious and the philosophical antinomy will make this clearer. We can relativize the philosophical conflict of freedom and necessity by relegating the latter to the World of appearance and the former to that of being, so that the two positions no longer really oppose one another but rather get along with one another as well as do the two World in which each is valid. However, when I mean freedom and necessity not in Worlds that are thought of but in the actuality in which I stand before God; when I know, I have been surrendered and know at the same time, it depends on me, then I may not try to escapes from the paradox I have to live by relegating the irreconcilable propositions to two separate realms; neither may I seek the assistance of some theological artifice to attain some conceptual reconciliation: I must take it upon myself to live both in one, and lived both are one. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
We regard Ralph Waldo Emerson as the perfect example of spiritual independence. He seems beholden to no mortal and draws all one’s light from within. How did he arrive at this condition? For in his early thirties, he wrote to his Aunt Mary, “A teacher–when will God send me one full of truth and boundless benevolence?” This question was written soon after he came to Europe. There were four literary heroes across the Atlantic among whom he hoped to find his teacher. They were Carlyle, Landor, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. However, when he met them in the flesh, Landor severely disappointed him. The Coleridge visit was “of no use beyond the satisfaction of my curiosity.” Emerson’s interview with Wordsworth was more successful but still so fruitless that he was glad to end it. The first glance at Carlyle made him believe that his search for a teacher was over, that there was his man. The actuality was the he found a lifelong friend, even a fellow-pilgrim and seeker. However, he did not become a pupil. He had gone in search of a master. He failed to find one. Indeed he tells his aunt as much, that he seeks a man who is wise and true but that he never gets used to men. “They always awaken expectations in me which they always disappoint.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Ralph Waldo Emerson left Europe, writing in his journal in his journal on shipboard the melancholy after-reflection, “I shall judge more justly, less timidly, of wise men forevermore.” And it was there, in his little cabin, that he received the illumination which he could not find in Europe. He need look outside himself no more. Out of his illumination, whilst still afloat on the ocean he wrote down such sentences as these: “A man contains all that is needful within himself.” “Nothing can be given to him or take away from him but always there is a compensation.” “The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man with himself.” One’s attraction toward this or that teacher may weaken and die but one’s attraction toward the Inspirer of all teachers, God, will keep on growing stronger in one. One alone must answer this question, and one can best answer it by listening for and obeying that deep inner feeling which is called intuition. The rarity of competent teachers in the World, and especially in the Western World, forces seekers to practice self-reliance and cultivate independence, unless they are willing to accept substitutes for competence or join organizations making unsubstantiated claims. God will not neglect determined seekers and through circumstances, events, books, or otherwise gives them the particular guidance or instruction needed at a particular time. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
The aspirant of today who is thoroughly discriminating will generally fail to find the support of a competent teacher. Usually one will have to depend on the inner Self alone. If one will listen to the voice of the Silence and accept its invisible leadership, one need not accept any human leadership. What one learns from outside one’s self, from teacher or tradition, will never lead to one’s true fulfilment until one joins it with what one learns in the stillness from inside oneself. People tie themselves to some one mortal, living or dead, and worthy of one. Yet one is outside themselves, and the divine is within, themselves. They contemplate one’s form, surrender to one’s personality, refuse to look within. As long as they do this, so long does the Consciousness elude them. When a mortal recognizes that all one really needs come to one from the higher self, and not from other mortals, and in the measure that one uses one’s own efforts to complete one’s development and so come closer in consciousness to that self, in that measure will one gain what one needs. Books however sacred, ceremonies however impressive, lecture however learned, even Masters however wise are still only outer helps and as such must in the end be discarded. “The Lord liveth, and as we live, we will not go down unto our father in the wilderness until we have accomplished the things which the Lord have commanded us,” reports 1 Nephi 3.15. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Why Do I Harm the Very Person I Love?
Do you think we find our destiny somehow, no matter what happens? I mean, do you think even as immortals we follow some path that was already marked for us when we were alive? We have said that human freedom gives birth to the human spirit and that spirit is necessary if there is to be freedom. However, are not human spirit and freedom also the sources of evil? What did do we really mean when we say the wrath of God is necessary if there is to be any love of God? In the course of my therapeutic experience I have met and talked with a number of parents whose son or daughter happened to be in treatment with me. When the parents let their hair down, their attitudes varied from tearful regret on the part of a clergy member high up in the ecclesiastical hierarchy about his son’s depression to the genuine, if sad, puzzlement of a mother whose psychotic episode when her daughter was born had a good deal to do wit the latter’s present promiscuity to the boisterous instructions of a Wall Street executive who adjured me to hurry and get his son to shape up. The boisterousness of the executive only served to emphasize his subconscious realization that his authoritarianism had a good deal to with his son’s perpetual failures in everything he tired. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
If these parents could have spoken out of the depths of their feelings, each one of them—even the Wall Street executive—would have cried out, “Why do I harm the very person I love?” When we see the evil we do, scarcely any of us can remain unaffected, mostly unintentionally, to those in our own family and to people we love by our inability to understand what is going on in the other’s thoughts. Oscar Wilde’s line “Yet each man kills the thing he loves” may relieve us to some extent in that it presents the universal quality of the problem of evil; we are not alone in the harm we partly cause. However, Oscar Wilde also makes it impossible for us to forget that each of us participates in the inhumanity to other human beings. The inevitability of evil is the price we pay for freedom. And the denial of evil is also the denial of freedom. Since we have some margin of freedom, we have to make some choices; and this means the chance of making the wrong choice as well as the right one. Freedom and evil presuppose each other, whether we accept responsibility for our freedom and evil or not. Possibility is possibility for evil as well as good. We can pretend innocence, but such retreating to childhood ignorance does not help anyone. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
There is an inescapable egocentricity in all of us, leading to the absolutizing of our own perceptions, which then become destructive to those closest to us. There is a tendency in each one of us to be absolute in one’s self. Each of us is bound up in one’s own skin, each of us sees life through one’s own eyes, and none of us can escape doing some violence to those we long most to understand. The good that I would I do not, and the evil that I would not do, that I do. There is no evading this dilemma. This is the original sin: each of us speaks out of one’s separate individuality and thus inexorably runs roughshod over yearnings and perceptions that are precious to people we love. And if one tried very hard not to do this, if one makes every effort to do good, one succeeds only in adding an element of self-righteousness to the ways one confronts one’s fellows. The problem of evil has been a stumbling block for philosophers and theologians for millennia. Those who represent the rational approach to evil, from Aristotle through Aquinas to the rational philosophers of today, hold that the more we solve our problems, the less evil will exist. Evil is thus a lack of goodness. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The more our science progresses, the argument goes, the more mysterious of life and nature are solved, and the less evil there is in this would. However, I believe this point of view is wrong. I heard this judgment much more in my earlier days before the advent of Adolph Hitler, before the Second World War with all its newly technologized ways of killing, before the use of concentration camps as an accepted political arm of the government, and before hydrogen bomb, with its unutterably cruel mass maiming and slaying. This depressing list should make clear the fact that the progress of science and technology has not resulted in our being less evil. Human cruelty and capacity for evil increase neck and neck with technological progress, just look at how many of the TV news stations lie, distort facts, and ruin lives for fun. Our ways of killing are made more efficient as well as our ways of living. In fact it is thought, people who are terrorized for fun should be beautiful in person so the insult to God might be greater when the Dark Tick is done. When the World of mortals collapses in ruin, beauty will take over. The trees shall grow again where there were streets; the flowers will again cover the meadow that is now a dank field of hovels. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
That shall be the purpose of the Satanic master, to see the wild grass and the dense forest cover up all trace of the once great cities until nothing remains. And why call this Satanic? Why not call it chaos? That is all it is. However, mortals invented Satan, did they not? Satanic is merely the name they give to the behavior of those who would disrupt the orderly way in which mortals want to life. Satan is mortal’s invention, a name for the force that seeks to overthrow the civilized order of things. The first man who made laws—be he Moses or some ancient Egyptian king Osiris—that lawmaker created the devil. The devil meant the one who tempts you to break the laws. And we are truly Satanic in that we follow no law for mortal’s protection. So why not truly disrupt? Why not make a blaze of evil to consume all the civilizations of Earth? The main example of the evil that is present in technology along with the good is, of course, nuclear power. If we had any doubts about the dangers to health and even life itself in radiation, nuclear residue, as well as the nuclear bombs per se we have only to listen to the Union of Concerned Scientists to shock us out of our delusions. Not only can nuclear fission destroy the World population many times over, but there is evidence that radiation and strontium 90 may already be seeping into the bodies of an unknown number of us. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
In any case, we walk a razor’s edge in dealing with nuclear fission. Science and technology deal with the how of life, and not the why or what for—which truth reputable scientists by the score tell us. Science increases the possibilities for good and the possibilities for evil, which many esteemed scientists have been shouting to us from the housetops. There is also another group of philosophers and the theologians who take a different approach. This group includes Heraclitus, who said “war is both king of all and father of all,” through Sokratis, Augustine, Pascal, Boehme, and down to Kierkegaard and Bateson. These thinkers directly face the fact that freedom makes evil inevitable. As long as there is freedom there will be mistake choices, some of the catastrophic. However, to relinquish the capacity to make choices in favor of the dictatorial segment of us called our reason is to surrender what makes us human in the first place. The modern form of the Grand Inquisitor’s plan leads people to hand over their responsibility to the scientists in the white coat or to the psychotherapist in the comforting office or to the priest in the church or to the anonymous environment all about us. If we could do these things, we would have the temporary facsimile of evading evil. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
