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My God—What Have We Done?
Torches blazed ahead, and over a chorus of mourful wails, there came other cries, distant but filled with pain. Yet something beyond these puzzling cries had caught my attention. Amid all the foulness, I sensed a mortal was near. It was Nicolas and he was alive and I could hear him, the warm, vulnerable current of his thoughts mingled with his scent. And something was terribly wrong with his thoughts. They were chaos. Also, when I exercised my freedom and vice versa the anxiety engulfed me like a tidal wave. The anxiety came in the person of this figure whom I identified as my enemy-friend, a kind of figurative devil. It is the anxiety that comes, in varying intensity, whenever one leaps into the field of new possibilities, whenever one moves into the area of new idea or new compositions in music or a new style in art. It comes after such subconscious thoughts as “Ah, there is a new vision—nobody ever painted a scene like this before.” Then there comes the feeling “Do I want to venture out so far?” And I remind myself of all the dangers in venturing into that no man’s land. In such situations the person finds oneself adjuring oneself to calm down, not to get too excited, when getting excited in the sense of becoming inspired is exactly what, on the deepest level, one wants. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Freedom and anxiety are two sides of the coin—there is never one without the other. The anxiety is part and parcel of the vision or an idea that, in the particular form it comes to us, no one has ever thought of before. This anxiety—or dread, if we wish to translate angst that way—is a function of the freedom of imagination we must exercise in order to get any idea of significance. The dread comes with the new possibility and the risk that this leap requires. We might, like the scientists who split the atom, break through into a new land, where the usual mooring places by which we have oriented ourselves no longer even exist. Hence, the sense of alienation and bewilderment—and even the experience of intense human aloneness—that such a breakthrough brings in its train. I am told that when the scientists stood behind their glass barrier near Los Alamos and saw the first atomic explosion, the faces of a number of them turned white. One cried aloud, “My God, what have we done?” There is a rational explanation for this anxiety. We must keep in mind that the anxiety comes not from the possibility that the new idea or discovery might be wrong and useless (then it can simply be discarded), but from the possibility that it might be true, as it was, for example, with atomic fission or with Armin van Buuren’s new idea about musical harmonies. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Then one’s colleagues, the professors at one’s university, will be jolted, will be required to change their lecture notes because the possibility that there are new truths has been proven to be correct. This causes upset, which was very great indeed with the splitting of the atom. Or if one is a Nicolas Copernicus with new theory that the Earth moves around the Sun, or a Karl Marx with a radically new approach to the economic life of humankind, the uproar that accompanies the shaking of the foundations will be that much more catastrophic. Although the examples above are of great mortals, we are illustrating something that we all experience, though to a lesser degree. When he or she exercises the freedom to move out into the real World of possibility, every human being experiences this anxiety. Only by not venturing—that is, by surrendering our freedom, we can escape the anxiety. I am convinced that many people never become aware of their most creative ideas since their inspirations are blocked off by this anxiety before the ideas even reach the level of consciousness. A pressure toward conformism infuses every society. One function of any group or social system is to preserve homeostasis, to keep people in their usual positions. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The danger of freedom to the group is possessed exactly at that point: that the nonconformist will upset the homeostasis, will use one’s freedom to destroy the tired and true ways. Sokratis was condemned to drink hemlock because, so the good citizens of Athens believed, he taught false daimones (moral philosophy that defines right action as that which lead to the well-being of the individual, thus holding good behavior as an essential value) to the youth of Athens. Jesus was crucified because he upset the accepted religion of his day. Joan of Arc heard voices and was burned at the stake. Aaliyah choose the material and images she liked best and perished in a mysterious plane crash. These extreme examples are of person whose idea later become the cornerstones of our civilization. However, the fact only confirms my point. The persons whose insights are too disturbing, who bring too much of the anxiety that accompanies freedom, are put to death by their own generation, which suffers the threat caused by the Earthquake of the news ideas. However, when their ideas are crystallized into the strict and rigid doctrines of the new age and there is no chance of the dead figures rising from their silent graves to disturb the peace a new, they are worshipped by subsequent generations. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
The prototype of the person who produces something new is found in Prometheus, who created fire—or, as the myth presents it, stole it from the gods—and gave it to humankind as the beginning of human civilization. No one envies his punishment in being chained to a mountainside, where an eagle would eat away at his liver all day. At night, the liver would grow back, and the same grisly process would begin all over again the next day. This accompanies his great act of defiance, which was one aspect of Prometheus’ personal freedom. The denying of the dizziness of freedom is shown in the phrase pure spontaneity. For no one can seek that without succumbing to the dreadful implications of freedom. Even John Lilly, in his experiencing pure spontaneity in one’s stimulus-free tank, describes the great dangers therein, and one’s own great anxiety in one’s experience hovering on the edge of nonbeing, death. One may envy one’s colleagues who claim to exist in pure spontaneity and who seem to be on a perpetual high. Yes, we may envy them, but we do not love them for that. We love them for their vulnerability—which means their accepting and owning the dizziness of their freedom, their destiny which always stalks their freedom. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The legend of Icarus presents a picture of a young man refusing to accept the dizziness, or the anxiety, of freedom. Icarus that day must have felt a sense of great adventure—to be the first person who could sail high and taste the ecstasy, the sheer freedom from the bonds of the Earth, with no limits at all. For this one afternoon he was completely subject, not limited even by the distant reaches of the sky. One could order one’s Universe as one wished, could live out one’s whim and desire born in one’s own imagination. Here, indeed, was pure spontaneity. No longer part of the World, no longer subject to the laws of Earth or its destiny or the requirements of community. What exhilaration there must have been in the young man’s heart! A great dream comes true, an experience of complete freedom, pure spontaneity at last. One needs only the self-preoccupation, the refusal to consider compromise. He is like humanists of previous decades who insisted that there was no evil they need bother to consider. Human kind had done such great things in the past; why could we not overcome any and all difficulties in the future? Icarus remained as spontaneous as a child and burst into the sea to drown not as a young man, but as a child. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
When they hear these truths concerning the inward life and Universal laws, how sad, how foolish that so many people turn their heads away in indifference, in apathy, and in inertia! They believe that, even if there were any truth in them, these ideas are only for a handful of dreamers, for an esoteric cult with nothing better to do with its times and thought than to entertain them. There does not seem to be any point of contact between these ideas and their own lives, no applicability to their personal selves, and hence, no importance in them at all. How gross this error, how great this blindness! The mystic’s knowledge is full of significance for every other mortal. The mystic’s discoveries are full of value for one. Mortal’s hope for a happier existence and need of faith in Universal meaning has led one to try so many wrong turnings which brought one only father from them, that it is understandable why cynicism or indifferentism should claim so many votaries. However, this is not yet the end result. The few who today have found both hope and need adequately satisfied are presages of what must happen to the others. Even those mortals who do not believe in God are unknowingly seeking to find him or waiting for him. Every mortal has within one this divine possibility. However, if one refuses to believe it, or puts one’s faith in a hard materialism, or fails to seek for it, it will remain only latent. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
It is the thought of attaining happiness in some way which induces mortals to commit most crimes, just as it is the thought of attaining truth which induces them to hold the most materialistic beliefs. Although they see both happiness and truth from a wrong angle and so are given this deceptive result, still the essential motivation of their lives is the same as that of the questers. The segregation in thought of a spiritual elite as being the only seekers is valid only for a practical view, not for an ultimate one. Like people who are visually impaired, they seek the unseen. Like mystics they want the unknow centre of their being, but the conscious mind does not yet share in this desire. Everything else they try must in the end fail them, since life itself fails them at death. Those who do not choose to tread the path of mysticism need not therefore tread the path of mysticism need not therefore tread the path of misunderstanding it. This wisdom is latent in the bad as well as the good mortal. Any moral condition will suffice as a starting point. Jesus spoke to sinners as freely as to those of better character. One’s words were not wasted as the sequence showed. Even to those who had committed great crimes, as they as they repent and understand what repentance entails, Jesus promised salvation. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Was it for the sake of a small withdrawn spiritual elite that Jesus walked in Galilees, that Buddha wandered afoot across India, that Sokratis frequented the Agora in Athens? There is hope for all, benediction for the poor and the rich, the good and the bad, for every mortal may come into this great light. However—some mortals may come more easily, more quickly, while others may drag their way. “If anyone among you thinks that one is wise in this age, let one become a fool that one may become wise. For the wisdom of this World is folly with God,” reports 1 Corinthians 3.18-19. When a speaker in a morning chapel service used this as his text, I got a written question in class: “What do you think about this morning’s sermon?” And this was the implication: How can philosophy stand in view of Paul’s deprecating words? I want to answer by trying to interpret what I believe Paul means, not only in the passage above but in the whole context. At the end of his discussion he gives the key by saying: Let no one boast of mortals. For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the World or life or death or the present of the future, all are yours; and you are Christ’s and Christ is God’s. (I Corinthians 3.21-23.) #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Paul has asked, “Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the World?” And now he exclaims, “World and life and Apollos are yours.” This means that the wisdom of the World is ours also. How could it be otherwise? We could not even read Paul’s words without the wisdom of the World which enables us to understand ancient texts, which gives us the technical tool to spread the Christian message all over the Earth, which produces and sustains the political and educational and artistic institutions which serve and protect the Church. All this is ours. And even the different theologies are ours: the more dialectical one of Paul, the more ritualistic one of Peter, the more apologetic one of Apollos. There is only one type of theology which Paul dislikes—that which wants to monopolize the Christ and call itself the party of Christ. For each of these theologies wisdom of the World is needed; scribes are needed, debaters are needed, philosophers are needed, a language is needed to which everybody contributes. It is impossible to deny all this. However, it is possible to discredit through loose talk what one cannot avoid using at the same time. There is a deep dishonesty in the accusation against the use of historical research and philosophical thought in theology. In daily life one calls somebody dishonest who bring defamation upon those whom one uses. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
We should not commit this dishonesty in our theological work. And we cannot escape using the wisdom of this World. If we say “let us use a little of it, but not much in order to escape the dangers implied in it, this is no escape. This is certainly not what Paul means. The whole World is yours, he says, the whole life, present and future, not parts of it. These important words speak of scientific knowledge and its passion, artistic beauty and its excitement, politics and their use of power, eating and drinking and their joy, pleasures of the flesh and its ecstasy, family life and its warmth and friendship with its intimacy, justice with its charity, nature with its might and restfulness, the mortal-made World above nature, the technical World and its fascination, philosophy with its humility—daring only to call itself love of wisdom—and its profundity—daring to ask ultimate questions. In all of these things is wisdom of this World and power of this World and all these things are ours. They belong to us and we belong to them; we create them and they fulfill us. However, and this “but” of Paul’s is not one of those prepositions in which everything is taken back that was given before. The great preposition to the World which is ours gives both the foundation and the limit of the World that is ours: “And you are Christ’s,” namely, that Christ whose Cross is foolishness and weakness to the wisdom of the World. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
The wisdom of this World in all its forms cannot know God, and the power of this World with all its means cannot reach God. If they try it, they produce idolatry and are revealed in their foolishness which is the foolishness of idolatry. No finite being can attain the infinite without being broken as one who represented the World, and its wisdom and its power, was on the Cross. This is the foolishness and the weakness of the Cross which is ultimate wisdom and which is the reason that Christ is not another bearer of wisdom and power of this World but that he is God’s. The Cross makes him God’s. And out of this foolishness we win the wisdom to use what is our, the wisdom of the World, even philosophy. If it be unbroken, it controls us. If it be broken, it is ours. “Broken” does not mean reduced or emaciated or controlled, but it means undercut in its idolatic claim. Paul’s courage in affirming everything given, one’s openness towards the World, his sovereignty towards life should put to shame each of us as well as all our Churches. We are afraid to accept what is given to us: we are compulsive self-seclusion towards our World, we try to escape life instead of controlling it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
We do not behave as if everything were ours. And the Churches do so even less. The reason for this is that we and out Churches do not know as Paul did what it means to be Christ’s and because of beings Christ’s, to be God’s. Those who feel no call to develop themselves spiritually, no obligation to follow the quest, are nevertheless unwittingly doing both. Only, they are doing so at so sow and imperceptible a pace that they do not recognize the activity and the moment. All the experience of life are in the end intended to induce us to seek wholeheartedly for God. That is, to lead us to the very portal of the Quest. The vision of the tree of life shows us how the effects of casualness can lead us away from the covenant path. Consider that the rod of iron and the strait and narrow path, or the covenant path, led directly to the tree of lie, where all the blessings provided by our Savior and his Atonement are available to the faithful. If we are not careful in living our covenants with exactness, our casual efforts may eventually lead us into forbidden paths or to join with those who have already entered the great and spacious building. If not careful, we may even drown in the depths of a filthy river. “The Spirit of Christ is given to every mortal, that one may know good from evil and is sent forth by the power and gift of Christ; wherefore ye may know with a perfect know it is of God,” reports Moroni 7.16. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Many Business People Love Monday as it is an Escape from Having Nothing Planned, Nothing Scheduled!