However, while we are no longer committing evil, we also are no longer committing goodness; and the age of the robot will be upon us. The ultimate error is the refusal to look evil in the face. This denial of evil—and freedom along with it—is the most destructive approach of all. To take refuge with the Moonies, or with Jonestown, or any others of the hundreds of cults, most of which seem to spring up in California, is to find a haven where our choices will be made for us. We surrender freedom because of our inability to tolerate moral ambiguity, and we escape the threat that one might make the wrong choice. The mass suicides at Jonestown seem to me to be the terrible, if brilliant, demonstration of the ultimate outworking of the attitudes with which the adherents joined in the first place. They committed spiritual suicide in surrendering their freedom to evade the partial evil of life, and they end up demonstrating to the World in their own mass suicides the final evil. Religious people have for millennia fervently asked, “How could a God of love permit evil?” An answer is given by that tributary of Christianity, Gnosticism: God allowed evil to exist, woven into the texture of the World, in order to increase mortal’s freedom and one’s will to prove one’s moral strength in overcoming. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
However, the question the religious people above ask is simplistic. Let us recall the words of Boehme, above, that God is a fire and it is necessary to confront the wrath of God if the love of God is to have any reality. A Hassidic saying points toward the same thing: God is not nice, God is no uncle. God is an Earthquake. We note that some saints through history have spoken of themselves as the “Chief of sinners.” Obviously, this cannot mean sinner in the sense of committing overt, objective crimes. However, it can mean that the saints, being more highly developed spiritually than ordinary people, have a correspondingly deeper awareness of their pride, vanity, hardness of heart, and obtuseness of understanding. If we look at sin from the inside, we see that there is indeed, sound meaning to their claim. It is impossible to have a sensitive conscience and a good conscience at the same time. If one has a sensitive conscience one will be aware of the evils of the World in which we as human beings participate. Hence, there is no clear, good conscience, but an active concern about the evils. It is not at all surprising, then, that in the Garden of Eden myth, the knowledge of good and evil comes by virtue of the evil of rebellion against God. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
If Adam and Eve are to have any freedom, any true autonomy or true independence, they must defy the orders of God; and whether Yahweh is benevolent or destructive does not at that moment matter. This defying of the orders of God is essential for this development of their own consciousness. Otherwise they will forever be the inert appendage of God. Is this alienating? Anxiety-creating? Guilt-producing? Of course. However, what become available with these “curses” are the blessings of love, responsibility, and the passion and power to create. Still, after meeting with certain people, one may complain about a sense of depression which comes to one’s mind. One should reduce such meetings to the least number possible, and where it is necessary to deal with them, to do so by correspondence as much as one can. It does not matter that such people may have spiritual interests and many also on the Quest. The Quest is an individual matter; it is not a group Quest. One finds God by oneself, alone in the privacy of one’s heart and life, not with the help of a group nor in public associations. Be yourself, your own divine self. Why play a part? Why be an echo? Why follow the World in its pursuit of the trivial, the stupid, the pain bringing? #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
One should not permit oneself to be re-entangled by others in past contacts which have out served their purpose and which now will only keep one down. This freedom to search for and find truth as well as to select one’s own path of approach toward it, is a precious prerogative. One refuses to accept a label; one feels oneself to be outside all the common categories. The divergence of opinion among leading individuals on every subject is extraordinary and emphasizes one again the necessity of thinking for oneself. Remember that custom and habit are the great tyrants who enslave the mass of humankind. Only when one is true to one’s own self, real freedom is possible. Do not permit yourself to be hypnotized by the common indifference to these high matters, but be loyal to the promptings of the spirit. With this decree one runs up one’s personal declaration of independence. No school can hold one. One’s loyalty is henceforth given to global thought. Nor is this all. The mystic life depends on no institution, no tradition, no sectarianism. It is an independent and individual existence. Without falling into the vacuity of skepticism, the intelligent and independent seeker shuns strict and rigid doctrines sectarian intellectual or emotional positions. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
However, this openness of mind, one’s semi-detached stand, do not prevent one’s forming favourable appreciations or accommodating unflattering impressions. “All this is the genius of Our Divine Violinist, but we must now be with him every waking moment. To force him to write we tie him to a chair. We put ink and paper in front of him. And if this fails, we make him dictate as we write down plays.” If you do not feel any affinity with it, let others follow whatever path attracts them, but do not let them impose their path upon you. The unified I: for (as I have said earlier) the unification of the soul occurs in lived actuality—the concentration of all forces into the core, the decisive moment of mortals. However, unlike that immersion, this does not entail ignoring the actual person. Immersion want to preserve only what is pure, essential, and enduring, while stripping away everything else; the concentration of which I speak does not consider our instincts as too impure, the sensuous as too peripheral, or our emotions as too fleeting—everything must be included and integrated. What is wanted is not the abstracted self but the whole, undiminished mortal. This concentration aims at and is actuality. The doctrine of immersion demands and promises penetration into thinking the One, that by which the World is thought, the pure subject. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
However, in lived actuality no one thinks without something being thought; rather is that which thinks as dependent on that which is thought as vice versa. A subject that annuls the object to rise above it annuls its own actuality. A thinking subject by itself exists—in thought, as the product and object of thought, as a limit-concept that lacks all imaginable content; also in the anticipatory determination of death for which one may also substitute its metaphor, that deep sleep which is virtually no less impenetrable; and finally in the assertions of a doctrine concerning a state of immersion that resembles such deep sleep and is essentially without consciousness and without memory. These are the supreme excesses of It-language. One has to respect its sublime power to ignore while at the same time recognizing it as something that can at most be an object of living experience but that cannot be lived. In the former centuries there was a long-lasting struggle in the Church about the religious significance of hearing and seeing. First, seeing prevailed, but then hearing became more and more significant. Finally, in the days of the Reformation hearing became completely victorious. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
The typical Protestant church-building bear witness to the victory. They are halls to hear sermons, emptied of everything to be seen of pictures and sculptures, of lights and stained windows, of most of the sacramental activities. Around the desk of the preacher a room was built to listen to the words of the law and gospel. The eye could not find a place to rest in contemplation. Hearing replaced seeing, obedience replaced vision. Truth is knowledge of things as they are, and as they were and as they are to come. Truth looks backward and forward, expanding the perspective of our small point in time. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” Truth shows us the way to eternal life, and it comes only through our Savior, Jesus Christ. There is no other way. Jesus Christ teaches us how to life, and, through his Atonement and Resurrection, he offers us forgiveness from our sins and immortality beyond the veil. This is absolutely true. Our mortal quest is to strengthen our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, to choose good over evil, and to keep his commandments. While we celebrate the innovations of science and medicine, the truths of God go far beyond these discoveries. We can know things of God as we seek them spiritually. The things of God knoweth no mortal, except one as the Spirit of God for they are spiritually discerned. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
The Universe Contemplates Us—In the End it Sinks Back into Mystery!
I blinked my eyes. I felt weary suddenly; it was almost a feeling of despair. And I thought confusedly, This is ridiculous, I never despair! Others do that, not me. I go on fighting no matter what happens. Always. Sometimes we find the specter of anxiety forcing its way into the picture time and time again. When a person is most vulnerable to anxiety, that is the moment of pause. It is the tremulous moment when we balance possible decisions, when we look forward with wonder and awe or with dread or fear of failure. The pause is the moment when we open ourselves, and the opening is our vulnerability to anxiety. When we spoke about listening to the silence, we noted that many people flee from silence because of the anxiety of the anxiety the silence brings. They perpetually seek the company of some noise or the television or radio even to the extent of carrying blaring portable sets with them on the streets or in the erstwhile peace of the parks. John Lilly found in his experiments in which people floated in his stimulus-free tank that silence, with its complete freedom, brings to many people more anxiety than they can bear. Who knows what devil may emerge out of the complete silence? Where are our familiar boundaries? #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
The members of John Cage’s audience at his famous concert of silence were required to absorb their own anxiety. There was no music to do it for them. People shrink from the quiet desperation that confronts them in periods of complete silence, fearing they will lose all ways of orienting themselves. In our technological society, we are moving toward periods of greater and greater leisure—in earlier retirement, for example—and superficially we welcome this prospective leisure. However, we find within ourselves a curious gnawing fear of something missing. What will we do with all this unfilled free time, this unplanned, unscheduled empty space? Does it not hang before us—O paradox of paradoxes! –like a great threat, the threat of emptiness, rather than the great boon we were seeking? Will our capacities, lying fallow, evaporate? Will we lose our abilities? Will we be blotted out in sleep for over a century like Lestat de Lioncourt? If there is nobody knowing at the door, will we lose our consciousness? Secretly, man of us interpret freedom as becoming nothing. And will we, in our now unhampered possibility, become simply no thing? This is a real and immediate source of anxiety, covered up and unadmitted though it generally is. Formless freedom, unstructured freedom without the limits of destiny, leaves human beings inert. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
At such times the pause takes over People do not know what to do, and they cry out for someone or something to organize them. Hence, organized play and planned leisure—which are really contradictions in terms. Thrown on their own resources, people may find themselves bankrupt since they have long gotten into the habit of ignoring their pauses. Let us consider again the illustration of a speaker receiving promptings and directions from the audience. Suppose, in one’s millisecond pauses, no such prompting comes. In anxiety over this possibility, some speakers choose to write out their lectures word for word, and then they can fall back on the printed page regardless of the promptings or lack thereof from the audience. However, in reading one’s speech the speaker has surrendered one’s opportunity for freedom, for the discovery of new ideas, for the adventure of exploring new frontiers, for the heady thrill of uncertainty. Thus, one chooses security over freedom, as the Grand Inquisitor so passionately adjured. However, such a choice exacts a serious price in self-consciousness, tension, and the loss of freedom. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Sometimes the anxiety that accompanies freedom is intermixed and confused with excitement. Once, while waiting (which is a form of pausing) at an airport for a person whom I knew only slightly and who was going to be my guest at my country farm for three days, I felt the excitement that always comes wit the anticipation of meeting a new person. However, this excitement merged back and forth into the anxiety that came as I asked myself in fantasy: What will two people do cooped up in an twelve room farm house for long? Will the intimacy become boring or scary? So I jotted down the following notes: When does excitement—for example, the constructive side of anxiety, which keeps life from being boring, keeps us spontaneous, stimulated, and alive—lead into destructive anxiety, which shuts out spontaneity, paralyzes, and blocks our freedom? Excitement, the risking of which is pleasurable, gives us the spirit of the chase, keeps us growing. This has a clear survival value. It remains excitement so long as I feel I can cope; I can retain a sense of some autonomy. When I cannot do this, it becomes destructive. Thus as long as we can experience “I can” and “I will,” we remain open, we experience our freedom, we preserve the power to experience new possibilities. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Does this anxiety always occur in the exercise of freedom? The answer to that depends on how one views life. If we follow Martin Heidegger and Paul Tillich, who conceive of life as a continuous dialectical tension between being and nonbeing, each of us engaged in every breath in preserving our own being against the threat of nonbeing, then we must answer “Yes.” In any case I prefer to keep the question on the level of consciousness. This would mean starting that while there is always some accompaniment of dizziness with freedom, we, as human beings, may not be aware of it since we have different points where we block it off, where we repress the dizziness temporarily or deny it altogether. All people are trying to find God, to feel his love and sense his peace. Those who are in flight from Worldly things do s consciously; those who are in pursuit of them do so unconsciously. Life compels no one to enter upon this conscious Quest, although it is leading everyone upon the conscious Quest. Even among the students of this teaching, not all are following the Quest, many are merely seeking for an intellectual understanding; their interest has been attracted and their curiosity aroused, but they have not felt called upon to go any farther. This may be due to inner weakness or to outer difficulties or both. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Such men and women do not have to pledge themselves to any moral tasks or mystical experiences. Nevertheless, their studies and reflections upon the teaching will not be without a certain value and will place them on an altogether different level from the unawakended herd which is bereft of such an interest. However, I a mortal’s mission requires one to know only one’s association with one’s cause and no real relation to any soul, no present encounter with God, so that everything around one becomes It and subservient to one’s cause? What about the saying of Napoleon, “I was never truly my own master but was always ruled by circumstances.” Was not that legitimate? Is this phenomenon of experiencing and using no person? Indeed, this master of the age evidently did not now the dimension of the soul. The matter has been put well: all being was for him valore. Gently, he compared the followers who denied one after his fall with Peter; but there was nobody whom one could have denied, for there was nobody whom he could have denied, for there was nobody whom he recognized as a being. He was the demonic spirit for the millions and did not respond; to the soul he responded be calling it an It, he responded fictitiously on the personal level—responding only in his own sphere, that of one’s cause, and only with his deeds. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
This is the elementary historical barrier at which the basic word of association loses its reality, the character of reciprocity: the demonic spirit for whom nobody can become true soul. In addition to the person and the ego, to the free and the arbitrary mortal—not between them—occurs in fateful eminence in fateful times: ardently, everything flames toward one while one oneself stands in a cold fire; a thousand relations reach out toward one but none issues from one. One participates in no actuality, but others participate immeasurably in one as in an actuality. To be sure, one views the beings around one as so many machines capable of different achievements that have to be calculated and used for the cause. However, that is also how one views oneself (only one can never cease experimenting to determine one’s own capacities, and yet never experiences their limits). One treats oneself, too, as an It. This the individual is saying one is not vitally empathic, not full. Much less does it feign these qualities (like the they are the foundation of the I of the modern ego). One does not even speak of oneself, one merely speaks on one’s own behalf. The I spoken and written by one is the required subject of the sentences that convey one’s statements and orders—no more and no less. It lacks subjectivity; neither does it have a self-consciousness that is preoccupied with being-that-way; and least of all does it have any delusions about its own appearance. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
I am the clock that exists and does not know itself: thus one oneself formulated one’s fatefulness, the actuality of this phenomenon and the inactuality of the soul, after one had been separated from one’s cause; for it was only then that one could, and had to, think and speak of oneself and recollect one’s soul which appeared only then. What appears is not mere subject; neither does it reach subjectivity: the magic spell broken, but unredeemed, it finds expression in the terrible word, as legitimate as it is illegitimate: The Universe contemplates Us! The end it sinks back into mystery. Who after such a step and such a fall, would dare to claim that this mortal understood one’s tremendous, monstrous mission—or that one misunderstood it? What is certain that the age for which the demonic mortal who lives without a present has become master and model will misunderstand one. It fails to see that what holds sway here is destiny and accomplishment, not the lust for and delight in power. It goes into ecstasies over the commanding brow and has no inkling of the signs inscribed upon this forehead like digits upon the face of a clock. One tries studiously to imitate the way one looked at others, without any understanding of one’s need and necessitation, and one mistakes the objectivity severity of this I for fermenting self-awareness. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
The word “I” remains the shibboleth of humanity. Napoleon spoke it without the power to relate, but he did speak it as the I of an accomplishment. Those who exert themselves to copy this, merely betray the hopelessness of their own self-contradiction. What is that: self-contradiction? When mortals do not test a priori of relation in the World, working out and actualizing the innate soul in what one encounters, it turns inside. Then it unfolds through the unnatural, impossible object, the I—which is to say that it unfolds where there is no room for it to unfold. Thus the confrontation within the self comes int being and this cannot be relation, presence, the current of reciprocity, but only self-contradiction. Some mortals may try to interpret this as a relation, perhaps one that is religious, in order to extricate themselves from the horror of their Doppelganger: they are bound to keep rediscovering the deception of any such interpretation. Here is the edge of life. What is unfulfilled as here escaped into the mad delusion of some fulfillment; now it gropes around in the labyrinth and get lost ever more profoundly. When mortals are overcome by the horror of the alienation between I and World, at times, it occurs to one that something might be done. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Imagine that at some dreadful midnight you lie there, tormented by a waking dream: the bulwarks have crumbled and the abysses scream, and you realize in the midst of this agony that life is still there and I must merely get through it—but how? How? Thus feels mortals in the hours when one collects oneself: overcome by horror, pondering, without direction. And yet one may know the right direction, deep down in the unloved knowledge of the depths—the direction of return that leads through sacrifice. However, he rejects this knowledge; what is mystical cannot endure the artificial midnight Sun. One summons thought in which one places, quite rightly, much confidence: thought is supposed to fix everything. After all, it is the lofty art of thought that it can paint a reliable and practically credible picture of the World. Thus mortals say to one’s thought: “Look at the dreadful shape that lies over there with those cruel eyes—is she not the one which with whom I played long ago? Do you remember how she used to laugh at me with these eyes and how good they were then? And now look at my wretched soul—I will admit it to you: it is empty, and whatever I put into myself, experience as well as use, does not penetrate to this cavern. Will not you fix things between her and me so that she relents and I get well again?” #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
And thought, ever obliging and skillful, paints with its accustomed speed a series—nay, two series of pictures on the right and the left wall. Here is (or rather: happens, for the World pictures of thought are reliable motion pictures) the Universe. From the whirl of the stars emerges the small Earth, from the teeming on Earth emerges small mortals, and now history carries one forth through the ages, to preserve in rebuilding the anthills of the cultures that crumble under its steps. Beneath this series of pictures is written: “One and all.” On the other wall happens the soul. A female figure spins the orbits of all stars and the life of all creatures and the whole of World history; all is spun with a single thread and is no longer called stars and the life of all creatures and the whole of World history; all is spun with a single thread and is no longer called stars and creatures and World but feeling and representations or even living experiences and states of the soul. And beneath this series of pictures is written: “One and all.” Henceforth, when mortals are for once overcome by the horror of alienation and the World fills one with anxiety, one looks up (right or left, as the case may be) and see a picture. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Then one sees that the soul is contained in the World, and that there is really no I, and this the World cannot harm the I, and one calms down; or one sees that the World is contained in the I, and that there really is no World, and thus the World cannot harm the I, and one calms down. And when mortals are overcome again by the horror of alienation and the I fills one with anxiety, one looks up and sees a picture; and whichever one sees, it does not matter, either the empty I is stuffed full of World or it is submerged in the flood of the World, and one calms down. However, the moment will come, and it is near, when mortals overcome by horror, looks up and in a flash sees both pictures at once. And one is seized by a deeper horror. Shall we say that all humans are traveling on this quest of God but most humans do so unconsciously and unwillingly? For then the person technically called a quester simply differs from other persons by one’s awareness of the journey, the demands in makes upon one, and one’s willingness to co-operate in satisfying demands. Mortals unconsciously seeks one’s freedom and enlightenment, as one consciously seeks one’s welfare and happiness. However, there is a faceless sinister, sarcastic, evil presence that one can sense sometimes. It plants thoughts and puts on demonic plays to cause worry and fear. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
As the influences of the World increasingly embrace the evil, we must strive with all diligence to stay firmly on the path that leads us safely to our Saviour. Cries and howls continue. A new anthem of curses upon those who break the sacred laws, blasphemed, provoke the wrath of God and Stand. They are pulling on the gates and lower windows. They are doing stupid things like throwing rocks at the wall. It I because God is hidden in all creatures that all creatures are searching all the time for God. This remains just as true even though in their ignorance they usually mistake the object of their search and believe that it is something else. Only on the quest does this search attain self-consciousness. The uninformed mortal is blind to the work of spiritual evolution which goes on within one and consequently thwarts and obstructs it unwittingly. The informed mortal sees the work and co-operates with it consciously. The blessing of feasting upon the words of Christ are powerful and life changing. The words of Christ will profoundly touch hearts and open the eyes of those who do not see him. “Ye must press forward with a steadfastness in Christ, having a perfect brightness of hope, and a love of God and of all mortals, animals and other living and non-living beings. Wherefore, if ye shall press forward, feasting up the word of Christ, and endure to the end, behold, thus saith the Father: Ye shall have eternal life,” reports 2 Nephi 31.20. In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Human Beings are Given More than One Chance to Redeem themselves for Such is the Mercy of the Higher Power!