We heard the presence very sharply after that, as we explored the churches, then again it was gone. We climbed belfries to survey our kingdom, and afterwards huddled in crowded coffeehouses for a little while merely to feel and smell the mortals around us, to exchange secret glances, to laugh softly, tete-a-tete. That form of the pause which we call leisure is also, curiously enough, both desired and feared. Unbonded leisure can turn people’s lives into chaos, which those people can then blame on excessive freedom. Persons who despair about such problems as delinquency, truancy, alcoholism, drugs, often point to too much leisure as the villain of piece. These people believe that the devil indeed has work for idle hands. The word leisure can be read as freedom or pausing. This is why American leisure has to be filled with named games, organized recreation, labelled hobbies, planned activities. And this is why the have to is often paradoxically freeing. Observing the sharp dilemma people are thrown into by leisure time, we ask: What is this apparent fear of leisure? In America we have traditionally associated freedom, especially in the form of leisure, with space. There was always some new, unexplored space to go to. Land was free. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
However, we cannot enter the private dwellings of mortals now to search for the clothes we need, even if we can hear a house is empty, we cannot move swiftly through the streets, with our eyes on the windows of the darkened mansions, and steal one of the rings off a sleeping woman’s hands. Therefore, America the free is not this is not true in a literal sense nearly as much as it used to be, the concept is still very much a part of our American Legend, American Dream, and Americana. Unfortunately, the Native Americas were never considered as owning the space or land. Freedom of the land was recognized as the fundamental freedom, from which other freedom was derived. We expressed our freedom of the body by moving to a new space. So we remained extroverts, concerned with our muscle. Hence, the great outcry, and near panic, with gasoline shortage. People interpreted it as having their freedom to travel, to move, taken away from them, thus enslaving them. In Europe, on the contrary, all spaces has been exploded for a long time, and is now apportioned out and owned by somebody. So the Europeans’ emphasis has been on time. Europeans cultivated the introvert side, turned inward, free in their imaginations and thought to travel all over the World. Freedom meant freedom of the mind in contrast to the body. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
However, in American this leaves us with a problem. We no longer can simply pack up and move to another house, typically farther west. When our freedom essentially means what we do with our leisure, freedom then turns out to be a vacuum. There is no being in it; it is a “no thing.” This becomes clear in psychoanalysis. There is something called “Sunday neuroses,” the anxiety that subtly eats away at business people on Sunday when nothing is planned, nothing scheduled. These business people are filled with anxiety and stoically endure the passage of time until Monday morning when they can go back to work and again become occupied. (What a graphic phrase, “become occupied,” implying that something outside ourselves takes over and occupies us!) Does this version of freedom, with it dependence on the pre-planned and its main emphasis on the capacity of the self, engender creativity, originality, spontaneity? My own opinion is that it does not; that indefiniteness and randomness, the recognition of the pauses are all essential to creativity. I enthusiastically agree. If the person is to be open to one’s creative impulses, randomness, the recognition of the pauses, and the confronting of leisure rather than destroying it by excessive planning are essential. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The pause is the essence of creativity, let alone of originality and spontaneity. One cannot avail oneself of the richness of precociousness or unconsciousness unless one can let oneself periodically relax, be relieved of tension. It is then that the person lets the silences speak. There is value to the analyst when a patient misses an hour. If the analyst is the creative type, this empty hour is of the essence. Therefore, it is true that unstructured freedom is difficult for most people to confront for long periods. However, there are happy mediums, and the use of leisure falls in that category. The constructive limits to our freedom are given by what we are committed to and by the myths we live by. Then there can be meaning to leisure. We can use it for random thinking, reverie, or for simply wandering around a new city for a time. Yes, the time may be wasted. However, who is to say that this wasted time may not bring us our most important ideas or new experiences, new visions, that are invaluable? The letting be and letting happen may turn out to be the most significant thing one can do. The sickness of our age is unlike that of any other and yet belongs with the sicknesses of all. The history of cultures is not a stadium of eons in which one runner after another must cover the same circle of death, cheerfully and unconsciously. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
A nameless path leads through their ascensions and declines. It is not a path of progress and development. It is a descent through the spirals of the spiritual underworld but could also be called an ascent to the innermost, subtlest, most intricate turn that knows no Beyond and even less any Backward but only the unheard of return—the breakthrough. Shall we have to follow this path all the way to the end, to the test of the final darkness? However, where there is danger what saves grows, too. The biologistic and the historiosophical orientations of this age, which made so much their differences, have combined to produce a faith in doom that is more obdurate and anxious than any such faith has ever been. It is no longer the power of karma nor the power of the stars that rules mortal’s lot ineluctably; many different forces claim this dominion, but upon closer examination it appears that most of our contemporaries believe in a medley of forces, as the late Romans believed in a medley of gods. The nature of these claims facilitates such a faith. Whether it is the law of life—a universal struggle in which everybody must either join the fight or renounce life—or the psychological law according to which innate drives constitute the entire human soul; or the social law of an inevitable social process that is merely accompanied by will and consciousness; or the cultural law of an unalterably uniform genesis and decline of historical forms. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Or, whatever variation there may be: the point is always that mortals are yoked into an inescapable process that one cannot resist, though one may be deluded enough to try. From the compulsion of the stars the ancient mysteries offered liberation; from the compulsion of karma, the Christian sacrifice, accompanied by insight. Both were preparations for salvation. However, the medley idol does not tolerate any faith in liberation. It is considered foolish to imagine any freedom; one is supposed to have nothing but he choice between resolute and hopelessly rebellious slavery. Although all these laws are frequently associated with long discussions of teleological development and organic evolution, all of them are based on the obsession with some running down, which involves unlimited causality. The strict and rigid doctrines of a gradual running down represents mortal’s abdication in the face of the proliferating It-World. Here the name of fate is misused: fate is no bell that has been jammed down over mortals; nobody encounters it, except those who started out from freedom. However, the strict and rigid doctrines of some running down leaves no room for freedom or for its most real revelation whose tranquil strength changes the countenance of the Earth: returning. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
The strict and rigid doctrines do not know the human being who overcomes the Universal struggle by returning; who tears the web of drives, by returning; who rises above the spell of one’s class by returning; who by returning stirs up, rejuvenates, and changes the secure historical forms. The strict and rigid doctrines of running down offers you only one choice as you face its game: to observe the rules or drop out. However, one that returns knocks over the mortals on the board. The strict and rigid doctrines will at most permit you to carry out conditionality with your life and to remain free in your soul. However, that one returns considers this freedom the most ignominious slavery. Nothing can doom mortals but the belief in doom, for this prevents the movement of return. The belief in doom is a delusion from the start. The scheme of running down is appropriate only for ordering that which is nothing-but-having-become, the severed World-event, objecthood as history. The presence of the You, that which is born of association, is not accessible to this approach, which does not know the actuality of spirit; and this scheme is not valid for spirit. Divination based on objecthood is valid only for those who do not know presentness. Whoever is overpowered by the It-World must consider the strict and rigid moral doctrines of an ineluctable running down as a truth that creates a clearing in the jungle. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
In truth, these strict and rigid doctrines only leads one deeper into slavery of the It-World. However, the World of the You is not locked up. Whoever proceeds toward it, concentrating one’s whole being, with one’s power to relate resurrected, behold one’s freedom. And to gain freedom from the belief is unfreedom is to gain freedom. And Jesus cried out and said, “One who believes in me, believes not in me but in him who sent me. And one who sees me sees him who sent me. I have come as light into the World, that whoever believes in me may not remain in darkness. If any one hears my sayings and does not keep them, I do not judge one; for I did not come to judge the World but to say the World. One who rejects me and does not receive my sayings has a judge; the word that I have spoken will be one’s judge on the last day. For I have not spoken on my own authority; the Father who sent me has himself given me commandment what to say and what to speak. And I know that his commandment is eternal life. What I say, therefore, I say as the Father has bidden me,” reports John 12.44-50. “He who believes in me, believes not in me but in one who sent me.” These words follow a bitter complaint of the evangelist about the unbelief and half-belief of the people and their leaders. The words are introduced by the phrase: “Jesus cried out . . .” He is making an almost desperate effort to be understood. And what Jesus cries out is that the believing in him means not believing in him. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
The argument of the unbelievers was—and is in all periods—that it is impossible to believe in Jesus of Nazareth as Jesus of Nazareth. Jesus declares: “This argument is valid. If people are asked to believe in me, they should not do so. However, they are not asked any such thing! They are asked to believe in one who has sent me, who is greater than I and with whom I am one. I have spoken on my own authority,” Jesus continues. “If I did so, the unbelievers would be right.” There are many authorities in past and present. Why accept one and not another? Why accept any authority? As Jesus the man Jesus is neither an authority nor an object of faith. None of his superior qualities—neither his religious life, nor his moral perfection, nor his profound insights—make him an object of faith or the ultimate authority. On this basis, Jesus say, he does not judge anyone. If he did, he would be a tyrant who imposes himself and his greatness on others, thus destroying instead of saving them. What about our preaching? When we use the name of Jesus, do we not often try to force upon those to whom we are speaking and upon ourselves something great besides God? Do we always make it clear that believing in Christ does not mean believing in him? If not, are we not working for destruction more than for salvation? #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
It seems that the Christian painters knew more about this than we often do. They did not present a picture of Jesus of Nazareth as Jesus of Nazareth. They painted him as the infant of Bethlehem who contains the whole Universe, though lying now in Mary’s lap. Through Christ’s infantile traits shines the power of the Lord of the World. Or they painted Christ as the visible bearer of the divine majesty in those great mosaics where every piece of his grown is transparent for the infinite depth he represents and expresses. Or they painted him as the Crucified who does not suffer as an individua man, but as he who stands for both the suffering Universe and the divine love which participates in its suffering. Or they painted him as the bringer of the new aeon who controls the powers of nature, the souls of mortals, the demonic forces of disease, insanity, and death. However, they did not give Christ individual traits, did not make him a representative of a psychological type or of a sociological group. Look at the pictures of the Sistine Chapel. Michelangelo gave a special character to every prophet, to every sibyl. However, when he painted Jesus as the ultimate judge, only an irresistible divine-human power appears. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
When in our time Jesus became an object of biographical and psychological essays and was portrayed as a fanatic and neurotic, or as a pious sufferer, or as a social benefactor, or as a moral example, or as a religious teacher, or as a mass leader—he ceased to be the one in whom we can believe, for he ceased to be the one in whom we do not believe, if we believe in him. He was no longer Jesu who is the Christ. We cannot pray to anyone except to God. If Jesus is someone besides God, we cannot and should not pray to him. Many Christians, many among us, cannot find a way of joining honestly with those who pray to Jesus Christ. Something in us is reluctant, something which is genuine and valid, the fear of becoming idolatrous, the fear of being split in our ultimate loyalty, the fear of looking at two faces instead of at the one divine face. However, one who sees him see the Father. There are no two faces. In the face of Jesus the Christ, God makes his face to shine upon us. For nothing is left in the face of Jesus the Christ which is only Jesus of Nazareth, which is the only face of one individual besides others. Everything in his countenance is transparent to him who has sent him. Therefore, and therefore alone, can we sing at Christmas-time: “O come, let us adore him.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
The word mystic is not the perfect one to convey my meaning, but it is at least the handiest one. It as been so ill-used that spouters of the errant nonsense have taken shelter under its roof whilst oracles of the loftiest wisdom have not hesitated to call themselves by this name. The partisan approach to this name has caused it to become either an abusive or else an adulatory word rather than a precise description. Whereas some use it in contempt, others use in it praise! Again, how many are scared by its very sound! When they hear the word mysticism uttered, there are even persons who feel a shiver run down their back! It has been stated that they who do not feel in possession of enough strength or desire to tread the ultimate path need not do so, and that if they remember and sometimes read about it even this will yield good fruit in time. We have been asked to be more explicit on this point. We deeply sympathize with all those who do not feel inclined to tackle the mental austerities involved in the ultimate path. If, however, they will just dip into its intellectual study from time to time, a little here this week and a little there next week, without even making their reading continuous and connected, there will slowly take shape in their minds an outline of some of the main tenets of this teaching. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
And however vague this outline may be it will be immeasurably better than the blank ignorance which covers the rest of humankind like a shroud. These new ideas will assume the characteristics of seeds, which under the water of the student’s own aspiration and the Sunshine of visible and invisible forces, will grow gradually into fruitful understandings and deeds. For the karmic consequences of such interest will be one day birth into a family where every opportunity for advancement will be found. At least it has aroused them to awareness that there is such a thing: they have later the chance to think about it, still later to try it, and perhaps in the end to appreciate it. The ideal may appeal, coming as it does from God, but the ego will put up obstacles, resistances, to its realization. The images of the Ideal formed in the early years of adulthood may get broken or smudged or even lost. The clamour from outside—by which I do not mean heard noise alone—is so insistent that the summons from inside is seldom heard or, if heard at all, is taken to be a summons to culture, art, poetry, and music perhaps or to intellect and its development. This dream of eventual illumination will haunt the background of one’s own mind as a hope to be fulfilled in some far-off future life. One is too aware of one’s own weakness to bring it into the foreground. #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
Time and Growth are Needed Before a Mortal Can Sign that Absolute Commitment of Mind and Life for Which it Asks!
I think he handled the notes much differently from other violinist. And the pauses between the notes—ah, there is where the artistry is possessed! Nicolas bore down on the strings, and I could almost see him against my eyelids, swaying back and forth, his head bowed against the violin as if he meant to pass into the music, and then all sense of him vanished and there was only the sound. The long vibrant notes, and the chilling glissandos, and the violin singing in its own tongue to make every other form of speech seem false. Yet as the song deepened, it became the very essence of despair as if its beauty were a horrid coincidence, grotesquely without a particle of truth. The goal of music and fasting is inner unity. This means hearing but not with the ear; hearing, but not with the understanding; it is hearing with the spirit of God, with your whole being. The hearing that is only in the ears is one thing. The hearing of the understanding is another. However, the hearing of the spirit is not limited to any one faculty, to the ear, or to the mind. Hence, it demands the emptiness of all the faculties. And when the faculties are empty, then the whole being listens. There is then a direct grasp of what is right before you that can never be heard with the ear or understood with the mind. Fasting of the heart empties the faculties, frees you from limitations and from preoccupations. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Was this what Nicolas believed, what he had always believed when I talked on and on about goodness? Was he making the violin say it? Was he deliberately creating those long, pure liquid notes to say that beauty meant nothing because it came from the despair inside him, and it has nothing to do with the despair finally, because the despair was not beautiful, and beauty was then a horrid irony? I did not know the answer, but the sound went beyond him as it always had. It grew larger than the despair. It fell effortlessly into a slow melody, like water seeking its own downward mountain path. It grew richer and darker still and there seemed something undisciplined and chastening in it, and heartbreaking and vast. I lay on my back on the roof now with my eyes on the stars. Pinpoints of light mortals could not have seen. Phantom clouds. And the raw, piercing sound of the violin coming slowly with exquisite tension to a close. We define freedom as the capacity to pause in the midst of stimuli from all directions, and in this pause to throw our weight toward this response rather than that one. The crucial term, and in some ways the most interesting, is that little word pause. It may seem strange that this word is the important one rather than terms like liberty, independence, spontaneity. And it seems especially strange that a word merely signifying a lack of something, an absence, a hiatus, a vacancy, should carry so much weight. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
In America especially, the word pause refers to a gap, a space yet unfilled, a nothing—or, better yet, a no thing. I was in some silent understanding of the language the violin spoke to me. Beauty was not the treachery some imagine it to be, rather it is an uncharted land where one can make a thousand fatal errors, a wild and indifferent paradise without signpost of evil or good. In spite of all the refinements of civilization that conspired to make art—the dizzying perfection of the string quartet or the sprawling grandeur of Fragonard’s canvases—beauty was savage. It was as dangerous and lawless as the Earth had been eons before mortals had one single coherent thought in their hears or wrote codes of conduct on tablets of gold plates. Beauty was a Savage Garden. Good and evil, those are concepts mortals have made. And better, really, than the Savage Garden. However, maybe deep inside Nicki had always dreamed of a harmony among all things that I had always known was impossible. Nicki had dreamed not of goodness, but of justice. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The word pause, like the word freedom, seems essentially to signify what something is not rather than what it is. We have seen that freedom is defined almost universally by what it is not—or, in a sentence definition, “Freedom is when you are anchored to nobody or nothing.” Similarly, the past is a time when no thing is happening. Can the word pause give us an answer not only as to why freedom is a negative word, but is also loved as the most affirmative term in our language? This conception of nothingness as somethinhness enabled the philosophers to perceive the integrity of non-being, to name the free space and give us zero. Freedom is experienced in our World in an infinite number of pauses, which turn out not to be negative but to be the most affirmative condition possible. The ultimate paradox is that negation becomes affirmation. Thus, freedom remains the most loved word, the word that thrills us most readily, the condition most desired because it calls forth continuous, unrealized possibilities. And it is so with the pause. The no thing turns out to bespeak a reality that is most clearly something. It is paradoxical that in our lives empty can be full, negative can be affirmative, the void can be where most happens. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
There is something in the Christian message which is opposed to established authority. There is something in the Christian experience which revolts against subjection to even the greatest and holiest experiences of the past. And this something is indicated in the question of Jesus, “Was the baptism of John from God or mortals?” and in his refusal to give an answer! That which makes an answer impossible is the nature of an authority which is derived from God and not mortals. The place where God gives authority to a mortal cannot be circumscribed. It cannot be legally defined. It cannot be put into the fences of doctrines and rituals. It is here, and you do not know where it comes from. You cannot derive it. You must be grasped by it. You must participate in its power. This is the reason why the question of authority never can get an ultimate answer. Certainly there are many preliminary answers. There is no day in our lives in which we do not give, silently or openly, answers to the questions of authority, saying mostly “yes” and sometimes “no.” However, an ultimate answer we cannot give. We only point to a reality, as Jesus does. And this is what our religious leaders could and should do—the churches, and the ministers, and the theologians, and every Christian who acts as a priest to other Christians. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
They all can raise their fingers as Jesus did to John, and as John did to Jesus. We all can point passionately, but not as established authorities, to the Crucified—as does the Baptist, in the tremendous picture by the antiquated painter Matthias Grunewald. There his whole being is in the finger with which he points to the Cross. This is the greatest symbol of which I know for the true authority of the Church and the Bible. They should not point to themselves but to the reality which breaks again and again through the established forms of their authority and through the hardened forms of our personal experiences. And once more we ask: “What does it mean that the question of authority cannot get ultimate answer?” It would sound like a blasphemy if I said, “Because God cannot give an answer.” It would sound not blasphemous but conventional if I said, “Because God is Spirit.” Yet both sentences mean the same. God who is Spirit cannot give an ultimate answer to the question of authority. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
The churches, their leaders and members, often ignore the infinite significance of the words “God is Spirit.” However, the sharp eyes of the enemy see what these words mean. Nietzsche calls the mortal who first said that God is Spirit the first one of those who have killed God. His profound insight into the human soul made it certain to him that a God who is not circumscribed on a definite place, who does not answer definitively the question of authority, cannot be accepted by most human beings. If he were right, we either had to agree with him that there is no God left, or we had to return to a God who tells us a definite answer to the question of authority, and subjects us by Divine order to an established religious authority as the Earthly representative of one’s own Heavenly authority as the Earthly representative of one’s own Heavenly authority. However, this God is not the God who is Spirit. Actually, such a God is the Heavenly image of the Earthly authorities which use him for the consecration of their own power. This God is not the God of whom Jesus speaks in our story. The God who cannot answer the question of ultimate authority because he is Spirit does not remove the preliminary authorities with whom we live our daily lives. God does not deprive us of the protection of those who have more wisdom and power than we have. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
God does not isolate us from the community to which we belong and which is a part of ourselves. However, he dines ultimate significance to all these preliminary authorities, to all those who claim to be images of his authority and who distort God’s authority into the oppressive power of a Heavenly tyrant. The God who does not answer the questions of ultimate authority transforms the preliminary authorities into media and tools of himself—of the God who is Spirit. Parental authority in Heaven, but it is the earliest tool through which the Spiritual qualities of order and self-control and love are mediated to us. Therefore, the parents must be and remain subjects of honor, but not of unconditional authority. Even God whom we call the Father in Heaven cannot answer the ultimate questions of authority. How could the parents? The authority of wisdom and knowledge on Earth is not the consecrated image of the authority of Heavenly omniscience, but it is the tool through which the Spiritual qualities of humility and knowledge and wisdom are mediated to us. Therefore, the wise ones should be honored but not accepted as unconditional authorities. The authorities in community and society, in nation and state, are not consecrated images of Heavenly power and justice, but they are tools through which the Spiritual qualities of mutuality, understanding, righteousness, and courage can be mediated to us. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Therefore, the social authorities should be accepted as guarantees of the external order but not as those which determine the meaning of our lives. The authority of the Church is not consecrated Earthly image of the Heavenly Ruler of the Church, but it is a medium through which the Spiritual substance of our lives is preserved and protected and reborn. Even the authority of Jesus the Christ is not the consecrated image of the mortal who rules as a dictator, but it is the authority of one who is emptied oneself of all authority; it is the authority of the mortal on the Cross. If you say that God is Spirit and that he is manifest on the cross, it is one and the same thing. And you who are fighting against authorities and you who are searching for authorities, listen to the story in which Jesus fights against them and establishes an authority which cannot be established! Here is an answer, namely, that no answer can be given except the one that, beyond all preliminary authorities, you must keep yourselves open to the power of one who is ground and the negation of everything which is authority on Earth and in Heaven! #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
It is easy to understand why so many persons have little faith in such teachings, but it is hard to understand why so few persons take the trouble to investigate them. Most people are too shallow—for which they are not to be blamed, since living itself is a fatiguing job—to be able to mine successfully for Reality, or for Truth, which is the knowledge of reality. It is hard for the moderns to appreciate that are years, when measured against Jesus’ teaching, are often spent in futile activities, hard to understand with the spiritual that they merely exist and do not really live. They bow too quickly before the mystery of life and being, resign further search and enquiry, make no more effort to develop and use their mental and intuitive faculties. Faith and patience are deserted too soon. Quite a number seek understanding of life’s meaning, but few seek a true understanding. Most want a partisan or prejudiced one, an endorsement of inherited ideas or personal satisfactions. Too many are married for life to their personal views: they are not seekers of Truth and are not really willing to learn the New and the True. It is a wrong and yet common notion to believe that one is not in a position to start out on the Quest. The business person pleads one’s business cares, the sinner one’s sins, the antiquated mortal one’s age, and the young person one’s youth as an excuse for failing to make any beginning at all. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
However, is it not the communal life of modern mortals bound to be submerged in the It-World? Consider the two chambers of this life, the economy and the state: are they even thinkable in their present dimensions and ramifications, expect on the basis of a superior renunciation of all immediacy—and even an inexorably resolute repudiation of any alien authority that does not itself have its source in this area? And if the I that experiences and uses holds sway here—in the economy, the I uses opinions and aspirations—is it not precisely to this absolute dominion that we owe the extensive and firm structure of the great objective fabrics in these two spheres? Does not the form-giving greatness of leading state people and business people depend on their way of seeing the human beings with whom they have to deal not as carriers of an inexperienceable You but rather as centers of service and aspirations tat have to be calculated and employed according to their specific capacities? If they refused to add up He + He + He to get an It, and tried instead to determine the sum of You and You and You, which can never be anything else than you, would not their World come crashing down upon them? If not an exchange of form-giving mastery for a puttering dilettantism, and of lucid, powerful reason for murky enthusiasm, what would this come to? #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
And when we turn our eyes from the leaders to the led and consider the fashion of modern work and possession, do we not find that modern developments have expunged almost every trace of a life in which human beings confront each other and have meaningful relationships? It would be absurd to try to reverse this development; and if one could bring off this absurdity, the tremendous precision instrument of this absurdity, the tremendous precision instrument of this civilization would be destroyed at the same time, although this alone makes life possible for the tremendously increased numbers of humanity. Speaker, you speak too late. However, a moment ago you might have believed your own speech; now this is no longer possible. For an instant ago you saw no less than I that the state is no longer led: the strokers still pile up coal, but the leaders merely seem to rule the racing engines. And in this instant while you speak, you can hear as well as I how the machinery of the economy is beginning to hum in an unwonted manner; the overseers give you a superior smile, but death lurks in their hearts. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
They tell you they have adjusted the apparatus to modern conditions; but you notice the henceforth they can only adjust themselves to the apparatus, as long as that permits it. Their spokesperson instruct you that the economy is taking over the heritage of the state; you know that there is nothing to be inherited but the despotism of the proliferating It under which the I, more and more impotent, is still dreaming that it is in command. Only seldom during a lifetime, and that very briefly, will mortals give a thought to these larger features of their existence—to its unreality, to its unreality, to its changeability, and to its mortality. Some people do not succeed n making the self-disciplinary grade which the quest of philosophy calls for. This is because they are more easily distracted from the quest by their personal feelings than they should be. People who live unaware of why they are here consequently live unconcerned with what seem like mere abstractions lacking any utility at all. They could not face truth for they would be embarrassed by the Goddess’s unshrinking gaze. I learned from each thing that I touched. And there were moments when all the color and texture became too lustrous, too overpowering. I wept inwardly. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
The Purest form of Love, the Warmest Kind of Love, the Most Exciting Love is Knowing that these Feelings Are Not Mine for Another, but Mine for Me!
I have no special circle of friends who think the way I do, no rights, no wrongs, no desired ends. There was no doubt in my mind, at least at this moment, that he was from the devil, that God and the devil existed, that beyond the isolation I had known only hours ago lay this vast realm of dark beings and hideous meanings and I had been swallowed into it somehow. It occurred to me quite clearly I was being punished for my life, and yet that seemed absurd. Millions believed as I believed the World over. Why the hell was this happening to me? And a grim possibility started irresistibly to take shape, that the World was no more meaningful than before, and this was but another horror. “In God’s name, get away!” I shouted. I had to believe in God now. I had to. That was absolutely the only hope. I went to make the Sign of the Cross. For one moment he started at me, his eyes wide with range. And then he remained still. He watched me make the Sign of the Cross. He listened to me call upon God again and again. He only smiled, making his face a perfect mask of comedy from the proscenium arch. This reveals a World with no structure of human relations and no moral structure—no rights, no wrongs, no purposes. It is a celebration of isolation and emptiness. No wonder I am driven inside myself, taking refuge in an essentially narcissistic relation with myself. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
The purest form of love, the warmest kind of love, the most exciting love is knowing that these feelings are not mine for another, but mine for me. However, this solipsism, a powerful illustration of the me decade, leads to my anxiety, which at this point is a sign of residual health. I am just beginning to see how scary it is to live first for myself. Nonetheless, self-discipline can seem like self mutiny when the growing degree of resentment and anger possesses one and one can sense that in one’s alienation and isolation, one has somehow missed the boat. There is no genuine freedom at all in a family that has been broken up by the fact that one has experienced death by suicide. The main problem in the “if I am me’ syndrome, and the reason it so quickly goes bankrupt in the search for personal freedom, is that it omits other people; it fails to enrich our humanity. It does not confront destiny as embodied in the community. If we all subscribe to the doctrine, “I do my thing and you do your thing. I am not in this World to live up to your expectations, and you are not in this World to live up to mine. You are you and I am I; if by chance we find each other, it is beautiful. If not, it cannot be helped,” this yields the courage—or arrogance, if one wishes to call it that—of one against the World. True, it may be a necessary phase of individuation at certain times in one’s history—and I think the past decade has been some a time. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
However, the me against the World attitude is a cop-out, it is a way to avoid or neglect problems, responsibilities, or commitments as a permanent way of life. The I detached from a Thu disintegrates. Narcissism is self-hate disguised as self-love. It is probably the cruelest and most insidious form of self-deception, because it destroys the healing power of loving relationships. We must now transcend the seduction of the mirror, and replace the ego’s image with a moral and political vision which restores our morale and enriches our humanity. The “I am me” always sooner or later comes to grief because it tries to escape confronting the destiny that limits every expression of freedom. Nothing keeps you bound except your Me—until you break its chains, its handcuffs, and are free. It our birth, the cutting of the umbilical cord is a first step on the long and tortuous path, fraught with endless difficulties and emblazoned with many joys, becoming autonomous. Obviously, we never fully reach our goals. However, until we become aware that individuation occurs in our confronting, accepting, or engaging in various ways our destiny as social creatures, we shall never even start on the right track. If there are no limits in a human relationship, no place in the other where one cannot go, there is then no gratifying relationship from which we can learn. The concept of the unconscious used to provide this, but now, when everyone wears one’s dreams on one’s sleeve, it no longer does. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Complete self-transparency, not withstanding its value as an ideal aim, is impossible and even undesirable. To keep the secret self-that sanctum sanctorum—is as important as the transparency. The new narcissism brought with it a distrust of reality, as though we could never be sure anything was real, and we grasped desperately at what was inside ourselves in the hope of finding an anchor. The beneficial side f this uncertainty about reality is shown in the Christian story of the person asking: Am I a mortal looking at the World, or am I a child of God dreaming I am on the quest for truth? The negative side is shown when reality has come to seem more and more like what we are shown by the cameras. There comes to mind the scene from Apocalypse Now, where the marine at night is desperately shooting at random not knowing where the enemies’ shells are coming from, not knowing where his commander is or even who he is or whether he even has a commander. It is a Kafkaesque story that we are playing out, except that it is not played out now on a calm scene: it is played with atom bomb, germ warfare, biological weapons, fake news, and the possibility of annihilated cities and the dreaded prospect of darkness at noon. It is the uncertainty about the reality of oneself that threatens us. The self becomes increasingly insignificant in our World of technology. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
The emphasis on living now, with no ability to get solace or renewal from the past of future, the inability to commit oneself because one is not sure there is a self, the pervasive sense of purposelessness and vague despondency always threatening to become severe depression—these are all symptoms crying out that something has gone radically wrong with the self in relation to this World. The new narcissism and the me decade are symptoms of what has gone wrong with the reality of oneself. We seem to have to question every relationship, and the answers continue to be ambivalent. Confronted mostly by hipster, this unreality of the self has led to a fear of psychosis on a scale broader than ever before. For their elders all these compulsive-obsessional symptoms—the rigidity, the hollowness, the lack of affect—were protections against psychosis. However, many are turning to strong opioids and street drugs to shock to one’s consciousness that produces makes it clear that a similar shock was possible for the whole of society. More and more the question is being asked whether society as a whole is psychotic, and the pause after the question is a sign that the answer could be yes as well as no. The widespread passion to be me with the assumption that then I will be free turns into becoming a candidate for a mental hospital. The inmates in mental hospitals are there because they cannot be themselves. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
As one man puts it in the hospital, “Here we are ourselves with a vengeance; ourselves and nothing whatever but ourselves. We go full steam through life under the pressure of self. Each one shuts oneself up in the cask of self. Sink to the bottom by self-fermentation, seals oneself in with the bung of self, and seasons in the well of self, no one here weeps for the woes of others. No one here listens to anyone else’s ideas.” There can be no sense of the self without a sense of the destiny of that self. How we respond to the facts of illness, disaster, good fortune, success, renewed life, death ad infinitum is crucial; and the pattern of such response is the self relating to destiny. For when all is said and done, the sense of self consists in the relationship between the person’s freedom and his or her destiny. So we must conclude that the lack of sense of reality of the self is due to the fact that we have omitted destiny. We secretly tend to believe that advertisements that tell us that we are unlimited, the sky is the limit, we will be 100-percent winners, we make our own destiny, and so on. And it is this that robs us of the sense of reality—and of adventure also—in our encountering the vicissitudes of human existence. It is certain that the “if I am me, I will be free” is a mistaken path, for it lacks the sense of destiny that gives freedom to reality. Instead of freedom, this path leads to isolation and estrangement. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Spirit in its human manifestation is mortal’s response to one’s person. Mortals speak in many languages—tongues of language, of art, of action—but the spirit is one; it is response to the individual that appears from the mystery and addresses us from the mystery. Spirit is word. And even as verbal speech may first become word in the brain of a mortal and then become sound in one’s throat, although both are merely refractions of the true event because in truth language does not reside in mortals but mortals stand in language and speak out of it—so it is with all words, all spirits. Spirit is not in the I but between I and society. It is not like the blood that circulates in you but like the air in which you breathe. When one is able to respond to the individual that means mortals live in the spirit. When one enters into this relation with one’s whole being, one is able to do that. It is solely by virtue of one’s power to relate that mortals are able to live in the spirit. However, it is here that the fate of the relational events rears up most powerful. The more powerful the response, the more powerfully it ties down the individual and as by a spell binds it into an object. Only silence toward the individual, the silence of all languages, the taciturn waiting in the unformed, undifferentiated, prelinguistic word leaves the individual free and stands together with it in reserve where the spirit does not manifest itself but is. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
All response binds the individual into the rational World. That is the melancholy of mortals, and that is one’s greatness. For thus knowledge, this works, thus imagine and example come into being among the living. However, whatever has thus been changed into It and frozen into a thing among things is still endowed with the meaning and the destiny to change back ever again. When it bestowed itself upon mortals and begot the response in one–ever again—that was the intention in that hour of the spirit—the object shall catch fire and become present, returning to the element from which it issued, to beheld and lived by mortals as present. The fulfillment of this meaning and this destiny is frustrated by the mortal who has become reconciled to the It-World as something that is to be experienced and used and who holds down what is tied into it instead of freeing it, who observes it instead of heeding it, and instead of receiving it utilizes it. Knowledge: as one beholds what confronts one, its being is disclosed to the knower. What one beheld as present one will have to comprehend as an object, compare with objects, assign a place in order of objects, and describe and analyze objectively; only as an individual can it be absorbed into the store of knowledge. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
However, in the act of beholding it was no thing among things, no event among events; it was presented exclusively. It is not in the law that is afterward derived from the appearance but in the appearance itself that the being communicates itself. That we think the universal is merely an unreeling of skeinlike event that was beheld in the particular, in a confrontation. And now it is locked into the Individual-form of conceptual knowledge. Whoever unlock it and beholds it again as present, fulfills the meaning of that act of knowledge as something that is actual and active between mortals. However, knowledge can also be pursued by stating: “so that is how it is constituted; that is were it belongs.” What has become in It is then taken as an It, experienced and sued as an It, employed along with other tings for the project of conquering the World. “One day, as he was teaching the people in the temple and preaching the gospel, the chief priests and the scribes with the elders came up and said to him, ‘Tell us by what authority you do these things, or what it is that gave you this authority.’ He answered them, ‘I also will ask you a question; now tell me, Was the baptism of John from Heaven or from mortals?’ And they discussed it with one another, saying, ‘If we say, from Heaven, he will say, from mortals, and all the people will stone us; for they are convinced that John was a prophet.” So they answered that they did not know whence it was. And Jesus said to them, “Neither will I tell you by what authority I do these things,” reports Luke 20.1-8. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
The story we have read was very important to the early Christians who preserved it for us. If we look at it superficially, no reason seems to exist for such a high valuation: the Jewish leaders tried to trap Jesus by a shrewd question, and Jesus trapped them by an even shrewder question. It is a pleasant anecdote. However, it is more than this? Indeed, it is infinitely more. It does something surprising: it answers the fundamental question of prophetic religion by not answering t. AN answer to the question of authority is refused by Jesus, but the way in which Christ refuses the answer is the answer. Let us imagine that Christ had answered the question of the religious leaders about his authority by asking them about the source of their authority! They could have replied easily and convincingly. The chief persists could have said, “The source of our authority is our consecration accord to a tradition which goes back without interruption to Moses and Aaron. The sacred tradition of which we are a link from the past to the future gives us our authority.” And the scribes could have answered, “The source of our authority is our knowledge—beyond that of anybody else—of the Scriptures. We have studied them day and night since our early childhood, as a student of the Word of God must do. Because we are experts in interpreting the Holy Scriptures, we have authority.” #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
And they all together would have said to Jesus, “But who are you, who are not consecrated and not studied in the Scriptures, and without the wisdom of age and the experience of practice? Which is the source of your authority? You have not only taught and preached, you have also acted as a radical, without our approval. You have driven out the temple of all who sold and bought, you have overturned the tables of the money-changers and the seat of those who sold pigeons. And you know yourself that they are necessary for the preservation of sacrifices! By what authority have you turned against the religion as it has been given to us by Moses and by all generations since his time?” I awoke in the middle of the night to discover the room was filled with bright light. I could see all the furniture. A marvelous peace pervaded me. I said to myself, “God is that you?” and instinctively, I knew that it was. After a while I got up when the experience was fading to check its extraordinary nature and confirmed that none of the electric lamps were switched on. Since then thirteen years have passed. I have a loving husband and loving children, enough money for the basic things of life. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
However, for some time life was not meaningful and I felt empty. I looked at my friends, so willing to accept this hollow life, but I could not. It became intolerable. Five years ago, I was shown the spiritual quest of truth and this has since become my mainstay. Was there a connection between the vision of Light and the subsequent restlessness until one turned to the quest? That there is such a line, is confirmed by many other instances scattered around the World. Every mortal who catches such a glimpse of one’s diviner possibilities will be haunted forever after by them until one tries to catch up in actual thought and life with them. The endeavour to do so brings one sooner or later to the Quest for God. In the moment of first meeting with one’s Higher Self, the quest is laid open to one in reality. One has to see the opportunity and to take the first steps by an act of intuition and a venture of faith. There will be many more succeeding steps if one is to continue the quest and most probably a number of missteps, but it all begins with this initial recognition and reaction. One who meets for the first time the challenge in an adept’s eyes, meets one’s fate, did one know it. For one is at once presented subconsciously with a choice between two courses: the one leading to a higher kind of life aim, the other continuing on normal lines. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
When the truth explodes suddenly like a NASA rocket blasting off beneath the traditions or beliefs or habits which held one captive in untruth, the light may dazzle and bewilder one or it may set one free from them in a way and with a speed which could not have existed ordinarily. It is this faith that there is a World-Idea and that we much adjust our lives to its or suffer unnecessarily which makes one out from the herd. It is the desire to do for oneself what Life wishes one to do, to realize one’s higher potentials, that puts one on this Quest. It is this feeling that one is not in one’s true place that pushes a mortal into this search for a teaching or a teacher. Mortals whose lives have been so endangered and whose minds so troubled will either turn for relief to gross sensuality or search for wholeness in new spirituality. The sickness of the World wants something much more than a mere philosophy of the lecture-room to cure it; no bottles of verbal drugs can prove potent in the present desperation. Not all mortals understand just at what time, what date, their quest of God will start. This may be because it did not happen all at once. “Wings stir the sunlit dust of the cathedral in which the Past is buried to its chin in marble,” reports Stan Rice from “Poem on Crawling int Bed: Bitterness” Body of work (1983). #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
How Can Mortals Accuse the Gods! For they Say Evils Come from Us—However, they themselves, by Reason of their Sins, Have Sufferings Beyond those Destined for them!