If you follow your conscience, you do what you want. However, it was simpler than that. I wanted you to have the wealth I gave you. I wanted you…to be happy. I lighted the torch on the wall, and went out for a moment to breathe the fresh air. Then leaving gates and doors unlocked behind me, and went up stairs to watch the twilight melt from the sky. An hour must have passed. The azure light faded, the stars rose. A friend responded to my question as to how he was with these words: “I have got a cold, I did not sleep much last night, everything is going wrong.” My friend went on: “The people who argue that the psyche and the ego are identical are wrong. My ego is in bad shape; my psyche is fine.” All through history human beings have wrestled with the fact that each of us experiences two aspects of selfhood which are never fully separated from each other. One of these aspects is the ego-self. This has the functions Dr. Freud rightly assigned to it: beleaguered monarch thought it is, it keeps, as best it can, some harmony in the different sections of its kingdom. It judges the demands of reality, balances preconscious ideas, and sifts out unacceptable unconscious impulses so that the person can live with some unity. The ego-self is related to the instincts and bodily well-being. A number (though not all) of the concerns about wounded prestige, suffering slights, I would assign to this ego-self. The ego-self’s question is some form of “Do I get what I want?” Hence, its associated with the term egocentricity. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
The other aspect is the psyche-self, which seeks to see life steadily and its it whole. The psyche-self is concerned with the context of freedom. The heightened consciousness of which we speak from time to time is a function of the psyche-self. It is the aspect that scans the various possibilities of the self; it is the locus of what we call essential freedom. When Christopher Burney, during the five years in solitary confinement in Germany in World War II, set himself to review everything he had been taught in school in order to keep from going psychotic, he was using not the ego-self, but the source of purpose that transcends the ego, which is the psyche-self. The ego-self is correlated with freedom of doing, the psyche-self with freedom of being. When it is pointed out again and again that freedom depends on how the self relates itself to itself at every moment, one is speaking of the psyche-self in relation to the ego. The self relating to itself was the aspect of selfhood that Dr. Freud never understood. About his therapeutic practice we find Dr. Freud writing, “analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible but to give the patient’s ego freedom to choose one way or the other.” This refers to freedom, but it omits the function most concerned with this freedom—namely, the self relating to itself. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
There is a curious phenomenon in human selfhood that I have noticed in my clients and in myself that I call the automatic pilot. The automatic pilot is the device on passenger planes to which the pilot can shift the directing of the plane when, on a long flight, he or she needs to rest. A client, for example, will be intensely anxious about a confrontation one must have with some other person or about a difficult phone call one mast make. Finally, one gets one’s courage up and goes ahead to do these anxiety-laden acts. One is surprised to discover that they turn out much better than one anticipated. There seems to be some unexpected assistance, some power that one did not know one possessed. From a Freudian point of view, it would be asserted that the help of which one was not aware comes from the client’s preconscious; and in Jungianism, it would probably be interpreted as a voice from the unconscious. I call such assistance a function of the psyche-self. The implication is that we, whether we are patients in therapy or not, can rightfully trust ourselves on those deeper dimensions which I have called the psyche-self. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
In the welter of self-distrust in which we generally find ourselves these days (covered up as it is by neonarcisscism, techniques of assertiveness, and advice to stand up for yourself), we can bank on more power, more capacity than mist of us give ourselves credit for. This upsurging of strength and energy which we did not know we has is an example of the working of destiny through the psyche-self. However, it is required at the same time that we confront our despair and our anxiety rather than suppressing them; otherwise the despair and anxiety will take over in the moment when we need their opposites. The automatic pilot is partially an influence from Eastern mysticism, particularly Zen Buddhism and its offshorts. It is the phenomena of letting go and letting be. The awareness of the duality of selfhood enables us to correct a radical misunderstanding of Zen Buddhism and other Eastern psychoreligions with regard to transcending the self. There is a passion among some groups in America to lose oneself, to escape from oneself, to get free of oneself. It is significant that this passion came along with, or followed closely, the age of narcissism and the preoccupation with self-sentiments. The “me” decade followed hard upon the Zen decade. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
These two phases, me decade and Zen decade, sound contradictory—and they are on paper. However, their proximity shows that they had in common the same longing to escape from oneself. People in search of a drug would ask a friend, “Do you have any uppers?” or if the answer was no, “Do you have any downers?” It did not matter whether the result one got was elation or depression. At least one got free of oneself. The rushing after Zen and the narcissism was thus often to be found in the same person. There was no distinction between the constructive self-concern of a person and the self-concern of one who leaps after one gimmick one weekend and after another gimmick the next weekend. This leaping often leads not only to temporary elation, but to eventual confusion and despair. The loss of the self, I believe is a misnomer. The misunderstanding of the Zen Buddhist goal of freedom from the self actually leads to a more subtle kind of narcissism. One’s own pushiness, one’s demands, one’s egocentricity may still be present; only the person now rationalizes them in terms of nonselfullness. We cannot help noting the exemplars of Zen Buddhism and Transcendental Meditation and other forms of psychoreligion are not without any self; the idea is abused. They are relieved of one phase of the self—namely, what I have called the ego-self. However, they seek to discover in the psyche-self a new clarity, a freshness, a sense of immediacy and of eternity. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The self we transcend in Zen Buddhism and meditation is the ego-self. The ecstasy we experience is the freedom from the concerns of the ego-self, a process of dumping rubbish of the self, followed by the pre-eminent presence, however temporary, of the psyche-self. One gains power over an incubus by addressing it by its real name. Similarly, the It-World that but now seemed to dwarf mortal’s small strength with its uncanny power has to yield to anyone who recognizes its true nature: the particularization and alienation of that out of whose abundance, welling up close by, every Earthly You emerges to confront us—that which appeared to us at times as great and terrible as the mother goodness, but nevertheless always motherly. However, how can we muster the strength to address the incubus by one’s right name as long as a ghost lurks inside us—that I that has been robbed of its actuality? How can the buried power to relate be resurrected in a being in which a vigorous ghost appears hourly to stamp down the debris under which this power lies? How is a being to collect itself as long as the mania of one’s detached I-hood chases it ceaselessly around an empty circle? If caprice is one’s dwelling place, how is anyone to behold one’s freedom? #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Even as freedom and fate belong together, caprice belongs with doom. However, freedom and fate are promised to each other and embrace each other to constitute meaning; caprice and doom, the spook of the soul and the nightmare of the World, get along with each other, living next door and avoiding each other, without connection and friction, at home in meaninglessness—until in one instant eye meets eye, madly, and the confession erupts from both that they are unredeemed. How much intellectual eloquence and artistry is used today to prevent or at least conceal this occurrence! Free is the mortal that wills without caprice. One believes in the actual, which is to say: one believes in the real association of the real duality, I and You. One believes in destiny and also that is needs one. It does not lead one, it waits for one. One must proceed toward it without knowing where it waits for one. One must go forth with one’s whole being: that one knows. It will not turn out the way one’s resolve intended it; but what wants to come will come only if one resolves to do that which one can will. One must sacrifice one’s little will, which is unfree and ruled by things and drives, to one’s great will that moves away from being determined to find destiny. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
Now one no longer interferes, nor does one merely allow things to happen. One listens to that which grows, to the way of Being in the World, not in order to be carried along by it but rather in order to actualize it in the manner in which it, needing one, wants to actualize it in the manner in which it, needing one, wants to be actualized by one—with human spirit and human deed, with human life and human death. One believes, I said; but this implies: he encounters. The capricious mortal does not believe and encounter. One does not know association; one only knows the feverish World out there and one’s feverish desire to use it. We only have to give use an ancient, classical name, and it walks among the gods. When you say You, he means: You, my ability to use! And what one calls one’s destiny is merely an embellishment of and a sanction for one’s ability to use. In truth one has no destiny but is merely determined by things and drives, feels autocratic, and is capricious. One has no great will and tires to pass off caprice in its place. For sacrifice one lacks all capacity, however much one may talk of it, and you may recognize it by noting that one never becomes concrete. One constantly interferes, in order “to let it happen.” How, one says to you, could one fail to assist destiny? How could one not employ all feasible means required for such an end? That is how one see those who are free; one cannot seem them differently. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
However, the free mortal does not have an end here and then fetch the means from there; one has only one thing: always only one’s resolve to proceed toward one’s destiny. Having made this resolve, one will renew it at every fork in the road; and one would sooner believe that one was not really alive than one would believe that the resolve of the great will was insufficient and required the support of means. One believes; one encounters. However, the unbelieving marrow of the capricious mortal cannot perceive anything but unbelief and caprice, positing ends and devising means. One’s World is devoid of sacrifice and grace, encounter and present, but shot through with ends and means: it could not be different and its name is doom. For all one’s autocratic bearing, one is inextricably entangled in unreality; and one becomes aware of this whenever one recollects one’s own condition. Therefore one takes pains to use the best parts of one’s mind to prevent or at least obscure such recollection of one’s falling off, of the deactualized and the actual I, were permitted to reach down to the roots that mortals calls despair and from which self-destruction and rebirth grow, this would be the beginning of the return. “Jesus Christ was not Yes and No; but in him it is always Yes. For all the promises of God find their Yes in him,” reports II Corinthians 1.19,20. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