That was permission, was it not? Or cosmic indifference, I am not sure which. I would have said nothing about the book to anyone; I had only brooded on it in those long painful hours when I could not really think, except in terms of chapters: an ordering; a road map through the mystery; a chronicle of seduction and pain. They are still asking me those questions now. Even Gabrielle, who in the main never bothers with questions, never says much of anything. They want to know when I am going to recover, when I am going to talk about what happened, when I am going to stop writing through the night. As for the Great Family, well, it was not likely that any of them would think it more than a fiction, with a touch here and there of truth; that is, if they ever happened to pick up the book. Are we responsible for our destiny? If we dare to answer that by saying “Partly so,” we then face another question just as difficult. That is: If destiny is a given, a vital design that gives us talents and limits and that we cannot revoke, how can responsibility have any meaning? The ancient Greeks faced this problem, together with the moral implications of destiny, when the ethical consciousness of the Greek civilization was being formed. During this period, around 1000 B.C., Homer relates the following fascinating incident from the Trojan War. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
The combined Greek forces were encamped around the walls for Troy. Agamemnon, the general in chief of the Greek armies, had stolen Achilles’ mistress from the Achilles’ tent. When Achilles returned and discovered this, his rage knew no bounds. He was not only a man of fiery temper, but also the best fighter in the Greek army. There hung in the balance the portentous question: Would the whole Greek expedition be destroyed by the enmity between these two men? As these two heroes confront each other, Agamemnon says: “Not I…was the cause of this act, but Zeus and the furies who walk in darkness: they it was who…put wild ate [madness] in my understanding, on that day when I arbitrarily took Achilles’ prize from him. So what could I do? Deity will always have its way.” In other words destiny—Zeus and his wild ate—will brook no denial. Is Agamemnon saying, “I was brainwashed; not I but my unconscious did it”? It may seem so, but he is not. He is preparing the way to assume his own responsibility. He then goes on: “But since I was blinded by ate, and Zeus took away my understanding, I am willing to make peace and give abundant compensation.” Ah! Since destiny did these things to me, I will give compensation. Cooling down, Achilles answers: “Let the son of Atreus [Agamemnon] go his way…For Zeus the counselor took away his understanding.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
The Greeks are saying here that a person is responsible even though the gods work inwardly, even though they take away one’s understanding. That is, one is destined, but one is responsible for what this destiny makes one do. Although Agamemnon is driven by destiny, which work through powers in his unconscious mind, he is nevertheless responsible. And responsibility is inseparable from freedom. Freedom and responsibility on one side, and ate and destiny on the other—these operate simultaneously in this dialectical and intimately human paradox. Julian Jaynes reminds us of another incident from Homer and the Trojan War. Hector finds himself confronting Achilles in the heat of battle Hector does not want to fight Achilles at that moment, so he backs away. His withdrawing is not determined by cowardice, for instance, he is not forced by Achilles’ sword to back up. Instead, the goddess puts her shield around Hector in the form of a could under which he could back out of the battle without any loss of self-esteem. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
The furies who walk in darkness and the goddess surrounding Hector with a could are superb synonyms for destiny. Indeed, the gods and goddesses were personifications of destiny; they set the ultimate limits on human actions opened up possibilities for human beings. Anyone who opposed them outright was brought to ruin by such means as a bolt of lightning—what we moderns call an act of God, carrying of this ancient belief—from the hand of Zeus. This sense of responsibility is partly the impingement of culture upon us. If we are to live with any harmony in community, we have to have responsibility. Those who pursue this quest do so because they too want to be happy. Do not imagine that only the Wordly pleasure-seekers, the hard money-hunters, the romantic love-dreamers, or the ambitious fame-followers are in this respect, in a different category. It is only their method and result that are different. All without exception want the feeling of undisturbed happiness, but only the questers know that it can be found only in the experience of spiritual self-fulfillment. Fame, fortune, love, or pleasure may contribute towards the outer setting of a happy person’s life but what of that person oneself? Who has not heard or known of mortals sitting in misery amid all their riches or power, of death forcing a well-mated could to bid each other farewell? When we see it, we must love the highest. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
Culture can help us mitigate or meliorate destiny: through culture we can learn to build architectural marvels as well are Cresleigh Homes to keep out the snow and the Winter cold and other elements. Through culture we barter our services for food so that we do not starve. However, culture cannot overturn destiny, cannot erase it. We can collectively cover our eyes to the results of our actions, blind ourselves to the full import of our cruelty and our responsibility for that cruelty as the Mayor of Sacramento does to housing crisis. However, this requires a numbing our of sensitivity and will sooner or later take its toll in neurotic symptoms. What lures a person to this quest? It may be that the ideas by which, and with which, one has lived for a long time have proved insufficient, false, or feeble. It may be that bereavement, calamity, or suffering have brought one to cherish peace. It may be nothing else than the simple need for higher quality of living. It may even be that one comes to this quest, as some undoubtedly do, because one seeks a special benefit—healing, relief, amendment of fortune, perhaps. However, in that case one must remain on it because one seeks God, alone. Lastly let it be noted that if for some reason the first step on this quest is the final step down a long road of increasing desperation, for most it ought to be the first step up a garden path of increasing joy. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
For Homer the acknowledging of destiny was by no means a wallowing in guilt, but an acceptance of personal responsibility. Homer has the gods proclaim in the Odyssey: “O alas, how now do mortals accuse the gods! For they say evils comes from us [the gods]. However, they themselves, by reason of their sins, have sufferings beyond those destined for them.” Some come to the quest for spirituality through the joy enkindled by great music, inspired writing, or majestic landscape, or through response to beauty; but others—and they are more—come through being wrecked or crushed, threatened with destruction, left hopeless, forlorn, and helpless. They reach the end of their strength, or discover the falseness and futility of their wisdom. One may come to the need or, as well as the illumination by, the God through two very different paths: through joy and sweetness or through suffering and sadness. In these Homeric tales the early Greeks were learning—an arduous task in civilization requiring hundreds and hundreds of years—that freedom and destiny require each other, that they are in dialectical relation with each other. Agamemnon knows that he must assume his responsibility by compensating Achilles for what he believes the god– for instance, destiny—made him do. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
In the Old World it is the general belief that a mortal turns toward this spiritual quest to fulfill their destiny for either two reasons. If one is young, it is because one has an inborn genius for it. If one is somewhat older, it is because one is dissatisfied with life, disappointed in it, or bereaved by its calamities. However, the philosophical view, while including these reasons, goes father and wider. For it sees that some, notably those who are aesthetically sensitive and those who are martially fulfilled, are indeed satisfied with their existing form of life. Only, they sense the greater possibilities open to a human being and wish to expand it to realize them more completely. The Greeks found, furthermore, that their belief in destiny, expressed in the gods and goddesses, energized and strengthened them individually. The typical Greek citizens, as anyone who reads Herodotus or Thucydides knows, were amazingly self-reliant and autonomous. We look at their activities and realize that it is not true that belief in destiny tends to make one passive and inert. The opposite is true—namely, that belief in unlimited freedom, as the flower children demonstrated, tends to paralyze one. For unlimited freedom is like a river with no banks; the water is not controlled in its follow and hence spills out in every direction and is lost in the sands. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Hence the seeming paradox that the deterministic movements, like Calvinism with its predestination, and Marxism with its economic determinism of history, have such great power. One would think that since people are the result of their predestination or their economic status, not much change is possible. However, the Marxists and Calvinists work energetically to change people and often with great success. In other words, their belief in their particular form of destiny give them power. Therefore, it would be too wide-sweeping a generalization to assert that all entrants on the quest come out of disgust with the Worldly life. This may be true for some, for several reasons, but it is not so true for Westerners. For among the latter there are those whose approach to life is through art—through sensitivity to beauty and joy—or through science—through the pursuit of truth about the Universe. Such persons are not unhappy, not alienated from Earthy affairs, but they know that a deeper basis to their present satisfaction is required. It is not only those who have exhausted all their limited means of attaining happiness who turn away and come to this quest: there are others whose capacity for enjoyment still remains, but having had the experience of a single glimpse or understood the pointers given by inspired are, they are attracted toward living on a higher plane. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
However, where some turn away from the World for negative reasons because of their misery and disappointment, others come to the quest for beneficial reasons; they have sensed or suspected, felt, or been told of, a higher plane of existence: they respond to a divine call. One is not sacrificing so much that is dear to the World for the sake of an empty abstraction, nor trampling on inborn egotism for the sake of a cold intellectual conception. One is doing this for somethings that has become a warm living presence in this life—for the God. After going through innumerable smaller decisions, once in a while a person arrives at a point where one’s freedom and destiny seems united. This was true of Martin Luther, wo, when he nailed his ninety-nine theses on the door of the cathedral at Wittenberg, declared, “Here I stand, I can do no other.” Such acts are the fruition of years of minor decisions culminating in the crucial decision in which one’s freedom and destiny merge. Deeper than all other desires is this need to gain consciousness of the God. Only it is unable to express itself directly at first, so it expresses itself in the only ways we permit it to—first the physical, then the emotional and intellectual quest of happiness. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
By encountering destiny directly, the Greeks had their own ways also of mitigating it. The clever individual, like Ulysses, could know which gods to set against other gods in his sacrifices. The Greeks could guarantee an auspicious wind with which to sail from Aulis to Troy by sacrificing Iphigenia, daughter of Agamemnon. This cruel act, incidentally, clinched Agamemnon’s destiny—one would later be murdered by his wife for his part in the bloody heritage of Mycenae. Therefore, the impulse which puts a person’s feet on the spiritual path, is not always an explicable one. It is sometimes hard to say why one obeys it, wen it will hinger the ego’s natural cravings at the very start and lead to an unnatural self-effacement at the very end. All one knows is that something him one bids one begin the journey and keeps one on it despite its hurts to one’s pride, one’s passion, and one’s ego. Disenchanted with celebrities and disillusioned with the World, the will be more inclined to turn in the end towards the divinity within themselves, to trust its first faint leadings on Jesus’ assurance that “the Kingdom of Heaven is within you!” Such independence is outwardly a lonely path, but with patience it will prove not less satisfying. Why should anyone be willing to put oneself aside, one’s inclinations and desires, unless one is bidden to do so by a power stronger than one’s own will? #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
In Aeschylus’ drama, when Agamemnon came back from Troy, he marched in as the proud conqueror, one who could scarcely restrain one’s boasting that one had accomplished the laying low of Troy. The chorus hastens to warn one not to commit hubris, the sin of overweening pride, which makes the gods jealous and incites their revenge. It is parallel to our modern, weaker form of the same wisdom “Pride goeth before a fall.” However, Agamemnon, with one’s bluster, does commit hubris, and this leads directly to his death. Hubris is the refusal to accept one’s destiny. It is the person’s belief that one performed great acts all by oneself. It is the tendency to usurp the power of the gods. It is also the denial of how much one is always dependent upon one’s fellow mortals and one’s society. Destiny itself is the course of our talents and assists the victors in these great projects like Trojan War, and when we lose sight of this—as we do when we commit hubris—evil consequences ensure. Others are attracted to these spiritual teachings through an impulse of feeling unsupported by the understanding of reason. It is safe to say that such persons are being led by their souls into this attraction. Does not the possibility or the power to do something about the situation at and confer on one some responsibility to do it? I choose to answer yes. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
Responsibility is no longer simply tied to past causes—for instance, what one did. It must be geared also to present freedom—for example, what I can do. The freedom to act confers on me the responsibility to act. In tis sense freedom and responsibility are united. Responsibility is more than a moral teaching, more than another rule of the ethical life. It is part of the underlying ontological structure of life. This means, obviously, that there is a host of things that we are responsible for that we will never be able to discharge. However, it is better to carry unfulfilled responsibility than to act on some pretense of pure conscience. Such is the interdependence of people in the collective nature of the human community that we need to assume responsibility for a multitude of things. Obviously, I am not saying that we develop neurotic consciences—there may be many reasons for not doing the given thing. For example, my friend brings up his child wrongly, and I had better not act on my hunch that I know how and he does not. However, the freedom inherent in a friendship does confer on me the responsibility to be open to talk with him about it and to share whatever insights I have. Thus, I am not suggesting we be busybodies. I am suggesting we be sensitive, compassionate, and aware of the complex interdependence of our humanity community. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Those who conceive of this quest as escapism are neither right nor wrong. They are right when it is embarked upon because of a neurotic refusal to do for and to oneself with effort what is hoped God or gurus will be able to do without it. They are wrong when it is embarked upon because of an evaluation of life that is made above its distorting battle or out of a compulsive, involuntary, and inner attraction toward the Ideal. Only when thought and experience have run deep enough and wide enough are the ego’s emotional and fleshly hungers likely to yield to spiritual hunger. One can no more help being on the spiritual quest than one can help being on this Earth. The hunger to know the inner mysteries of life, and the aspirations to experience the Soul’s peace and love will not leave one alone. They are part of one, as hands or feet are parts of one. When ripened by experience, it is natural and inevitable that mortals should yearn to be untied with their divine Source. Through widely different kinds of external experience, the ego seeks but never finds enduring happiness. Discovering in the end that it is on a wrong road, it turns to internal experience. Then or melancholy lot took shape in primal history? Indeed, it developed—insofar as mortal’s conscious life developed in primal history. However, in conscious life cosmic being recurs as human becoming. Spirit appears in time as a product, even a byproduct, of nature, and yet it is spirit than envelops nature timelessly. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
The opposition of the two basic words as many names in the ages and Worlds; but in its names truth it inheres in the creation. Then you believe after all in some paradise in the primal age of humanity? Even if it was a hell—and the age to which we can go back in historical thought was certainly full of wrath and dread and torment and cruelty—unreal it was not. Primal mortal’s experiences of encounter were scarcely a matter of tame delight; but even violence against a being one really confronts is better than ghostly solicitude from faceless digits! From the former a path leads to God, from the latter only to nothingness. Let us close this enumeration with the pair of most threatening power—death and life. These two belong to each other. In every life death is always present; it works in body and soul from the moment of conception the moment of dissolution. It is present at the beginning of our lives just as much as at their end. At the moment of our birth we begin to die, and we continue to do so daily, throughout our lives. Growth is death, because it undermines the conditions of life even while it is increasing life. However, not to grow is immediate death. All of us stand between the fascination of life and the anxiety of death, and sometimes between the anxiety of life and the fascination of death. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
Death and life are the greatest, the all-embracing powers, which try to separate us from the love of God. Even if we could fully understand the life of the primitive, it would be no more than a metaphor for that of the truly primal mortal. Hence the primitive affords us only brief glimpses into the temporal sequence of the two basic words. More complete information we receive from the child. Here it becomes unmistakably clear ow the spiritual reality of the basic words emerges from a natural reality: that of the basic word I-You from a natural association, that of the basic word I-It from a natural discreteness. One’s own higher self will direct the properly equipped seeker’s steps towards philosophy. One may go reluctantly, fighting against its ideas secretly or openly for months and years. However, in the end one will have to yield to what will become quite plainly a divine leading. One’s intellect will have to obey this irresistible intuition. If a mortal is born with innate tendencies for this quest, nothing will keep one from it and one will surely come to it in the course of time. One may come because one is so satisfied with life that one believes in God’s goodness. One may come because one is so disappointed in life that one disbelieves in God’s goodness. However, by whatever the road, one will come to it because the urge will be irresistible. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
When One’s Personal Life is Miraculously Saved During Some Period of Great Danger, Perhaps in the Face of Death, it is for a Purpose!
Who would cash this royalty check? No one. It was seven o’ clock and the fancy skyscraper, which housed Shanghai World Financial Center, at 100 Century Avenue, Lu Jia Zui, Pudon Xinqu was for the most part closed, and Armand had no identification because his wallet had somehow disappeared day before yesterday. So dismal this glaring gray Winter twilight, the sky boiling silently with low metallic clouds. Even the stores had taken on an uncommon grimness, with their hard facades of marble or granite, the wealth within gleaming like archaeological relics under museum glass. He plunged his hands in his pockets to warm them, and he bowed his head as the wind came with greater fierceness and the first sign of rain. He did not give a darn about the check, really. He could not imagine pressing the buttons of a phone. Nothing here seemed particularly real to him, not even the chill. Only the dream seemed real—Lestat had somehow set into motion something that even he could never control. When we express our freedom peacefully, openly, cheerfully it is easier to persuade others to want to help us achieve justice. This might entail a high price, but it will achieve the sense of dignity, the rebirth, the self-esteem among the mortals—it will earn freedom for their people. The way of non-violence means a willingness to suffer and sacrifice, but it is a way to free people from a permanent death of the spirit, and noting can be more redemptive. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
What is the inner dignity, the experience of rebirth, that occurs as one takes one’s stand? Let us note two cases. When one experiences a loss of freedom for the first time, something happens inside a person. One crosses a barrier. It is an emotional experience which jars and confuses one; later, after the emotional impact one has worn thin, one is left with a new sense of oneself as a citizen. An individual is able to sense this, and one suspects that it is truth of others. When people refuse to be victimized any longer by the Kashisties (fictional secret rouge law enforcement troops from Law and Order SVU), they become transformed into a power community of men and women, capable, despite the severest limitations, of free and even heroic acts. Their subsequent activity at the polls and in initiating a boycott of businesses that practice discrimination suggests that this kind of freedom, though essentially personal, will inevitably lead to social action, and that freedom once won is not readily surrendered. If we do not encourage less affluent communities to engage in direct action-picket lines, boycotts, demand civil rights protection in housing and a safe and clean-living environment with properly functioning appliance—all the money and loving care in the World will not succeed in providing them with a dignified life. Our people must feel that they are shaping their own lives; they that have implemented changes in the politics of the powerful. One cannot engineer a freedom. A freed mortal is not yet free. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Thus people do earn their right to be free. They experience the birth of themselves inwardly, shape themselves, experience the dignity of an independent human being. We might think of the demonstration as a rite of the initiation through which the people of the World are mustered into the sacred order of freedom. It is also a rite the entire World must undergo to exorcise the demons of racial, gender, creed, cultural, and spiritual hate. “All that separates, whether of race, class, creed or sex is inhuman and must be overcome,” reports Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex. If in a spasm f emancipated exuberance these rites should cause inconvenience or violate the canons of cultivated good taste or trouble the dreams of some good-livers—I think it is forgivable….exuberance and…inconvenience are small prices to pay when a World is undoing historic wrong. Freedom is an art demanding practice, and too many of us are unpracticed. Freedom is an art demanding practice, and too many of us are unpracticed. Freedom is not an end; it is a beginning and a process. We feel further from the end now than we did before a decade’s progress was wrought. This is part of the fact that freedom is never static, never gained once and for all; and this is because essential freedom is an inner state that must be re-affirmed in each act. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The majority leaps at the thought that life has some higher mean, some better worth. Destiny, which can always present as the limiting factor, may make the struggle to attain freedom more difficult than at first envisioned. This certainly is true for the egalitarian movement; sometimes people do not build their foundation deep enough to sustain the later shocks. However, essential freedom is an inner state that is reaffirmed in each act. The struggle is surely more complex than we may foresee, but the complexity is splendid; perhaps that is freedom too. “I have told you all this,” said Jesus Christ, “so that you may have the happiness I have had,” reports John 15.11. In starting this task, he knows that he is not carrying out his own personal desire but following a way chalked out for him by the higher self. There are certain rare moments when intense sorrow or profound bereavement makes a mortal sick at heart. It is then that desires temporarily lose their force, possessions their worth, and even existence itself its reality. One seems to stand outside the busy World those figure flit to and fro like the shadowy characters on a cinema screen. Worst of all, perhaps, significance vanishes from human activity, which becomes a useless tragi-comedy, a going everywhere and arriving nowhere, an insane playing of instruments from which no music issues forth, a vanity of all the vanities. It is then, too, that a terrible suicidal urge may enter one’s blood and one will need all one’s mental ballast not to make away with oneself. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Yet these dark moments are intensely precious, for they may set one’s feet firmly on the higher path. Light here symbolizes the spiritual World, and darkness our Earthly home. Our purely spiritual acts contrast with the gluttonous Worldly activity going on in some communities and a faction of individuals act like wild dogs knawing at a bone and alley cats searching for leftovers. Christ must be the center of our attentions, and his light will draw us to righteous ways. Few realize this whilst all complain. The self-destruction to which one is being urged by focusing on dreaded experiences of life is not the crude physical act, but something subtle—a suicide of thought, emotion, and will. One is being called indeed, to die to one’s ego, to take the desires and passions, the greeds and hates out of one’s life, to learn the art of living in utter independence of externals and in utter dependence on God. And this is that same call which Jesus Christ uttered when he declared: “One that loseth one’s life shall find it.” When discrimination, systematic oppression, or injustice is welcomed or forces on us, we all kind of lose our lives and want to be reborn in Christ and evict the demons out of our temple. Thus the sorrows of life on Earth are but a transient means to an eternal end, a process through which we have to learn how to expand awareness from the person to God. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Only When the person can feel in their own muscles, in their own hearts, that they have risked themselves, that they have leaped, that they have risked themselves, that they have gained the sense of dignity necessary for the real experience of freedom, then freedom of being is gained. Thus, they will develop their collective legends as we developed ours in 1776. “Those who profess to favor freedom and yet deprecate agitation are mortals who want crops without plowing up the ground. They want rain without thunder and lightning. They want the ocean without the awful roar of its many waters. The struggle may be a moral one; or it may be a physical one; or it may be both moral and physical. However, it must be a struggle. Power concedes nothing without demand. It never did and it never will,” reports Sir Frederick Douglass. If a mortal will not come to this quest willingly, because it leads to Truth and one loves Truth, then one must be forced onto it, unwillingly, because there is no other way to alleviate one’s burdens and reduce one’s miseries. When dreams are pleasant, most persons have no inclination to wake up, whereas when they are frightening they soon awaken. So too the dream of Worldly life does not impress them wit the need of true religion until it become tragic or severely disappointing. Only when sorrow drives them to question the value of living do they take a real interest in non-Worldly urges. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Certain events will so arrange themselves as to put a mortal upon the quest, or if one is already on it, to prepare one for a further advance. They will not be pleasant events, for they will crush one’s spirit, or render it lame and weak for a time. However, it is only through this apparent defeat by circumstances that one is compelled to accept a course which will, spiritually, benefit one greatly in the end. Do mortal’s hearts have to be broken before they yield to the Most High? Often, yes, but not if they heed the teacher, prophets, seers, and sages. Where a mortal is ready for this quest but stubbornly clings to one’s old familiar way of thought and life, God may or may not release karma that will tear one away from it. One’s desires will then be macerated by suffering until its will to live gets weaker and weaker. A few come to this quest after the shock produced by the unreasonableness and unfairness and stupidity of the treatment they received from the organization, the group, the sect, the church, the party, to which they belonged. Some crisis in their lives, such as the need to get married or to get divorced, blocked by solemn bleak dogma or decision, become the occasion of the shock. Sometimes, heartless discourtesy provokes swift disillusionment. A single jarring incident, a single deliberate injustice or hurt or insult is enough to bring on such resentment and indignation—penetrating as sharply as a hypodermic needle—that character change and a new outlook were inaugurated. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
Some have even come to the quest not because they had any real vocation for it but because they had nowhere else to go, because the World had lost all meaning, all hope for them through some ghastly tragedy or some heartbreaking loss, and this was a better way than committing suicide. However, the best way to come to the quest is of course to fulfill the higher possibilities as a human being. If they are ever to come alive spiritually, most persons need a drastic shock, an enforced awakening, a sharp arousal from that long sleep which is the egoic existence. Only if it breaks antiquated habits, trends, and inclinations, this is effective, and thus will make a new mortal. When a mortal comes to the point when all one’s outer life dissolves in tragedy or calamity, one comes also to the point when this quest is all that is left to one. However, one may not perceive this truth. One may miss one’s chance. Either consciously or not, one says to oneself, in a sense, “By my I alone I cannot endure this adverse destiny. I must seek help and support from outside myself.” So one goes to another mortal or to an institution, but in the end one must go to God. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
When one’s personal life is miraculously saved during some period of great danger, perhaps in the face of death, it is for a purpose. Before a mortal comes to this path one may have to grope and stumble and struggle for years. If the mortal lets others draw one down below one’s own level, the emotion of remorse and disgust or the logic of suffering and self-preservation may force his return. They need first to discover that they are on the wrong road. Out of the distress or frustration following it may arise the search for a right one. No person makes one take on this task or enterprise, this labour or quest—whatever one wishes to call it. A summons come to one from within, from a part of oneself hidden in mystery, and one obeys. Why? It is for those who feel that their lives ought to hold something more than the mere gaining of material necessities or even the mere satisfying of intellectual urges. If one will follow up this intuition, one will be able to move one’s feet eventually out of darkness into light. When a mortal becomes tired of hearing someone else tell one that one has a soul, and sets out to gain firsthand experience of it for oneself, one becomes spiritual. However, unfortunately, for mortals ever come to this point. Only after they have felt the uncertainties of human affection, the transiencies of human passion, and the insufficiencies of human activities, mortals will seek to feel the real life. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
To those who wish to escape from the pressures of tyrannies of contemporary materialism, philosophical Christianity offers the most effective way and the safest road. It seeks to understand the true relationships between the divine and the human. It will enable them to realize their spiritual potentialities. For materialism is and can be only a temporary phase of mortal’s endeavour to comprehend the facts of life. When the mind is sufficiently developed, the presence of God within us sooner or later, creates of itself the craving for truth and the abstract questions about life, God, and mortals. This knowledge that life in this World can never by fully satisfying makes one commit oneself one day to the quest for God. Christ has conquered these powers which govern the World, and it is affirmed triumphantly in the beautiful and powerful words of the book of Romans in the Holy Bible. “God demonstrates his own love for us in this: While we were still sinners, Jesus Christ died for us,” reports Romans 5.8. If these words have power over our souls in our time, they must say something we feel to be true, even if we do not share the ancient belief in the stars and their constellations. They name the powers in whose bondage we all are and with us all mortals in all periods of history, and the whole of creation. And they show us that which can give us the certainty that these powers do not prevail against us, that they are conquered and that we can participate in the victory over them. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Who, in recent years, and indeed in our whole century, does not feel the irresistible forces which determine our historical and personal destiny? They drive nations and individuals into insoluble conflicts, internal and external; into arrogance and insanity, into revolt and despair, into inhumanity and self-destruction. Each of us is involved in these conflicts and driven to a greater or lesser degree by these forces. The personal life of each of us is in come way determined by them. No security is guaranteed to anyone; no house, no work, no friend, no family, no country anywhere in the World is safe, no plans are certain of fulfillment, all hopes are threatened. The mayor of Sacramento, Darrell Steinberg, even went as far as to tell people if they need food and affordable housing to, “Eat from a garbage can if you have to, sleep somewhere even if it’s a park. None of this matters.” And tent cities are now popping up all along the rail road for miles and miles, and homeless camps are being shutdown, with threats of arrest, as violence and loud words are spoken. Meanwhile, nothing is being done to add affordable housing to prevent homelessness, but that taxpayer funded ($600 million) King’s arena went up overnight, while the team still owns the other perfectly good arena that is sitting empty. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
This is not a new state of things in human history. However, what is new is that during a few years of comparative safety, we had forgotten that this is the true state of things. Now we see it again everywhere because suddenly we are living in its midst in every part of the Earth. No taxation without representation is a slogan originated during the 1700s that summarized one of the 27 colonial grievances of the American colonists in the Thirteen Colonies, which was one of the major causes of the American Revolution. Driven by the forces of fate, we ask the question humankind has always asked: What lies behind this inequality; what is its meaning; how can we endure it? Faith is a living, daring confidence in God’s grace, so sure and certain that a mortal could stake one’s life on it a thousand times. True faith rests upon the character of God and asks no further proof than the moral perfections of the One who cannot lie. It is enough that God has said, “Ask and you shall be given.” Faith in God and Jesus Christ is a gift from Heaven that comes as we choose to believe and as we seek it and hold on to it. You will find some of your greatest joys in your efforts to make your home a place of faith in the Lord Jesus Christ and a place that is permeated with love. That miraculous feeling is what we all want in our homes. It is a feeling that come from being spiritually minded. And it will come to pass that there will be no contention in the land, because of the love of God which does dwell in the hearts of people. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Faith is the key to leading your family to raise to that spiritual place we are meant to experience. As we grow and help others grow in the faith that Jesus Christ is our loving Redeemer, we will feel a desire to repent. As we do, humility will begin to replace pride. As we begin to feel what the Lord has given us, we will want to share more generously. Rivalry for prominence or recognition will diminish. Hate will be driven out by love. And finally, like it did for the people converted by King Benjamin, the desire to do good will fortify everyone against temptation to sin. King Benjamin’s people testified that they had “no more disposition to do evil.” So building faith in Jesus Christ is the beginning of reversing spiritual decline in your family and community and home. That faith is more likely to bring repentance than your preaching against each symptom of spiritual decline. In addition to your example of growing in faith, your praying as a family can play a crucial part in making a home a sacred place. God loves with a great love the mortal whose heart is a light of passion for the impossible. The rest of your life will be the best of your life. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
It is a Rare Gift to Meet a Human Being in Whom Love—and this Means God—is so Overwhelmingly Manifest!