A change in his traveling plans and the angry reaction of the Corinthian Christians to this change is used by Paul for profound and far-reaching assertions about Jesus “the Christ”: “In hi it is always Yes, he is not Yes and No.” This reminds us by contrast of the words of a great Protestant mystic who has said that in Yes and No all things consist, and of philosophers and theologians who are convinced that truth can only be expressed through No and Yes, and above all of Paul’s own central doctrines that God justifies the sinner, that he says “yes” to one whom he says a radical ‘”no” at the same time. And does not Paul in this second letter to Corinthians formulate the Yes and No in a most paradoxical way: “Unknown and yet well known, dying and behold we live, having nothing yet possessing every.” This certainly is Yes and No. However, in the Christ, he says, there is not Yes and No. Really not? Do we not come from Good Friday to Easter, which point to the deepest No and the highest Yes—that of the death and life of Christ? Yes and No: This certainly is the law of all life, but not Yes alone and not No alone. Yes alone is the advice of a self-deceiving confidence which soon will be shaken by the No of the three gray figures: emptiness, guilt, death. No alone is the advice of a self-deceiving despair whose hidden Yes to itself is manifest in its self-seclusion and its resistance against the Yes of love and communion. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
And further, Yes and No is the law of truth. Not Yes alone and not No alone! Yes alone is the arrogance which claims that its limited truth is the ultimate truth, but which reveals by its fanatical self-affirmation how many hidden No’s are present in its ground. No alone is the resignation which denies any ultimate truth but which shows by its self-complacent irony against the biting power of every word of truth how strong the Yes to itself is that underlies its ever-repeated No. Truth as well as life unite Yes and No, and only the courage which accepts the infinite tension between Yes and No can have abundant life and ultimate truth. How is such a courage possible? It is possible because there is a Yes above the Yes and No of life and of truth. However, it is a Yes which is not ours. If it were ours, even our greatest, our most universal and most courageous Yes, it would be contrasted by another No. This is the reason why no theology and no philosophy, not even a theology or philosophy of “Yes and No” is ultimate truth. In the moment in which it is expressed, it is contradicted by another philosophy and another theology. Not even the message of Yes and No, be it said by Kierkegaard or by Luther or by Paul, can escape its No. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
There is only one reality where there is not Yes and No but only Yes: Jesus as the Christ. First he also stands under the No, as completely as a being can stand; this is the meaning of the Cross. Everything of Christ which is only the expression of a finite life or a finite truth stands with all life and all truth under the No. Therefore, we are not asked to accept Christ as the unquestionable teacher or as the always fitting example, but we are told that in Christ all promises of God have become real, and that in Christ a life and truth which is beyond Yes and No has become manifest. This is the meaning of Resurrection. The No of death is conquered and the Yes of life is transcended by that which has appeared in Christ. A life which is not balanced by death, a truth which is not balanced by error is visible in Christ’s being. Christ shows the final Yes without another No. This is the Easter message; this is the Christian message altogether. And this is the ground of a courage which can stand the infinite tension between Yes and No in everything finite, even in everything religious and in everything Christian. Paul points to the fact that Christian say Amen through Christ. One cannot say Amen to anything expect the reality which is the Christ. Amen is the formula of confirmation, the expression of ultimate certitude. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
There is no ultimate certitude expect the life which has conquered its death and the truth which as conquered its death and the truth which has conquered its error, the Yes which is beyond Yes and No. Paul points to that which gives us such a certainty: It is not an historical report, but it is the participation in Christ, in whom we are established, as he says who has given us the guarantee of his Spirit in our hearts. We can stand the Yes and No of life and truth because we participate in the Yes beyond Yes and No, because we are in it, as it is in us. We are participants of Christ’s resurrection; therefore, we can say the ultimate Yes, the Amen beyond our Yes and our No. How many people thing and say that when their material fortunes improve, or their family problems are solved, or their living place is changed they will be able to give time and effort to the spiritual quest, but until then they must wait! However, in actual fact this seldom happens. For when the improvement, solution, or change does take place, new matters call for their attention or new attachments are formed for the ego, and so the spiritual effort gets postponed again. Those who believe that it is better to wait for more propitious circumstances before they begin the Quest, deceive themselves into an unavailing and lugubrious pessimism. Neither tomorrow nor the next year will be any better. Procrastination my be perilous. Later may be too late. Beware of being drawn into that vast cemetery wherein mortals bury their half-born aspiration and paralysed hopes. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Wide Unclasp the Tables of Their Thoughts—These Same Thoughts, People, this Little World
It was time to go out, time to test my powers. After all there had not been a case of witchcraft in a hundred years, the last that I knew f being the trial of La Voisin, a fortune-teller, bunt alive in the time of Louis the Sun King. All the houses, built by Cresleigh Homes in Rocklin, California, looked like dollhouses to me in their completeness. They reminded me of baby Winchester Mansions. Perfect collections of toys with their dainty little wooden chairs and polished mantelpieces, mended curtains and well-scrubbed floors. I saw all this as one who had never been a part of life, gazing lovingly at the simplest details. A starched white apron on its hook, worn boots on the hearth, a pitcher beside a bed. And the people . . . oh, the people were marvels. I was reflecting on my time at the Winchester Mansion, after the passing of Mrs. Winchester in 1922, we opened one of the safes, and I was flabbergasted by what I saw there. The safe was crammed with gems and gold and silver. There were countless jeweled rings, diamond necklaces, ropes of pearls, plate and coins and hundreds upon hundreds of miscellaneous valuables. I ran my fingers lightly over the heap and then held up handfuls of it, gasping as the light ignited the red rubies, the green of the emeralds. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
I saw refractions of color of which I have never dreamed, and wealth beyond any calculation. It was the fabled Caribbean pirates’ chest, the proverbial king’s ransom. And it was mine now. More slowly I examined it. Scattered throughout were personal and perishable articles. Satin mask rotting away from their trimming of gold, lace handkerchiefs and bits of cloth to which were fixed pins and brooches. Here was a strip of leather harness hung with gold bells, a moldering bit of lace slipped through a ring, snuffboxes by the dozen, lockets on velvet ribbon. Had Mrs. Winchester been collecting this all her life? I lifted up a jewel-encrusted sword, far too heavy for these times, and a worn slipper saved perhaps for its rhinestone buckle. There were other objects scattered about in this treasure. Rosaries made up gorgeous gems, and they still had their crucifixes! I touched the small sacred images. Perplexity is leavened by extravagant Victorian beauty scattered along each crooked path of exploration in this 160-room catacomb. Regularly each night Mrs. Winchester dined in lonely splendor, table set with a $774,387.88 solid-gold dinner service. And each night she counted every piece as it was put away in one of the mansion’s six huge safes. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
I think I was on the verge of deceiving her, of creating some strong emanation of contentment with all the powers I had. I would tell mortal lies with immortal skills. I would start talking and talking and testing my every word to make it perfect. However, something happened in the silence. I do not think I stood still more than a moment, but something changed inside of me. An awesome shift took place. In one instant I saw a vast and terrifying possibility, and in that same instant, without question, I made up my mind. It had no words to it or scheme or plan. And I would have denied it had anyone questioned me at that moment. I would have said, “No, never farthest from my thoughts. What do you think I am, what sort of monster” . . . And yet the choice had been made. I understood something absolute. The relation between creativity and pause is as close as it is startling. Not only does one get one’s original ideas in the pause—Albert Einstein got his while shaving. Henri Poincare, French Mathematician, got his while walking by the sea; others get theirs in dreams at night—but the capacity to pause is woven all through the creative production itself. The pause is an active, nimble, often intense state, as when an Olympic diver, Jennifer Abel or Tom Daley, pauses at the end of the diving board until that precise hundredth of a second when every muscle is tensed in harmony. And at that instant one dives. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The creative person stands in a state of openness, heightened sensitivity, incubating the creative idea, with a sharpened readiness to grasp the creative impulse when it is born. The phrase “inviting the Muses,” which is a part of the occupation in the pause, is an active yearning, an imploring, the authenticity of which is demonstrated by the hours of hard work the creative person puts in before and after the insight. While writing this essay, I went to the nearby coast one Sunday hoping to do a sketch. Afterward, I wrote some notes about the experience: I walk about on the shore in a mood of readiness, openness, asking myself, Where is the scene that grasps me? This red cliff with that water behind it or that boulder with the other rocks in front of the ocean? I continue looking until I have the special feeling that a particular scene seizes me. I see it; and though I do not think of this consciously, I see it in a way that no one has ever seen it before. I think only: “This I like, this turns me on.” When I start painting: The colors flow into each other . . . my muscles react . . . I make this line going off in the direction, another great rock on the paper . . . the colors form almost as though they had their own plan in mind . . . the World is born anew in the painting. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Not only did no one ever see this scene before as I do now [everyone sees every scene differently] but I find a new picture coming to birth, new to me as well as others, in the flowing of the colors into each other, new in that the combination makes a different effect from what I have expected. We see how important are such terms as “readiness,” “openness.” In these active pauses, we see the work of destiny born in the unpredictable flowing of colors. Hence so much of creativity seems accidental. However, the artist, whether one be scientific inventor or painter or writer or what not, is the one who can most often put oneself in readiness for the “accident.” True, the picture comes out differently from what one expects. However, knowing one can never predict for the “lucky accident.” This means that “accident” is not the right term: rather, a myriad of different possibilities exist, and out of these one is born. Our capacity to appreciate is already a kind of creativity which shows the activity in the pause. Our appreciative listening to Mozart, Aaliyah, Bach, our concerned reading of Aeschylus, is our creative contribution. The listening and the seeing are what is important; hence, Frederick Franck in his book on Zen painting entitled it, very rightly, The Zen of Seeing. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Indeed, it takes listeners, actual or imaginary and partakes of the creative act by virtue of the fact that writing poetry or prose or music dramas would not be possible without a real or imagined audience, whether an author writes for people of one’s own century (like most of us) or for later centuries (like Soren Kierkegaard). The presence of the pause is very clear in Henri Matisse’s paintings in his use of space—which is a synonym for pause. Ben Shahn tells, in his description of creativity, of one day taking his daughter out to his studio with him to make a mock-up book out of one color, rejected it, pondered another, put it aside, and so on for half an hour. When they came back into the house, the little girl asked her mother, “Why can’t Daddy make up his mind?” Ben Shahn goes on to explain that the artist is the one who has the courage to pause, to be suspended for a certain duration in midair. And even though in our technological culture such doubts may appear on the surface to imply weakness, this pausing is really a sign of an inner richness of discriminatory powers. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