All right. I allowed myself to be taken along. White marble tile, carved gold fixtures; and ancient Roman splendor. Time is important because, although we are eternal beings, we are not going to be able to enjoy the pleasures of being in the flesh and on this Earth forever, and you may miss it, even when you go to Heaven. Nevertheless, we know and believe the love God has for us. “God is love, and one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in one,” reports 1 John 4.16. “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this, if you have love for one another, all mortals will know that you are my disciples,” reports John 13.34-35. After two thousand years are we still able to realize what it means to say, “God is Love”? The writer of the First Epistle of John certainly knew what he wrote, for he drew the consequences: “One who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in one.” God’s abiding in us, making us his dwelling place, is the same thing as our having love as the sphere of our habitation. God and love are not two realities; they are one. God’s Being is the being of love and God’s infinite power of Being is the infinite power of love. Therefore, one who professes devotion to God may abide in God if one abides in love, or one may not abide in God if one does not abide in love. And one who does not speak of God may abide in him if one is abiding in love. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
And since the manifestation of God as love is his manifestation in Jesus Christ, Jesus can say that many of those who do not know him, belong to him, and that many of those who confess their allegiance to him do not belong to him. The criterion, the only ultimate criterion, is love. For God is love, and the divine love is triumphantly manifest in Christ the Crucified. Let me tell you the story of a woman who passed away a few years ago and whose life was spent abiding in live, although she rarely, if ever, used the name of God, and though she would have been surprised had someone told her that she belonged to him who judges all mortals, because he is love and love is the only criterion of his judgment. Her name was Elsa Brandstrom, the daughter of a former Swedish ambassador to Russia. However, her name in the mouths and hearts of hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war during the First World War was the Angel of Siberia. She was an irrefutable, living witness to the truth that love is the ultimate power of Being, even in a century which belongs to the darkest, most destructive and cruel of all centuries since the dawn of humankind. At the beginning of the First World War, when Elsa Brandstorm was twenty-four years of age, she looked out the window of the Swedish Embassy in what was then Saint Petersburg and saw the Germany prisoners of war being driven through the streets on their way to Siberia. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
From that moment on, after what she had seen, Elsa could no longer endure the splendor of the diplomatic life of which, up to then, she had been a beautiful and vigorous center. She became a nurse and began visiting the prison camps. There she saw unspeakable horrors and she, a girl of twenty-four, began, almost alone, the fight of love against cruelty, and she prevailed. She had to fight against the resistance and suspicion of the authorities and she prevailed. She had to fight against the brutality and lawlessness of the prison guards and she triumphed. She had to fight against cold, hunger, dirt and illness, against the conditions of an undeveloped country and a destructive war, and she prevailed. Love gave her wisdom with innocence, and daring with foresight. And whenever she appeared despair was conquered and sorrow healed. Elsa visited the hungry and gave them food. She saw the thirsty and have them to drink. She welcomed the unknown, clothed the people in their birthday suits and strengthened the sick. Elsa herself fell ill and was imprisoned, but God was abiding in her. The irresistible power of love was with her. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
And she never ceased to be driven by this power. After the war Elsa initiated a great work for the orphans of Germany and Russian prisoners of war. The sight of her among these children whose sole ever-shinning Sun she was, must have been a decisive religious impression for many people. With the coming of the Nazis, she and her husband were forced to leave Germany and come to this country. Here she became the helper of innumerable European refugees, and for ten years I was able personally to observe the creative genius of her love. We never had a theological conversation. It was unnecessary. Elsa made God transparent in every moment. For God, who is love, was abiding in her and she in the Lord. She aroused the love of millions towards herself and towards that for which she was transparent—the God who is love. On her deathbed Else received a delegate from the king and people of Sweden, representing innumerable people all over European, assuring her that she would never be forgotten by those whom she had given back the meaning of their lives. It is a rare gift to meet a human being in whom love—and this means God—is so overwhelmingly manifest. It undercuts theological arrogance as well as pious isolation. It is more than justice and it is greater than faith and hope. It is the presence of God himself. For God is love. And in every moment of genuine love we are dwelling in God and God in us. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Attitude is an important part of the foundation upon which we build a productive life. In appraising our present attitude, we might consider what is necessary. There are many degrees of necessity. Everything is necessary in some degree if its loss really causes a decrease of vital energy. (This word is here used in the strict and precise sense that it might have if the study of vital phenomena were as far advanced as that of falling bodies.) When the degree of necessity is extreme, deprivation leads to death. This is the case when all the vital energy of one being is bound up with another by some attachment. In the lesser degrees, deprivation leads to a more or less considerable lessening of energy. Thus a total deprivation of food causes death, whereas a partial deprivation only diminishes the life force. Nevertheless, if a person is not to be weakened, the necessary quantity of food is considered to be that required. The most frequent cause of necessity in the bonds of affection is a combination of sympathy and habit. As in the case of avarice or drunkenness, that which was at first a search for some desired good is transformed into a need by the mere passage of time. The difference from avarice, drunkenness, and all the vices, however, is that in the bonds of affection the two motives—search for a desired good, and need—can very easily coexist. They can also be separated. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
When the attachment of one being to another is made up of need and nothing else it is a fearful thing. Few things in this World can reach such a degree of ugliness and horror. Whenever a human being seeks what is good and only find necessity, there is always something horrible. The stories that tell of a beloved being who suddenly appears with a death’s head best symbolize this. The human soul possesses a whole arsenal of lies with which to put up a defense against this ugliness and, in imagination, to manufacture sham advantages where there is only necessity. It is for this very reason that ugliness is an evil, because it conduces to lying. Speaking quite generally, we might say that there is affliction whenever necessity, under no matter what form, is imposed so harshly that the hardness exceeds the capacity for lying of the person who receives the impact. That is why the purest souls are the most exposed to affliction. For one who is capable of preventing the automatic reaction of defense, which tends to increase the soul’s capacity for lying, affliction is not an evil, although it is always a wounding and in a sense a degradation. When a human being is attached to another by a bond of affection which contains any degree of necessity, it is impossible that one should wish autonomy to be preserved in one’s self and the other. It is impossible by the miraculous of nature. It is, however, made possible by the miraculous intervention of the supernatural. This miracle is friendship. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Friendship is an equality made of harmony. There is harmony because there is a supernatural union between two opposites, that is to say, necessity and liberty, the two opposites God combined when he created the World and men. There is equality because each wishes to preserve the faculty of free consent both in oneself and in the other. When anyone wishes to put oneself under a human being or consents to be subordinated to one, there is no trace of friendship. The Queen of the Damn’s Maharet is not the friend of Queen Akasha. There is no friendship where there is inequality. A certain reciprocity is essential in friendship. If all good will is entirely lacking on one of the two sides, the other should suppress one’s own affection, out of respect for the free consent which one should not desire to force. If on one of the two sides there is not any respect for the autonomy of the other, this other must cut the bond uniting them out of respect for oneself. In the same way, one who consents to be enslaved cannot gain friendship. However, the necessity contained in the bond of affection can exist on one side only, and in this case there is only friendship on one side, if we keep to the strict and exact meaning of the word. If only for a moment, a friendship is tarnished as soon as necessity triumphs, over the desire to preserve the faculty of free consent on both sides. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
In all human things, necessity is the principle of impurity. If even a trace of the wish to please or the contrary desire to dominate is found in it, all friendship is impure. In a perfect friendship these two desires are completely absent. The two friends have fully consented to be two and not one, they respect the distance which the fact of being two distinct creatures places between them. Mortals have the right to desire direct union with God alone. Friendship is a miracle by which person consent to view from a certain distance, and without coming any nearer, the very being who is necessary to one as food. It requires the strength of the soul that Eve did not have; and yet she had no need of the fruit. If she had been hungry at the moment when she looked at the fruit, and if in spite of that she had remained looking at it indefinitely without taking one step toward it, she would have performed a miracle analogous to that of perfect friendship. Through this supernatural miracle of respect for human autonomy, friendship is very like the pure forms of compassion and gratitude called forth by affliction. In both cases the contraries which are the terms of the harmony are necessity and liberty, or in other words subordination and equality. These two pairs of opposites are equivalent. From the fact that the desire to please and the desire to command are not found in pure friendship, it has it in, at the same time as affection, something not unlike a complete indifference. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
Although friendship is a bond between two people it is in a sense impersonal. It leaves impartiality intact. It in no way prevents us from imitating the perfection of our Father in Heaven who freely distributes Sunlight and rain in every place. On the contrary, friendship and this distribution are the mutual conditions one of the other, in most cases at any rate. For, as practically every human being is joined to others by bounds of affection that have in them some degree of necessity, one cannot go toward perfection except by transforming this affection into friendship. Friendship has something universal about it. It consists of loving a human being as we should like to be able to love each soul in particular of all those who go to make up the human race. As a geometrician looks at a particular figure in order to deduce the universal properties of the triangle, so one who knows how to love directs upon a particular human being a universal love. The consent to preserve an autonomy within ourselves and in others is essentially of a universal order. As soon as we wish for this autonomy to be respected in more than just one single being we desire it for everyone, for we cease to arrange the order of the World in a circle whose center is here below. We transport the center of the circle beyond the Heavens. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
If the two beings who love each other, through an unlawful use of affection, think they form only one, friendship does not have this power. However, then there is not friendship in the true sense of the word. That is what might be called an adulterous union, even though it comes about between husband and wife. There is not friendship where distance is not kept and respected. The simple fact of having pleasure in thinking in the same way as the beloved being, or in any case the fact of desiring such an agreement of opinion, attacks the purity of the friendship at the same time as its intellectual integrity. It is very frequent. However, at the same time pure friendship is rare. When the bonds of affection and necessity between human beings are not supernaturally transformed into friendship, not only is the affection of an impure and low order, but it is also combined with hatred and repulsion. That is shown very well in The Queen of the Damned and in Romeo Must Die. The mechanism is the same in affections other than carnal love. It is easy to understand this. We hate what we are dependent upon. We become disgusted with what depends on us. Sometimes affection does not only become mixed with hatred and revulsion; it is entirely changed into it. The transformation may sometimes even be almost immediate, so that hardly any affection has had time to show; this is the case when necessity is laid bare almost at once. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
When the necessity which brings people together has nothing to do with the emotions, when it is simply due to circumstances, hostility often makes it appearance from the start. When Christ said to his disciples: “Love one another,” it was not attachment he was laying down as their rule. As it was a fact that there were bounds between them due to the thoughts, the life, and the habits they shared, he commanded them to transform these bonds into friendship, so that they should not be allowed to turn into impure attachment or hatred. Since, shortly before his passing into Heaven, Christ gave this as a new commandment to be added to the two great commandments of the love of our neighbor and the love of God, we can think that pure friendship, like the love of our neighbor, has in it something of a sacrament. Christ perhaps wished to suggest this with reference to Christian friendship when he said: “Where there are two or three gathered together in my name there am I in the midst of them.” Pure friendship is an image of the original and perfect friendship that belongs to the Trinity and is the very essence of God. It is impossible for two human beings to be one while scrupulously respecting the distance that separates them, unless God is present in each of them. The point at which parallels meet is infinity. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
The Greeks were an eminently visual people. They gloried in the visual arts; Homer’s epics abound in visual details; and they created tragedy and comedy, adding new dimensions to visual art. The Hebrews were not so visual and actually entertained a prohibition against the visual arts. Neither did they have tragedies or comedies. The one book of the Bible that has sometimes been called a tragedy, Job, was clearly not intended for, and actually precluded, any visual representation. The Greeks wanted God to be a friend, they visualized their gods and represented them in marble and in beautiful vase paintings. They also brought them on the stage. The Hebrews did not visualize their God and expressly forbade attempts to make of him an object—a visual object, a concrete object, any object. Their God was not to be seen. He was to be heard and listened to. He was not an It but an I—or a You. Christianity was born of the denial that God could not possibly be seen. Not all who considered Jesus a great teacher became Christians. Christians were those for whom he was the Lord. Christians were those who believed that God could become visible, an object of sight and experience, of knowledge and belief. Of course, Christianity did not deny its roots in Judaism. Jesus as the Son of God who had ascended to the Heavens to dwell there with God, as God, did not simply become another Heracles, the son of Zeus who had ascended to the Heavens to dwell there with the gods, as a god. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Jesus did not simply become another of the legion of Greek gods and demigods and sons of Zeus. He had preached and was to be heard and listened to. His moral teachings were recorded lovingly for the instruction of the faithful. However, were they really to be listened to? Or did they, too, become objects—of admiration and perhaps discussion? Was the individual to feel addressed by them, commanded by them—was he able to relate his life to them? The new dispensation was hardly that. The New Testament keeps saying, nowhere more emphatically than in the Gospel according to John, that those who only live by Jesus’s moral teaching shall not enter the kingdom of Heaven; only those can be saved who are baptized, who believe, and who take the sacraments—eating, as that Gospel puts it, “of this bread.” Of course, Christian belief is not totally unlike Jewish belief. It is not devoid of trust and confidence, and in Paul’s and Luther’s experience of faith these Jewish elements were especially prominent. Rarely have they been wholly lacking in Christianity. Still, this Jewish faith was never considered sufficient to some. Christian faith was always centered in articles of faith that had to be believed by those who wanted to be saved. When the Reformation did away with visual images, it was only to insist more firmly on the purity of doctrines that must be believed. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
However, may love the beautiful stained-glass windows, which communicate stores to those who are visual learners. And for Luther the bread and wine were no mere symbols of Christ’s flesh and blood—otherwise he might have made common cause with Ulrich Zwingli and presented the splintering of Protestantism—but the flesh and blood itself: God as an object. People sometimes wonder, is there some particular purpose in my birth here? Is it all ere coincidence? Must we doubt, deny, even reject God? These are some of the questions a thoughtful mortal might ask. If one is to moan over the length of the road opening out before one, one should also jubilate over the fact that one has begun to travel it. How few care to take this step! If some are immediately and irrevocably captured by the teachings, others are only gradually and cautiously convinced. Those who feel an emptiness in their hearts despite Worldly attainment and possession may be unconsciously yearning for God. So many of us place so much value in possessions, yet we overlook the startling fact that we have not begun to possess ourselves! What mortal can call one’s essential self? Can we build a bridge between this sorrowful Earthly life and the peaceful eternal life? Are the two forever sundered? Every seer, sage, and saint answers the first question affirmatively and the second negatively. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
The echoes of our spiritual being some to us all the time. They come in thoughts and things, in music and pictures, in emotions and words. If only we would take up the search for their source and trace them to it, we would recognize in the end the Reality, Beauty, Truth, and Goodness behind all the familiar manifestations. Those who can no longer confine their thinking within the conventional boundaries of common experience may cross over into religion’s reverent faith, into Christianity’s deep-felt intuition, or into philosophy’s final certitude. Whoever perceives the inferiority of one’s environment to what it could be, as well as the imperfections of one’s nature in the light of its undeveloped possibilities, and who sets out to improve the one and amend the other, has taken a first step to the quest. It is better to come late to the higher life with its nobler values and uplifting practices, than not at all. It is still better to come to it when one is comparatively young and foundations are being laid. They will be fortunate indeed if their spiritual longings are satisfied without the passage of many years and the travail of much exploration. They will be fortunate indeed if pitying friends do not repeatedly tell them with each change and each disappointed pulling-up of tents that they are pursing a mirage. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Those who have found their way to this Path leave forever behind them their aimless wanderings of the past. One fateful day, one will ruefully realize that one is octopus-held by external activities. Then will one take up the knife of a keen relentless determination and cut the imprisoning tentacles once and for all. I have no need to see and to test in order to be set free. I am free even in the confusion of servitude. I enjoy the freedom of the future, generations in advance. And when I die, I shall die a free man, for I have fought for freedom my whole life long. Mortals are free, in so far as one has the power of contradicting oneself and one’s essential nature. Mortals are free even from one’s freedom; that is, one can surrender one’s humanity. Freedom, by its very nature, is elusive. The word is difficult to define because of its quicksilver quality: freedom is always moving. You can state what it is not or what you desire to get free from—which is why the phrase freedom from should never be disparaged. However, it is difficult to designate what freedom is. Thus we always hear of the struggle for, the fight for freedom. Yet, when someone tells us “how I found freedom,” we have a feeling that something is being faked. The greatest virtue is not to be free, but to struggle ceaselessly for freedom. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Freedom is like a flock of white butterflies bestirred in front of you as you walk through the woods: rising in cluster they flit off in an infinite number of directions. Once you become self-konsciously sure of your freedom, you have lost it. Hence we find ourselves almost always describing what freedom is not rather than what it is: “I am free tomorrow” means I do not have to work; “I have a free period” means I do not have any class then. Freedom is frequently and persistently conceived of as a negative quality. Freedom is very much like health or virtue or innocence. After we have lost it, we feel it mist intensely. The dictionary does nothing to relieve our frustration. In the eighteen different meanings in Webster’s, fourteen of them are negative, such as “not held in slavery” or “not subject to external authority.” Of the reaming four, one is “liberty”—which deals with political freedom—and the others are simply tautological, such as “spontaneous, voluntary, independent.” Freedom is continually creating itself. Freedom is expansiveness. Freedom has an infinite quality. The guiding laws of life are not easy to find. The sacred wisdom of God is also the secret wisdom. The seeker quests until one’s thoughts rests. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
The quest will continue to attract its votaries so long as the Real continues to exist and mortals continue to remain unaware of it. This ever-new set of possibilities is part of the reason psychology has by and large evaded the subject, for freedom cannot be pinned down as psychologists are wont to do. In psychotherapy the closest we can get to discerning freedom in action is when a person experiences “I can” or “I will.” When a client in therapy says either of these, I always make sure he or she knows that I have heard him or her; for “can” and “will” are statements of personal freedom, even if only in fantasy. These verbs point to some event in the future, either immediate or long-term. They also imply that the person who uses them sense some power, some possibility, and is aware of ability to use this power. The mystery of the soul is as formidable and as baffling as any. Yet it is also a fascinating one. If few people have penetrated it today, may tried to do so in the past. Only when they are brought by the discipline of experience to a sense of responsibility, are they likely to seek this knowledge. This does not mean that a spiritual outlook requires an unquestioning acceptance of what mortals have made of themselves and the World. We approach God deep in our hearts. We feel the divine presence in that profound unearthly stillness where neither the sounds of emotional clamour nor those of intellectual grinding can enter. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
To Keep Aloof is to Write One’s Name in the Book of Failure—The Lord is Still Existent and Still Eager to Speak with Us Even Today!
I know your arguments. For centuries I have pondered them, as I have pondered so many questions. You think I do what I do with human limitations. I do not. To understand me, you must think in terms of abilities yet unimagined. Sooner will you understand the mystery of splitting atoms or black holes in space. The abyss and light of the World, time’s need and the craving for eternity, vision, event, and poetry are the dialogue with me. When I confront you, God is present. However, if I look away from you, I ignore him. As long as I merely experience or use you, I ignore God. As long as I merely experience or use you, I deny God. Yet, when I encounter you, I encounter God. Loneliness is honesty in one sense. In honesty you have to separate yourself from the impersonal mass—you are saved from conformism. To be honest is to be lonely in the sense that you individuate yourself, you seize the moment to be yourself and yourself alone. There is an initial loneliness about being oneself, speaking out of one’s own center. Some people feel a sadness and despair about being cast loose, alone, into the Word. One may feel life a single red wood tree standing at the North Pole, with nobody or nothing around for a million miles. However, is not the loneliness that we all experience at times, the kind that is inseparable from the human condition? #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
If you dare to be honestly yourself, you will be lonely. At each moment in our self-consciousness we are alone. No one else can genuinely come into our sanctum sanctorum. We pass into Heaven alone. No one escapes. This is destiny in its deepest sense. When we recognize this, then we can overcome the loneliness to some extent. We recognize that it is a human loneliness. It means we are all in the same yacht, and we can then choose to, or not to, let others into our life. Lo and behold, we then have used the aloneness to be less lonely. Sometimes when people have to work in an international community or land where the people who speak their native language are a minority and uninteresting, one can feel painfully lonely, due chiefly to the isolation. And their work may not be that absorbing. Nonetheless, people generally follow the usual defense: they throw themselves into their work with ever greater zeal. However, the harder they work, the more isolated they may feel. Generally, this could lead to an individual collapsing and having to go to bed for a couple of weeks. This is what many call a nervous breakdown. When this happens, one may want to change their lifestyle. Maybe take up a hobby like reading, drawing, gardening, sculpting or a sport. Even learning to cook could be fascinating. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
Still, giving up your habit of rigidly planning your life and taking the flow of your energy as it comes can have some unintended side effects. Being all without aim or sense of direction, isolated, may lead to one feeling like a nonentity since all one’s old ways of proving their worth are no longer being employed. Seeking a new direction and life and letting go and trusting in God has also been helpful for some people. David Talbot started out on his Summer vacating up toward the Caspian Sea with no plans, no fixed guides to follow. By accident he met a group of fifteen or sixteen artists traveling and doing art as a group, and he got a job with them as a sort of fancy handy man. He traveled and had made sketches with them all through the villages along the Caspian Sea. This was the birth of him becoming an architect. He also fell deeply in love that summer and it was the greatest joy of his life. However, should we call this accident of meeting this group an accident, or was it really an expression of destiny? I think it was. When David gave up his rigid and compulsive demands on life, when he let go and let God, unexpected possibilities opened up in unpredictable ways which would have never been known to him. These are aspects of destiny become conscious. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
For other people, they may need to support their confidence without taking away the force of their despair, since despair may well lead to the deepest insight and the most valuable change. When in despair or depression, it is true that most people shrink—they tend to retreat into their hopelessness. However, one should try to experience this despair constructively, as an opportunity. The despair can then act upon the person like the flood in Genesis: it can clear away the vast debris—the false answers, false buoys, superficial lighthouses, and phony principles—and leave the way open for new possibilities. That is, for new freedom. We know in psychotherapy that times of despair are essential to the client’s discovery of hidden capacities and basic assets. Those therapists are misguided who feel it incumbent upon themselves to reassure the patient at every point of despair. For if the client never feels despair, it is doubtful whether one ever will feel anything below the surface. 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 is necessary. That seems to me to be the meaning of the sentence from folklore, “Despair and confidence both banish fear.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
The loves of childhood and of adolescence cannot be subtracted from us; they have become part of us. Not a discrete part that could be served. It is as if they had entered our blood stream. Therefore, one cannot let anyone tell them what is best to do, and sometimes when you already have a successful career, consider sticking to it or just transferring to a different office or location. Do not let people prey on your vulnerabilities because even those who seem like well wishers would like to see you fail and may give you faulty advice, whether they be paid consultants, friends, family or coworkers. We ought to be mindful that all human beings we confront are persons. We need a new language, and new poets to create it, and new ears to listen to it. Meanwhile, if we shut our ears to the old prophets who still speak more or less in the old tongues, using ancient words, occasionally in new ways, we shall have very little music. We are not so rich that we can do without tradition. Let one that has new ears listen to it in a new way. To be given direction, to feel an impulsion towards it, and to practice purification is a necessary requisite for the journey. Two warnings are needed here: fall not into the extreme of unbalance, and depend not on what is outside. One reminder: seek and submit to grace. It may be imageless or found anywhere anytime and, in any form, —a work of art, a piece of music, a living tree, or a human being—for in the end it must come from your own higher individuality and in your own loneliness. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
Before embarking on a new journey in life, one should figure out what attracts them most to this direction? What does one hope to get out of it? And if one is seeking religious satisfaction, spiritual truth or moral power of inner peace or psychic faculties? Consider if you will be satisfied with a theoretical understanding or would one go as far as to put in into practice? And are you will to put in the work and effort and dedication needed for the experience? How far do you think this new path will take you in life, career, and spirituality? The beginnings of this higher life are always mysterious, always unpredictable, sometimes intellectually quiet and sometimes emotionally excited. When first one sets logs of one’s first raft afloat upon these strange waters whose ending can only be somewhere in infinity, as the geometricians say, there are no lights to show one’s frail vessel the way of travel, no Suns or Stars to point a path for it. However, one knows then that one’s head is bowed in homage to a higher power. Later one will know also how utterly right was the intuition which earlier drove one forth. We walk the Quest uncertainly, human nature being what it is, human weakness following us so obtrusively as it does. The decision to embark on this quest—so new, uncommon, and untried to the average Westerner—becomes especially hard to the mortal seeking alone, with no compassion or relative to fortify one’s resolution. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
This urge to discover an intangible reality seems an irrational one to the materialistic mentality. However, on the contrary, it is the most completely logical, the most sensible of all the urges that have ever driven a mortal. The instinct which draws mortals to the truths of philosophy, the experiences of mysticism, and the feeling of religion is a sound one. The fact of one’s own self-existence is the innate primary experience of every mortal. It is clear, certain, and incontrovertible. However, the nature of that existence is obscure, confused, and arguable. So much happens in the subconscious before they are quite aware of it that only when a new decision, a new orientation of feeling or thought is firmly arrived at, and openly appears, do they discover and define what they have been led to by outer and inner developments. In each mortal there is a part of one which is unknown and unmolested. It is in the region of consciousness below the normal state that the most powerful forces move the human being—and can be applied to move one. Here only can the radical transformation be made. If one believes that these ideas ring true, then one’s course of duty is plain. To keep aloof in such a circumstance is to write one’s name in the Book of Failure. Mortals have largely conquered their planetary environment. Now one must begin the sterner task of conquering oneself. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
“Speak, Lord, for Thy servant heareth” is a sentence from that ancient record, the Hebrew Bible. However, any mortal may find that the Lord is still existent and still willing to speak to one even today. Yet, to actualize such an encounter one must take to the secret path and practice inner listening. In mortals, Heaven and Earth unite. One is free to enjoy the one or the other. The first leads to peace of mind, the second ties one to the terrestrial wheel. Whoever sincerely wants access to divinity may find it, but one must make the first move. The fulfilment of the heart’s nostalgic yearning for its true homeland may be delayed, but it cannot be defeated. If experience, reason, or intuition cannot bring one to the conviction that God rules the World, a prophet’s help, grace, or writing may do so. If that fails, one has no other recourse than to keep pondering the question until light dawns. If the quest seems too far from one’s environment or circumstances, it is still a good time to start, for the reward will be better savoured. This search after the soul need not wait until death until it successfully ends. To do so would be illogical and in most causes futile. Here on Earth and in this very lifetime the grand discover may be made. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
The quest upon which one has entered will be a long one and the task one has understand a hard one. However, the Ideal will also be one’s support because one’s conscience will endorse one’s choice to the end. Leave aside wrangling, and take up the quest leading to the true goal, the Supreme Overself, which is unique. Push thy enquiry further. Since God is the source and power of reconciliation, who could reconcile Him? All of us have tried and are trying to reconcile God by rites and sacraments, by prayers and services, by moral behavior and works of charity. However, if we try this, if we try to give something to God, to show good deeds which may appease the Lord, we fail. It is never enough; we never can satisfy God because there is an infinite demand upon us. And since we cannot appease God, we grow hostile toward the Lord. Have you ever noticed how much hostility against God dwells in the depth of the good and honest people, in those who excel in works of charity, in piety and religious zeal? This cannot be otherwise; for one is hostile, consciously or unconsciously, toward those by whom feels rejected. Everybody is in this predicament, whether one calls that which rejects one God, or nature, or destiny, or social conditions. Everybody carries a hostility toward the existence into which one has been thrown, toward the hidden powers which determine one’s life and that of the Universe, toward that which makes one guilty and that threatens one with destruction because one has become guilty. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
We all feel rejected and hostile toward what has rejected us. We all try to appease it and in failing, we become more hostile. This happens often unnoticed by ourselves. However, there are two symptoms which we hardly can avoid noticing: The hostility against ourselves and the hostility against others. One speaks so often of pride and arrogance and self-certainty and complacency in people. However, this is, in most cases the superficial level of their being. Below this, in a deeper level, there is self-rejection, disgust, and even hatred of one’s self. Be reconciled to God; that means at the same time, be reconciled to ourselves. However, we are not; we try to appease ourselves. We try to make ourselves more acceptable to our own judgment and, when we fail, we grow more hostile toward ourselves. And one who feels rejected by God and who rejects oneself feels also rejected by the others. As one grows hostile toward destiny and hostile toward oneself, one also grows hostile toward other people. If we are often horrified by the unconscious or conscious hostility people betray toward us or about our own hostility toward people whom we believe we love, let us not forget: They feel rejected by us; we feel rejected by them. They tried hard to make themselves acceptable to us, and they failed. We tried hard to make ourselves acceptable to them, and we failed. And their hostility grew. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
Be reconciled with God—that means, at the same time, be reconciled with the others! However, it does not mean try to reconcile the others as it does not mean try to reconcile the others as it does not mean try to reconcile yourselves. Try to reconcile God. You will fail. This is the message: A new reality has appeared in which you are reconciled. To enter the New Being we do not need to show anything. We must only be open to be grasped by it, although we have nothing to show. Being reconciled—tat is the first mark of the New Reality. And being reunited is its second mark. Reconciliation makes reunion possible. The New Creation is the reality in which the separated is reunited. The New Being is manifest in the Christ because in the him the separation never overcame the unity between him and God, between him and humankind, between him and himself. This gives his picture in the Gospels its overwhelming and inexhaustible power. In him we look at a human life that maintained the union in spite of everything that drove him into separation. He represents and mediates the power of the New Being because he represents and mediates the power of an undisrupted union. Where the New Reality appears, one feels united with God, the ground and meaning of one’s existence. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
One has what has been called the love of one’s destiny, and what, today, we might call the courage to take upon ourselves our own anxiety. Then one has the astonishing experience of feeling reunited with one’s self, not in pride and false self-satisfaction, but in deep self-acceptance. One accepts one’s self as something which is eternally important, eternally loved, eternally accepted. The disgust at one’s self, the hatred of one’s self has disappeared. There is a center, a direction, a meaning for life. All healing—bodily and mental—creates this reunion of one’s self with one’s self. Where there is real healing, there is the New Being, The New Creation. However real healing is not where only a part of body or mind is reunited with the whole, but where the whole itself, our whole being, our whole personality is untied with itself. The New Creation is healing creation because it creates reunion with oneself. And it creates reunion with the others. Nothing is more distinctive the Old Being than the separation of mortals from mortals. Nothing is more passionately demanded than social healing, than the New Being within history and human relationships. Religion and Christianity are under strong accusation that they have not brought reunion into human history. Who could deny the truth of this challenge. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Nevertheless, humankind still lives; and it could not live any more if the power of separation had not been permanently conquered by the power of reunion, of healing, of the New Creation. Where one is grasped by a human face as human, although one has to overcome personal distaste, or racial strangeness, or national conflicts, or the differences of sex, of age, of beauty, of strength, of knowledge, and all the other innumerable causes of separation—there New Creation happens! Humankind lives because this happens again and again. And if the Church which is the assembly of God has an ultimate significance, this is its significance: That here the reunion of mortal to mortal is pronounced and confessed and realize, even if in fragments and weaknesses and distortions. The Church is the place where the reunion of mortals with mortals is an actual event, though the Church of God is permanently betrayed by the Christian churches. However, although betrayed and expelled, the New Creation saves and preserves that by which it is betrayed and expelled: churches, humankind and history. The Church, like all its members, relapses from the New into the Old Being. Therefore, the third mark of the New Creation is re-surrection. The word resurrection has for many people the connotation of dead bodies leaving their graves or other fanciful images. However, resurrection means the victory of the New state of things, the New Being born out of the death of the Old. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
Resurrection is not even an event that might happen in some remote future, but it is the power of the New Being to create life out of death, here and now, today and tomorrow. Where there is a New Being, there is resurrection, namely, the creation into eternity out of every moment of time. The Old Being has the mark of disintegration and death. The New Being puts a new mark over the old one. Out of disintegration and death something is born of eternal significance. That which is immersed in dissolution emerges in a New Creation. Resurrection happens now, or it does not happen at all. It happens in us and around us, in soul and history, in nature and Universe. Reconciliation, reunion, resurrection—this is the New Creation, the New Being, the New state of things. Do we participate in it? The message of Christianity is not Christianity, but a New Reality. A New state of things has appeared, it still appears; it is hidden and visible, it is there and it is here. Accept it, enter into it, let it grasp you. There is a great difference between the essence of the Necessary and that of the Good. There is no contradiction between seeking our own good in human being and wishing for one’s good to be increased. For this very reason, when the motive that draws us toward anybody is simply some advantage for ourselves, the conditions of friendship are not fulfilled. Friendship is a supernatural harmony, a union of opposites. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
When a human being is any degree necessary to us, we cannot desire one’s good unless we cease to desire our own. Where there is necessity there is constraint and domination. We are in the power of that of which we stand in need, unless we possess it. The central good for every mortal is the free disposal of oneself. Either we renounce it, which is a crime of idolatry, since it can be renounced only in favor of God, or we desire that the being we stand in need of should be deprived of this free disposal of oneself. Any kind of mechanism may join human beings together with bonds of affection which have the iron hardness of necessity. Mother love is often of such a kind; so at times is paternal love, as in Pere Goriot of Balzac; so is carnal love in its most intense form, as in L’Ecole des Femmes and in Phedre; so also, very frequently, is the love between husband and wife, chiefly as a result of habit. Filial and fraternal love are more rarely of this nature. A person with a good heart can help someone fix a tire, take a roommate to the doctor, have lunch with someone who is sad, or smile and say hello to brighten a day. However, a follower of the first commandment will naturally add to these important acts of service. We need to have compassion and we will be provided opportunities to forget self and lift others. If we are to be more like Christ, we are to be sensitive to the struggles, trials, and challenges faced by so many but that can often be overlooked. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
There Other Two Persons Seemed a Million Miles Away—Hold Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand and Eternity in an Hour