There is a phrase among artists, “negative space,” which stands for space not noticed by the usual viewer. On a Rorschach record, “negative space” is the white area surrounding the black or colored. Many people who take the Rorschach never notice or remark on the white spaced—it is simply “surrounding.” Those who do, who see many white spaced may be adjudged “stubborn” on the test because they are preoccupied with the opposite to what most people point out. This is an interesting commentary on the conformist tendencies in our culture to see artist and musicians as a bit strange and to see the pause as an anomaly. I want to make clear that the common misconception that the creative person is passive is just that—a misconception. The creative person is receptive. I agree entirely with Archibald MacLeish when he quotes a Chinses poet, “We poets struggle with Non-being to force it to yield Being. We knock upon silence for an answering music.” Archibald MacLeish continues, “The ‘Being’ which the poem is to contain derives from ‘Non-being,’ not from the poet. And the ‘music’ which the poem is to own comes not from us who make the poem but from the silence; comes in answer to our knock.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
The creative act has always been a paradox, and it probably will always be one. Practically everybody trying to explain it, especially the psychoanalysts who propose that creativity is “regression in the service of the ego,” find they crash upon the rocks of their inability to distinguish between passivity and receptivity. The creative persons are the latter; they are certainly not the former. We do not know from what combination in the brain cells and synapses the creative ideas spring. However, we do know that creativity requires freedom, and the pause is the way to give that creative combination the chance to work. Pausing is wondering, and wonder is first cousin to creativity. Poetry for me is the space between the words. A poet is a poet when he or she can create that tension between words—a tension created by spaces—that lift the reader would add, of intense or mild ecstasy—standing mentally outside oneself. These new experiences of splendor or wonder or just plain insight have their start in the poem, but they leap out into the reader’s conception of his own private World. Creativity comes not only out of our moments or hours or weeks of effort; it requires—and this is essential—the moments or hours or weeks of pause between the effort. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
The pause is that situation in which symbols are formed. The intensity of handling all the stimuli that come at us requires the symbol. How are we to assess these stimuli, how are we to judge them, to weight them—all of which must be done before one can throw one’s strength toward this response rather than that one, to employ our simplest paradigm of freedom? The term symbol comes from two Greek words, sym meaning “with” and bollen meaning “to throw.” The symbol is, thus, that which throws or brings together these antimonies into one image, one form. The vitality of the situation is preserved for as long as the symbol continues to exist. We surely cannot handle all these stimuli by computer; we cannot add and subtract and in other mathematical ways try to fashion them into a decision. In a technological problem one can do this. However, when one tries to turn human decisions—such as whom shall I marry—over to the machine and tried to abstract oneself out of the picture, one becomes more and more mechanical, less and less personal and human. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Lo and behold, the warmth has gone out of the situation, the vitality lost, the personal characteristics fled, and the person talking to you experiences you as less and less a person and more and more a machine. This is similar to talking with brain-injured patients in a mental hospital: they understand all the words you use, but cannot go behind the words to understand you as the person speaking. A human being is normal communication speaks in symbols, and if these are not grasped—and they are not by the brain-injured—the person is not understood. Al vital words carry some residue of their origin as symbols. In a human problem, the pattern is all-important and personal likes and dislikes are crucial. The response, to which you throw your weight, will not be only a conclusion, but will also be a commitment with its own power. Many factors need to be taken into consideration, some of which are only partially conscious. In such personal questions there is no decision which is right, but only approximately so. We have to keep the different factors all alive, like a juggler with a dozen balls in the air; we cannot avoid some factors without doing damage to the totality. What ideally happens is that these stimuli begin to fit into a pattern, a whole, a totality, a form that preserves the kernel and the value of each one. This is the symbol. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Take, for example, the apparently simply stimuli that arise around the concept of patriotism. There is the call of one’s homeland; the fact that our forefathers fought in 1776 to construct this nation; the feeling of comradeship with people who speak the same language; and a million and one other facts and memories acting as stimuli. You hit upon a banner, and you call it a flag. The flag does not leave out any of the above meanings; it expresses the multitude of meanings in a compact, dynamic symbol. The elements that are forged and united into symbol in this pause which we have made the center of freedom come from many sources. They are from past and present, individual and group, consciousness and unconsciousness, and they are both rational and irrational. All of these antimonies are brought together in the pattern which is the symbol. The symbol keeps them alive and vital. Every great culture that embraces more then one people when a response is made to a You, an essential act of the spirit. Reinforced by the energy of subsequent generations that points in the same direction, this creates a distinctive conception of the cosmos in the spirit; only this does a human cosmos become possible again and again; only now can a mortal again and again build houses of worship and human houses in a distinctive conception of space and from a confident soul—and full vibrant time with new hymns and songs and give the human community itself a form. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
However, only as long as one possesses this essential act in one’s own life, acting and suffering, only as long as oneself enters into the relation is one free and thus creative. When a culture is no longer centered in a living and continually renewed relational process, it freezes into the It-World which is broken only intermittently by the eruptive, glowing deeds of solitary spirits. From that point on, common causality, which hitherto was never able to disturb the spiritual conception of the cosmos, grows into an oppressive and crushing doom. Wise, masterful fate which, as long as it was attuned to the abundance of meaning in the cosmos, held sway over all causality, has become transformed into demonic absurdity and has collapsed into causality. The same karma that appeared to earlier generations as a beneficial dispensation-for our deeds in this life raise us into higher sphere in the next—now is seen as tyranny for the deeds of a former life of which we are unconscious have imprisoned us in a dungeon from which we cannot escape in this life. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Where the meaningful law of Heaven is used to arch, with the spindle of necessity hanging from its bright vault, the meaningless, tyrannical power of the planets now holds sway. It used to be merely a matter of entering Dike, the Heavenly path that aimed t be ours, too, and one could live with a free heart in the total measure of destiny. Now we feel, whatever we do, the compulsion of heimarmene, a stranger to spirit who bends every neck with the burden of the dead mass of the World. The craving for redemption grows by leaps and bounds and remains unsatisfied in the end, in spite of all kinds of experiments, until it is finally assuaged by one who teaches mortals how to escape from the wheel of rebirth, or by one who saves the souls enslaved by the powers into the freedom of the children of God. Such accomplishments issue from a new encounter that becomes substantial, a new response of one human being to one’s You, an event that comes to determine fate. The repercussions of such a central essential act may include the supersession of one culture by another that is devoted to this ray, but it is also possible for a culture to be thus renewed. The yearning for spiritual light wells up in the heart spontaneously. It is a natural one. However, desires, egoism, and materialism cover it for so long a time that it seems unreal. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
No Victory Can Ever Be Won When it is Already Lost in the Mind–The Intervals Between the Events Are More Significant than the Events Themselves!
I pulled the bank notes out of my pocket and put them in his unsteady hand. I spilled gold coins onto the payment. The actors darted forward fearfully to gather them up. I scanned the crowd around for the source of this strange distraction, what was it, not Nicolas in the door of the deserted theater, watching me with a broken soul. No, something else both familiar and unfamiliar, having to do with the dark. This conception of the pause gives us a whole new World. It is in the pause that people learn to listen to silence. We can hear an infinite number of sounds that we normally never hear at all—the unending hum and buzz of insects in a quiet Summer field, a breeze blowing lightly through the golden hay, a thrush singing in the low bushes beyond the meadow. And we suddenly realize that this is something—the World of silence is populated by a myriad of creatures and myriad of sounds. In childhood, we were taught to sit still and enjoy the silence. We were taught to use our organs to smell, to look when apparently there was nothing to see, and to listen intently when all seemingly was quiet. We learned that silences as well as sounds are significant in the forest, and we learned how to listen to the silences. Deeply felt silences might be said to be the core of our religion. During these times, the nature within ourselves found unity with the nature of the Earth. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
In Japan, free time and space—what we call pauses—are perceived as ma, the valid interval or meaningful pause. Such perception is basic to all experience and specifically to what constitutes creativity and freedom. This perception persists in spite of the adoption of Western culture and science. Even in 1958, Misako Miyamoto wrote of the No plays, “The audience watches the play and catches the feeling through not only the action and words but also the intervals of the period of pauses. There is a free creation in each person’s mind; and the audience relates to this situation with free thinking.” Of silent intervals in speech, she says, “Especially in the pauses in a tone of voice, I can feel the person’s unique personality and one’s joy, sorrow or other complicated feelings.” On listening to a robin in early Spring, “It sand with pauses, I could have time to think about the bird in the silent moment between one voice and others. The pauses produced the effect of the relation between the bird and me. Lest these examples seduce us into assuming that this valuing of the pause is chiefly in Eastern esoteric cultures, let me point out that the phenomenon is just as clear, though not as frequent, in our own modern culture. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