The air so emotionally frigid that when going to be at night, there was a feeling that no other person was in the house. I never in a thousand years would have imagined that would come out. Often times in human beings there is an early attachment of imprinting behavior, where people seem to follow their attachment with a similar blind fidelity. And this behavior may be made stronger by punishment or other difficulties put in their path. Some people spend a lifetime looking for someone to make up for their losses, to bring them justice for their less than pleasant childhoods or adult life. They go through life lonely, yearning for a love that will fill the large area of emptiness in their hearts. However, the struggles these individuals are engaged in is bound to be self-defeating. The first and fundamental challenge is to confront one’s fate as it is, reconcile one’s self to the fact that one did receive a bad deal, know that justice is irrelevant, no one will ever make up for the emptiness and the pain of those years. The past cannot be changed—it can only be acknowledged and learned from. It is one’s destiny. It can be absorbed and mitigated by new experiences, but it cannot be changed or erased. An individual only adds insult to injury by going on the rest of one’s life knocking one’s head against the same stone wall. Fortunately, psychotherapy can be a vehicle through which human beings may become more aware of and compensate for such implanted destiny. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Some people hang on to the past as a way of hanging on to someone they cared deeply about. It is an expression of the hope that someday this coveted individual will reward one, someday one will find the Holy Grail. Now one will get the original care one was missing; now one will get that restored! However, there is no way to restore it, no matter how much of a loss it is. Bad fate, yes. Yet, that is just the way it is. The lost idol image, the lost change, the great emptiness within one—they are all going to remain there. These things are the past; there is no way of changing them. You can change your attitude toward these tragic happenings, as the ultimate freedom is a command over one’s own attitude. However, you cannot change the experiences themselves. If you hang on to an illusion of such change, always hoping for pie in the sky by and by and by you cut off your possibilities. You then become rigid. You do not let yourself take in the new possibilities. You trade your freedom for a mess of emotional pottage. And this way, as a corollary, you never use your anger constructively. You lose a tremendous amount of power, energy, and possibility. In short, you lose your freedom. However, is there no constructive value in coming to terms with one’s early fate? Yes, there is—and a value potentially greater than what one gives up. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
The struggle to come to terms with acrimonious relationships and lifestyles has much to do with the emergence of creativity. For example, a man who had an unpleasant childhood ended up developing talents which led to his high status in the World of architecture. Because he had such a disturbed family life, that the creativity was compensation for such an early trauma. We know that creative people often come out of such unfortunate family backgrounds. Why and how they do is still one of the mysteries the answer to which the Sphinx of creativity has not revealed. We do know that some people have been unfortunate and never have been able to take life lightly. They learn from the hour of birth that it is best to take life easily, as many may. They cannot coast along or rest on their laurels. This exceptional achievement following a disturbed childhood or adulthood had been documented in many cases. Such freedom of the artist is not born. It is made in the pain of adolescent loneliness, the isolation of physical disability, or, perhaps, the smug superiority of inherited title. The freedom that permits generation of possibilities is the beginning of a creative product. Many of our most valuable people have come from the most calamitous situations. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
Investigations of the childhoods of eminent people expose the fact that they did not receive anything like the kind of child rearing that a person in our culture is led to believe is healthy for children. Whether in spite of or because of these conditions, it is clear that these children not only survived, but reached great heights of achievements, many after having experienced the most deplorable traumatic childhoods. The tension in these personalities between high aspiration and disappointment may well be the necessary matrix out of which creativity—and, later, civilization—is born. This type cannot slide into any well-adjusted syndrome. There is the outstanding exception of J.S. Bach, but his contentment—if it was that—seems to have been a combination of fortunate social conditions. The well-adjusted person rarely make great painters, sculptors, writers, architects, musicians. Coming out of such a confused early childhood allows the creative capacity to be considered a later compensation. The question is: Can a person seize these possibilities—these new reaches of freedom not without cruel fate, but despite fate—and weld them into a significant building, house, a statue, a painting, or some other creative product? #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
If one can accept the deprivation of the care one rightfully expected, if one can engage this loneness face to face, one will have achieved a strength and a power that will be a foundation more solid than one ever could have achieved otherwise. If one can accept this aspect of one’s destiny, the fates will work rather than against one. In this way one lives with the Universe rater than against it. One must learn to engage and accept these cruel things in one’s background. It is, therefore, inevitable that the questions “Is there a need for self-control” arises when a way of life is being espoused that encourages freedom of thought and action. And it is vital that no glib, easy answer be given, for it is an important question. Situations do exist where it can be said without equivocation “Yes, do exercise self-control.” Wen, for example, individuals have the desire to destroy the life or property of others or when they have the urge to take their own lives or act in obviously self-destructive ways, it is important that they control these impulses. Society has found it necessary and desirable, when it has the opportunity, to impose control on such persons by limiting their freedom by restraining them. One of the most painful tragedies in American life today is the suicides that occur among high school and college students—frequently those of great promise. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
It could be said those planning to end their own lives to please, please, hold on! Life may seem painful and meaningless. Perhaps you feel suddenly and terribly disillusioned. However, at least bear with the struggles and give yourselves the perspective of a few more years before you make such an irrevocable decision. It is not enough simply to develop self-control, even though we may need to use it to curb destructive impulses. The ultimately satisfying answer is to deal effectively with problems that underlie our destructive impulses so that we can move beyond the need for self-control. The basic problem is self-hate, for self-destructiveness and destructiveness directed toward others go hand and hand. The nation, for example, that sets out to destroy other nations is bent on a self-destructive course. The personal who assaults another person and follows one’s impulses is not benefiting one’s self. And, of course, one’s self-hate is evident in the obvious lack of confidence on one’s ability to relate to individuals in other ways that would be more pleasant. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
So let us be clear about one thing. The violent or destructive acts we are so often afraid we will do if we do not control ourselves are not the result of true freedom or spontaneity. The murderer is not free. One is an enslaved, tormented person who is driven by pent-up feelings of self-hate that have been projected outward onto other individuals or onto society at large. The superheated steam of this hatred builds up in one’s internal pressure cooker until whatever self-control one possesses is bypassed in an explosion of violence. To exhort such a person to control one’s self may be a necessary stop-gap measure, although it is likely to be futile. Any thorough-going help must deal with the mortal’s self-hate. Most of us may feel some impulses within ourselves to be destructive to others or to ourselves, which we sense the seen to curb by self-control. Often the inner pressure is not too great and we can be successful in this control if we choose to go that route, but the more such self-control we need to impose on ourselves the less able we will be to be carefree and spontaneous. And spontaneity is a deliciously desirable way of living. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
If we can discover why we feel destructive and through this exploration reduce the self-hate to the point where we have relatively little need for self-control, it will be a far more freeing experience. A professional therapist can often be very helpful here, for one can provide a relatively secure environment where hatreds (both toward the self and others) can be expressed and explored with a minimum of danger. Often in therapy people discover that they are not nearly as dangerous to themselves or others as the feared. They find they had been so frightened of freedom that they had imagined themselves far more potentially harmful than they were as a way of keeping themselves rigidly controlled. However, some people like to deceive themselves. To be rejected makes a better excuse—to tell everyone how misunderstood they are, and how they triumphed over great odds. The misunderstood genius, nobody to help them, and so on. We all live in the old state of things. We belong to the Old Creation, and the demand made upon us by Christianity is that we also participate in the New Creation. We have known ourselves in our old being, and we shall ask ourselves in this hour whether we also have experiences something of a New Being in ourselves. The union with God is when the New Reality is present. God is the ultimate truth and demands complete devotion. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
It is important to experience the birth in consciousness of a new—though old—part of the self. One may consider it a dawning of awareness of new possibilities which have in effect been there all the time. This is a giant step toward personal freedom. This New Creation is manifest in Jesus who is called Christ. And it is actually the beginning of accepting acceptance, the uniting of one’s self with that early self that one had had to lock up in a dungeon in order to survive when life was not happy but threatening. Although this does not alter the original lack of basic trust, it does surmount it in the literal meaning of that term. We hear about the psychology of anger and how it clouds our vision, causes us to misunderstand each other, and in general interferes with the calm necessary for a rational, clear view of life. People point out that their anger curtails one’s freedom. All this is true. However, it is one-sided; it omits the constructive side to anger. In our society, we confuse anger with resentment, a form of repressed anger that eats steadily away at our innards. In resentment we store up ammunition to get even with our fellows, but we never communicate directly in a way that might resolve the problem. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
This transformation of anger into resentment is the sickness of the middle class. It corrodes our stature as human beings. Or we confuse anger with temper, which is generally an explosion of repressed anger; with rage, which may be a pathological anger; with petulance, which is immature resentment; or with hostility, which is anger absorbed into our character structure until it infects every act of ours. I am not referring to these kinds of hostility or resentment. I am speaking, rather, of the anger that pulls the diverse parts of the self together, that integrates the self, keeps the whole self alive and present, energizes us, sharpens our vision, and stimulates us to think more clearly. This kind of anger brings with it an experience of self-esteem and self-worth. It is the healthy anger that makes freedom possible, the anger that cuts one loose from the unnecessary baggage in living. However, people who are romantically involved with others that do not share their values will find there is a conflict of two different value systems, and it will feel like a red hot poker being shoved into your heart. Some people take their issues they have with their absentee parents out on their partner or a family member of the same gender as the parent they have an issue with. They take revenge by punishing innocent people as a whole. The individual being targeted has to admit one’s own cruelty—cruelty to one’s self most of all for allowing someone like that to be in one’s life. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
Do not cover up what you really feel and become deceitful just to survive. Do not surrender your freedom. Many people always try to foresee that the other person’s reaction will be before they speak. These types of individual hide behind such laudable words as responsibility, dutiful, noble member of society, and so on. However, one must hate these roles they play with people who are taking advantage of them. Occasionally being honest with people and venting your anger will give you partial freedom. At least one starts to know one can say what one feels. However, it may still be a freedom within a jail. There is the lacking surge of anger that leads to a changing of one’s life, the willingness to cut loose all the barges one is pulling, to throw aside all one’s luggage and one’s overscrupulous cares. It is not a good idea to always prefer to be hurt rather than to take care of yourself even if it hurts someone else. Another vital question remains to be discussed in regard to living spontaneously. Can we be deeply involved in a love relationship and still be free to be spontaneous? A great many people act as though love and spontaneity are incompatible. There are two frequent feelings that contribute to this reaction that love and freedom cannot coexist. And, of course, they help to make love that much more frightening to us. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
One of these feelings has to do with the idea that the revealing of ourselves, which intimacy involves, gives the other person power over us, thereby limiting our freedom to do what we want to do. Have you noticed that when you talk to people sometimes it is like you have an invisible wall between your eyes and theirs—a wall that has never been absent in all the time you have know them? Well, some of us are always on guard. There is the feeling that one can never let anyone see one completely—know all about who we are. That is because it would give the other person too many strings on one. It would allow one to become their puppet. Many develop these defenses of withdrawing into one’s self and permitting others to see as few of one’s real feelings as possible as a way of avoiding manipulation by them. This is because some feel if one allows others to really know one, one will be helpless to avoid being manipulated. The other feeling that leads us to shy away from love because it appears to threaten our freedom is probably even more common. This is the idea that love is inescapably tied up with obligation and responsibility. Among other ways in which this duty theme operates is the idea that if we really love another we will cease doing what we want to do and concentrate on pleasing the one we love. Such feelings often strike a death blow to the experience and expression of love. Men and women talk about their lack of freedom to do what they would like to do because of the necessity of providing adequately for their families. So work becomes noxious, tolerated duty. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
We also hear could saying their partner would not like it if they did this or that and that they would like to go out, but the children have to come first, you know. So all of life become hedged about with responsibilities and the necessity of pleasing others brought about by love. And virtually everything in life, from daily work, fidelity, pleasures of the flesh, and second honeymoons to family picnics, walking in the park, and holding hands in the movie, becomes a dutiful and essentially joyless act that we do in hope that spouse and children will be pleased. When approached this way, it is no wonder that love seems like slavery and many splendored things! When so many people view love this way, it is not surprising that a playboy (and playgirl) philosophy would develop in our culture in which physical intimacy without emotional intimacy would become very attractive to us as a way of life. The essential message of the philosophy seems to be, “As long as I can remain indifferent to my pleasures of the flesh partners I can retain my freedom and individuality. Once I begin to allow myself to care for someone, I have had it! I am on my way to becoming a slave.” The joker in this deck is that the moment we embrace this philosophy we have walked out on the freedom to have the most deeply satisfying fun of all—a love relationship freely experienced and expressed. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
The basic problem underlying our feeling that love and freedom are incompatible is our old nemesis, self-hate. If we act freely and do what we want to do, we assume, and often we have been taught to assume, that we will destroy relationships that are important to us. However, this involves a colossal distrust of ourselves. We are, in effect, saying to ourselves, “If you do not watch yourself carefully, you are such a miserable creature and so self-destructive that you will alienate everyone you care for and end up all alone.” The reality is that one of the quickest ways of alienating another person is to put every effort into pleasing them. When we try to put their wishes foremost, we are likely to become a nonentity in their eyes. It is not particularly pleasing to attempt to relate to a person who has no apparent desires of one’s own, who always bends to accommodate our wishes, and who makes an uncomplaining doormat of one’s self for us to walk upon. Furthermore, when we deny our own desires, we quickly come to resent that person for talking advantage of us. That resentment will then likely be expressed in any number of ways. Perhaps we begin to take on martyr posture and express by word or attitude the feelings: “After all I have done for you, the least you could do would be to try to please me once in a while.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
It is much more straightforward and ultimately satisfying to be what we want to be and do what we want to do. As we learn that we can value ourselves and respond to our own desires, it is unlikely we will act in ways that destroy relationships with those for whom we care—because this will be destructive toward ourselves, too. It is true that more flare-ups of disagreements and anger may occur, because our wishes and those of others will not always agree, but two individuals in this situation are likely to respect each other for being sufficiently independent to express feelings openly, and the way is then clear to battle through to some agreements. If we do find ourselves acting in ways that constantly hurt those we love and destroy our relationships with them it would be advisable to seek professional help, for it would be an indication that we have so much self-hate that we have a need to hurt ourselves, since hurting others is self-destructive. Love God and do as you please. This is a profound idea, but it can be carried an additional step and be developed into a philosophical phrase which is more complete. If you truly value yourself, love yourself and do as you please for you will not hurt people unnecessarily. To do so would be to hurt yourself. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
This seems too good to be true to most of us. We are so connived that to live spontaneously is to live dangerously toward others and ourselves, but if we can begin, perhaps a little at a time, to be more responsive to our inner selves, we will discover that living spontaneously is exciting and rewarding to ourselves and to those we care for. Once having made that discovery we will not be content with less than an ever-increasingly spontaneous life. Moving toward the right attitude is passionate and infinite longing. The New Being is not something at simply takes the place of the Old Being. However, it is a renewal of the Old which has been corrupted, distorted, split and almost destroyed. Yet, not wholly destroyed. Salvation does not destroy creation; but it transforms the Old Creation into a New one. Therefore we can speak of the New in terms of a re-newal: The threefold “re,” namely, re-condilation, re-union, re-surrection. The message of reconciliation is: Be reconciled to God. Crease to be hostile to the Lord, for God is never hostile to you. The message of reconciliation is not that Good needs to be reconciled. How could he be? Since God is the source and power of reconciliation, who could reconcile the Lord? The sacred is here and now. God is present in all elements. Hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Randolph Harris II International Institute 