John Cage, a composer noted for his originality, gave a concert in New York which consisted of his coming out on the stage, sitting down at the keyboard for a period of time, and not playing one note. His sim, as he explained to a less-than-pleased audience, was to give them an opportunity to listen to the silence. Hos recorded music shows precisely this—many pauses are interspersed with heterogeneous notes. John Cage sharpens our awareness, makes our sense keener, and renders us alive to ourselves and our surroundings. Listening is our most neglected sense. The very best essence of jazz is in the space between notes, called the afterbeat. The leader of a band in which I once played used to sing out “um-BAH,” the “Bah”—or the note coming always between the beats. This syncopation is a basis of jazz. Duke Ellington, for example, keeps the audience tantalized, on edge, expectant—we have to dance to work out the emotion building up within us. On an immediate level this expectancy has a similarity to the exquisite levels of feeling before climax. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Hence, some musicians, can simulate the process of pleasures of the flesh in the tantalizing beat of their song. In the ever-changing jazz group at Preservation Hall in New Orleans, this infinite variety, with each person improvising, produces each time a piece of music never before played and never to be played again. This is freedom par excellence. There seems to be no pause in technology. Or when there is, it is called a depression and is denied and feared. However, pure science is a different matter. We find Alert Einstein remarking that “the intervals between the events are more significant than the events themselves.” The significance of the pause is that the rigid chain of cause and effect is broken. The pause momentarily suspends the billiard-ball system of Pavlov. In the person’s life response no longer blindly follows stimulus. There intervenes between the two our human imaginings, reflections, considerations, ponderings. Pause is the prerequisite for wonder. When we do not pause, when we are perpetually hurrying from one appointment to another, from one planned activity to another, we sacrifice the richness of wonder. And we lose communication with our destiny. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
When they learn about it for the first time, too many persons will have nothing to do with the Quest. This is not because they find it impossible to believe some of the ideas on which it is based, such as the idea of reincarnation. Nor is it because the metaphysical side is too abstruse for them to go through the needed labour of troubling their minds with it. No—it is because the ideal set up for the questers is, they claim, completely outside their horizon and quite unreachable by most, if not nearly all of them. Its peak seems so austere, the climb up it so demanding of the bravery that a mortal could ever possess, that few even venture to approach it. They hear of saints who seem to achieve the impossible—a happiness which eludes their fellow denizens of this planet and a self-control which puts human desire and passion easily underfoot. What these spiritual superpeople can do, in temptation-free Himalayan heights of European monastic retreats, they see no prospect of ever doing in their noisy busy cities. It is not possible, they think, to live on such a high Godlike plane in a World where meanness and violence are everyday patterns. This is a plausible view but it is not the only one. It is impossible only if they think so. When it is already lost in the mind, no victory can ever be won. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Even if it were offered to them, those persons who are satisfied with substitutes for the Truth could not appreciate or recognize it. Those who seek neither moral elevation nor spiritual teaching do not thereby show their indifference to thought about life. They show only that they are smugly satisfied with the little they thought they have managed to do. Those who are content with a life of nothing more than sitting down to meals, going out to make money, and coming back to enjoy pleasures of the flesh—that is, wit a solely materialistic life—find nothing in such inspired messages and get noting from such mystical teachings. There is no large idea in their petty lives. It will not engage the interest of the spiritually indolent. So long as we keep ourselves focused wholly in the physical World of thoughts such as these may be read but will not reach our minds. The mortals who see no need for a higher concept of one’s nature than the merely physical one will see no need for a higher goal than feeding, clothing, sheltering, and amusing one’s body. In letting the senses, the passion, the intellect, and the ego take sole charge of one’s life, one quite naturally sees only mere emptiness beyond. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
One doubts and refutes the intuitive-spiritual and denies and rejects the spiritual. The Infinite is nothing to one so long as one prefers to remain shut in within the sense bound outlook. This is why one dismisses spiritual experience, religious feeling, and philosophic insight as mere hallucinations. However, all the opposition takes place only in one’s conscious mind for there is unavoidable recognition on one’s subconscious mind. One wants to escape from oneself, however, and fears the ordeal of facing oneself. These words will make no appeal to the materialistic mentality which still regards all spiritual experience as the outcome of pathological conditions. Such an attitude, fortunately, has become less sure of itself than it was when I first embarked on these studies and experiments, now more than a decade ago. People neglect the real because they believe they already have it (in sense-experience of the World outside) and for the same reason they do not seek truth. The unfortunate who have been unable to manage their affairs or to recover from the blows of destiny may turn to religion for comfort: they seldom turn to philosophy. For this fails to confront their emotions: it appears is only to those who are learning that emotions need to be checked or balanced or controlled by reason. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
The mass of people do not want, and may even fear, the spiritual and intellectual freedom to search for truth. They are more comfortable inside the gregarious protection of ready-made group tradition. It is not only that so many people are not capable of comprehending the truth but also that a large number of them do not want to comprehend it. The truth hurts their ego, contradicts their desires, and denies their expectations. Mortal’s communal life cannot dispense any more than one oneself with the It-World—over which the presence of the You floats like the spirit over the face of the waters. Mortal’s will to profit and will to power are natural and legitimate as long as they are tied to the will to human relations and carried by it. There is no evil drive until the drive detaches itself from our being; the drive that is wedded to and determined by our being is the plasma of communal life, while the detached drive spells its disintegration. The economy as the house of the will to profit and the states as the house of the will to power participate in life as long as they participate in the spirit. If they abjure the spirit, they abjure life. To be sure, life takes its time about settling the score, and for quite a while one may still think that one sees a form move where for a long time a mere mechanism has been whirring. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Introducing some sort of immediacy at this point is surely futile. Loosening the framework of the economy or the state cannot make up for the fact that neither stands any longer under the supremacy of the You-saying spirit, and stirring up the periphery cannot replace the living relationship to the center. The structures of communal human life derive their life from the fullness of the relational force that permeates their members, and they derive their embodies form from the saturation of this force by the spirit. The states person of business person who serves the spirit is no dilettante. One knows well that one cannot simply confront the people with whom one has to deal as so many carriers of the You, without undoing one’s own work. Nevertheless one ventures to do this, not simply but up to the limit suggested to one by the spirit; and the spirit does suggest a limit to one, and the venture that would have exploded a served structure succeeds where the presence of the You floats above. One does not become a babbling enthusiast; one serves the truth, which, though supra-rational, does not disown reason but holds her in lap. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
What one does in communal life is no different from what is done in personal life by a mortal who knows that one cannot actualize the You in some pure fashion but who nevertheless bears witness of it daily to the It, defining the limit every day anew, according to the right and measure of that day—discovering the limit anew. Neither work nor possessions can be redeemed on their own but only by starting from the spirit. It is only from the presence of the spirit that significance and joy can slow into all work, and reverence and the strength to sacrifice into all possessions, not to the brim but quantum satis—and that is worked and possessed, though it reminds attached to the It-World, can nevertheless be transfigured to the point where it confronts us and represents the You. There is no back-behind-it; there is, even at the moment of the most profound need—indeed, only then—a previously unsuspected beyond-it. Whether it is the state that regulates the economy or the economy that directs the state is unimportant as long as both are unchanged. Whether the institutions of the state become freer and those of the economy juster, that is important, but not for the question concerning actual life that is being posed here; for they cannot become free and just on their own. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
You-saying, responding spirit—remains alive and actual; whether what remains of it in communal human life continues to be subjected to the state and the economy or whether it becomes independently active; whether what abides of it in individual human life incorporates itself again in communal life. However, that certainly cannot be accomplished by dividing communal life into independent realms that also include the life of the spirit. That would merely mean that the regions immersed in the It-World would be abandoned forever to this despotism, while the spirit would lose all actuality. For the spirit in itself can never act independently upon life; that it can do only in the World—with its force which penetrates and transforms the It-World. The spirit is truly at home with itself when it can confront the World that is opened up to it, give itself to the World, and redeem it and, through the World, also itself. However, the spirituality that represents the spirit nowadays is so scattered, weakened, degenerate, and full of contradictions that it could not possibly do this until it had first returned to the essence of the spirit: being able to say You. Most people are contented with their chains or even strongly attached them—such is the awesome power of desires, passions, infatuation, and especially egoisms. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
And when we defend our Christian faith, they point to the fact that the World has not become better since the days of Hosea and Jeremiah, and that the prophetic visions of doom are more realistic today than they were in those days. It is hard to answer this; but we must answer it for not only the Christians, but for humanity, or friends, and our children, and something in ourselves asks these questions. It is hard to answer them. What, for instance, can we answer when our children ask us about the child in the Manger while in some parts of the World all children from two years old and under have died and are dying, not by an order of Herod, but by ever-increasing cruelty of ear and its result in Christian era and by the decrease of the power of imagination of the Christian people. Or, what can we answers the Jews when the remnants of the Jewish people, returning from death-camps, worse than anything in Babylon, cannot find a resting place anywhere on the surface of the Earth, and certainly not amongst the great Christian nations? #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Or, what can we answer Christians and non-Christians who have realized that the fruit of centuries of Christian technical and social civilization is the imminent threat of a complete and universal self-destruction of humanity? When we look at the unhealed and unsaved state of our lives after the message of healing and salvation has been heard at every Christmas for almost two thousand years, what answer can we give to ourselves? Should we say that the World, of course, is unsaved but that there are men and women in all generations who are saved from the World? However, this is not the message of Christmas. All those in Christmas legend who expect the Christ and receive the divine are looking out for the salvation of Israel and of the Gentiles and for the World. For all of them, and for Jesus himself, and for the apostles, the kingdom of God, the universal salvation is at hand. However, if this was the expectation, has it not been utterly refuted by reality? Many people fear the quest because they fear that, if they get involved in it too seriously, they might have to repress some inclination in their nature or renounce some habit in their way of living. So they take from it only what appeals to them, and discard the rest. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
The Purest Form of Love, the Warmest, the Most Exciting Love is Not Mine for Another, But Mine for Me!
I climbed to my feet. I felt myself light and powerful, and strangely numbed, and I went to the dead fire, and walked through the burnt timers. It was time now to examine the inner room. Most of us remember the myth of Narcissus as the story of a beautiful youth who fell in love with his own image in a pool and pined away because he never could possess it. However, the actual myth is a great deal richer. It begins with Tiresias, the aged prophet, predicting to the river nymph who was Narcissus’ mother, provided he never knows himself, her son would live to a ripe old age. This catches us up short. What is the meaning of not knowing oneself? True, the dynamics of narcissism always have as their fulcrum the problem of self-knowledge. However, could Tiresias be saying if Narcissus avoids the absorption of self-love, the very thing we later call narcissism, that he will live long? Or can he be referring to the literal translation of know thyself, from the Greek know that you are only a man, accept your human limits, which Narcissus obviously refused to do? The second character in the myth, also forgotten by most of us, is Echo, a lovely mountain nymph who falls hopelessly in love with Narcissus and follows him over hill and dale as he hunts for stage. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Intending to call his hunting companions, Narcissus cries, “Let us come together here!” Echo responds in the same words and rushes out to embrace Narcissus. However, he shakes her off roughly and runs away crying out, “I will die before you ever lie with me!” Echo then pines away, leaving behind only her melodious voice. Disdaining her supine resignation, the gods condemn her to wander forever in the mountain glens and valleys, where we hear her voice today. However, in her need for revenge, she calls upon the gods to punish Narcissus by making him also the victim of unrequited love. It is only then that he falls in love with his own reflection. At first he tried to embrace and kiss the beautiful young man who confronted him, but presently he recognized himself, and lay gazing enraptured into the pool, hour after hour. How could he endure both to possess and yet not to possess? Grief was destroying him, yet he rejoiced in his torments; knowing at least that his other self would remain true to him, whatever happened. Echo, although she has not forgiven Narcissus, grieved with him; she sympathetically echoed ‘Alas! Alas!’ as he plunged a dagger in his chest, and also the final ‘Ah, youth, beloved in vain, farewell!” as he expired. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Narcissus’ tragic flaw, in the eyes of the gods, is that he could never love anyone else, never love in the sense of giving himself in union with another person. There is no fertility in Narcissus’ love, and none in narcissism—no genuine coupling, no cross-fertilization, no interpersonal relationship. This threatens to be a tragic flaw in our present-day “I am me” effort to escape the paradox: we cannot love without committing ourselves to another person. In grasping for freedom from entanglement with other persons, we come to grief over our failure of compassion and commitment—indeed, the failure to love authentically. However, there is another important insight in this story that will help us understand present-day neo-narcissism and that, to my knowledge, has not yet been mentioned in the literature. It is that narcissism has its origin in revenge and retaliation. Echo’s plea, answered by Aphrodite, is a gesture of revenge. And this is also true in our contemporary neo-narcissism: there is in it a strong motive of anger and revenge. This is shown in the above series of verses. “I have no right, no wrongs” can be translated into the cry “The culture has let us down.” What we learned as children turns out to be phony; our parents seemed unable by dint of their confusion to show us any alternative moral guideposts or teach us wisdom; and what we were taught often turns out to be undesirable anyway and promotes conterrebellion. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
It is out of revenge upon those in the culture who betrayed her that the writers of the verses withdraws into herself and comforts herself with a lonely self-love: “The purest form of love, the warmest, the most exciting love is not mine for another, but mine for me.” In our society we have called this self-love. The phrase self love came into general currency after Erich Fromm’s essay “Selfishness and Self-Love.” Dr. Fromm condemned the fist and elevated the second. He did not see the important differences between self-love and love of another. There is a tragic flaw in this self-love, a seductive error that carries over into the masses of self-help books and spreads the havoc that arises from neo-narcissism. What is called love for others and self-love are two different things. Love for another person is the urge toward the uniting of two separate entities who invigorate each other, revivify each other, and contribute their differences to each other, and combine their different genes in a new and unique being—toward which the pleasures of the flesh is a powerful motivation. The essence, then, is the combining of two different beings. Nature’s obvious purpose in this, in contrast to incest, is the increase of possibilities. The insemination, the combination of two different sets of genes, result in the creation of new forms and original patterns. All of this Narcissus could not or would not do. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
The well-worn, strict doctrine that if you hate yourself, you cannot love others is true. However, the converse of that—that is you love yourself, you will automatically love others—is not true. Narcissus, in his rejection of Echo, dramatically demonstrates this. Many persons use self-love, then, ought really to be termed self-caring, which includes self-esteem, self-respect, and self-affirmation. This would save from the confusion of self-caring and love for others, as it is shown so vividly in the myth of Narcissus. To be free to love other persons requires self-affirmation and, paradoxically, the assertion of oneself. At the same time it requires tenderness, affirmation of the other, relaxing of competition as must as possible, self-abnegation at times in the interests of the loved one, and the age-old virtues of mercy and forgiveness toward each other. Destiny is the other person in the act of loving. The dialectical poles of self-caring and love for the other fructify and strengthen each other. Fortunately, this paradox can neither be escaped nor solved, but must be lived with. There are others, however, who are not satisfied with such ignorance and such indifference, who want certain and assured knowledge of the spirit, by penetrating the secrets of their own being. And it is the promise of the satisfaction of this want which attracts them to the quest for God’s truth. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Was the baptism of John from Heaven or from mortals? Many cannot answer this. If one says that it was from mortals, they would have hurt the popular feelings and perhaps even a feeling within themselves, that John was a prophet. However, if they had said that he was from God, they would have established an authority beyond the threefold authority which they could claim for themselves. And this they did not want. They, who were called authorities, demanded that all authority be vested in them. Therefore, they did not accept John as a prophet, nor Jesus as the Christ. Do not minimize the seriousness of this conflict. It was not simply a conflict between good and evil, between faith and unbelief. The conflict was much more profound and much more tragic than this! Let us imagine that we ourselves were in the place of those who asked Jesus about the source of his authority. Let us imagine ourselves as the guardians of a great religious tradition, or as the unquestionable experts in a sphere of decisive importance for human existence, or as people who have learned through a long experience to deal with matters of highest value. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
And let us also assume that we had no function as legally established authorities and that somebody came and spoke about the same things in quite a different language and acted in the field of our authority in quite a radical way; how would be react? And if the people who saw and heard this man said of him what they said about Jesus, that he teaches as one who has authority and not as we the established authorities, how would we react? Would we not think: He confuses the masses, he spreads dangerous doctrines, he undermines well-proved laws and institutions, he introduces strange modes of life and thought, he disrupts sacred ties, he destroys traditions from which generations of mortals have received discipline and strength and hope? It is our duty to resist him and if possible to remove him! For the sake of our people we must defend our consecrated and tested authority against this mortal who cannot show the source of the authority he claims. Could we be blamed for such a reaction? And if not, can we blame the authorities in Jerusalem for their reaction to Jesus? We think of the Reformation. This was a moment in the history of the Church in which the question of authority was once more in the center of events. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
Luther, and consequently the whole Protestant World, broke away from the Roman Church and from 1500 years of Christian tradition when no agreement about the authority of the pope and the councils could be reached. Here, again, someone had arisen who spoke and acted with an authority of the pope and the councils could be reached. Here, again, someone has arisen who spoke and acted with an authority the sources of which could not be determined by legal means. And here also we must ask, “Are the Catholic authorities who rejected him in the name of their established authority to be blamed for it?” However, if we do not blame them, we can ask them, “Why do you blame the Jewish authorities who did exactly the same as you did when the people said of the Reformers that they spoke with authority and not like the priests and monks?” Is the same thing so different if it is done by the Jewish high priest and if it is done by the Roman high priest? And one may ask the present-day Protestant authorities in Europe and in this country, “Are you certain that the insistence on your authority, on your tradition, and your experience does not suppress the kind of authority which Jesus has in mind?” #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
And now we ask, “What does authority mean?” What does it mean for a mortal as a mortal? What does it mean for our period and for each of us?” First of all, it means that we are finite and in need of what the word “authority” really says: to be started and increased. It means that we are born, that we were infants and children, that we were completely dependent on those who gave us life and home and guidance and contents for soul and mind. We were not able to decide for ourselves for many years, and that made us dependent on authority and made authority a benefit for us. We accepted this authority without resistance, even if we rebelled on special occasions. And this authority became the basis for all other authorities. It gave strength to the authority of the older brother or sister, of the more mature friend or teacher, of the official, of the ruler, of the minister. And through them we have been introduced into the institutions and traditions in society, state and Church. Authority permeates, guides, shapes our lives. The acceptance of authority is the acceptance of what is given by those who have more than we. And our subjection to them and to what they stand for enables us to live in history, as our subjection to the laws of nature enables us to live in nature. And from the authority of the law is derived the authority of those who represent and administer it and who, for this reason, are called the authorities. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Our daily life would be impossible without traditions of behavior and customs and the authority of those who have received them and surrendered them to us. Mortal’s control of nature would be impossible without the tradition of knowledge and skill into which every new generation is introduced and which gives authority to those who are able to introduce us. Mortal’s intellectual life—the language one uses, the songs one sings, the music one plays, the houses one builds, the pictures one paints, the symbols one creates—one has received through the authority of those who have participated in it before one. Mortal’s religious life—the faith one hold, the cult one loves, the stories and legends one has heard, the commandments one tried to obey, the texts one knows by heart—all this is not created by one; one takes it from those who represent to one religious authority. And if one revolts against the authorities which have shaped one, one does it with the tools one has received from them. The language of the revolutionary is formed by those against whom one revolts. The protest of the reformer uses the tradition against which one protests. There, no absolute revolution is possible. If it is attempted, it fails immediately; and is a revolution succeeds, its leaders soon have to use forms and ideas created by the authorities of the past. This is true of the rebellion of the adolescent against the family authority as well as of the rebellion of new social groups against the authority of the established power. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
When we speak of human finitude, we usually think of mortal’s transitorines in time, of birth and death, of the vicissitudes which threaten one in every moment. However, we are not only finite in that we are temporal, we are also finite in that we are historical and that means subject to authority, even if we rebel against it. We are thrown into existence, not only bodily, but also mentally. In no respect are we by ourselves, in no moment can we be by ourselves. One who tries to be without authority tries to be like God, who alone is by himself. And like everyone who tries to be like God, one is thrown down to self-destruction, be it a single human being, be it a nation, be it a period of history like our own. Art, to: as one beholds what confronts one, the form discloses itself to the artist. One conjures it into an image. The image does not stand in a World of gods but in this great World of mortals. Of course, it is there even when no human eye afflicts it; but it sleeps. The Chinese poet relates that mortals do not want to hear the song that one was playing on one’s flute of jade; then one played it to the gods, and they inclined their ears; and ever since mortals, too, have listened to the song—and thus one went from the gods to those with whom the image cannot dispense. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
As in a dream it looks for the encounter with mortal in order that one may undo the spell and embrace the form for a timeless moment. And there one comes and experiences what there is to be experienced: that is how it is made, or this is what is expresses, or its qualities are such and such, and on top of all that perhaps also it might rate. Not that scientific and aesthetic understand is not necessary—but it should do its work faithfully and immerse itself and disappear in that truth of the relation which surpasses understanding and embraces what is understandable. And also: that which towers above the spirit of knowledge and the spirit of art because here evanescent, corporeal mortals need not banish oneself into the enduring matter but outlasts it and rises, oneself an image, on the starry sky of the spirit, as the music of one’s living speech roars around one—pure action, the act that is not arbitrary. Here the Independent World appeared to mortals out of a deeper mystery, addressed one out of the dark, and one responded with one’s life. Here the word has become life, and this life, whether it fulfilled the law or broke the law—both are required on occasion lest the spirit die on Earth—is teaching. Thus it stands before posterity in order to teach it, not what is and not what ought to be, but how one lives in the spirit, in the countenance of the Independent World. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
And that means: it stands ready to become an Independent World at any time, opening up to the spirit of God; no, it does not stand ready, it always comes toward them and touches them. However they, having become uneager and inept for such living intercourse that opens up a World, are well informed; they have imprisoned the person in history, and one’s speech in a library; they have codified the fulfillment of the breach, it does not matter which; nor are they stingy with reverence and even adoration, adequately mixed with some psychology, as is only proper for modern mortals. O lonely countenance, starlike in the dark; O living finger upon an insensitive forehead; O steps whose each is fading away! It is a tradition in spiritual circles of God that anyone who has ever felt the truth power or beauty of the Gospel, however briefly, will not be able to escape being drawn to its practical consequence, the Quest, one day, however long deferred it may be. A mind which is no longer satisfied with shallow consolations will naturally turn to mystical experience or metaphysical study for deeper ones. All that has happened before one’s entry upon the quest has really been converging toward it. It is as inevitable that some mortals should come to the Quest because of their sorrows and difficulties as that other mortal should abandon it temporarily for the same reasons. God offers the surest path to the mind’s peace and the heart’s satisfaction. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Randolph Harris II International Institute 