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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
In the Engaging of Destiny Our Freedom is Born, Just as With the Coming of the Light the Day Overcomes the Night!
The music was like the music of old, when all songs had been the songs of the body, and the songs of the mind had not yet been invented. As we begin to confront our destiny as a given, unchangeable series of events which, no matter how painful, needs to be acknowledged and accepted, we become able to experience the relief of one who was a slave and is now is free. The freedom of each of us is in proportion to the degree with which we confront and live in relation to our destiny. Unfortunately, the term destiny has been so used and misused by Hollywood films that the word has almost solely the connotation of inescapable catastrophe, secret doom, irrevocable ruin—all of which gives a curiously erotic flavor to the films, as though the secret urge to be carried off for pleasures of the flesh by Zeus camouflaged as bull were present in the subconscious of all of us, male as well as female. True, the definitions of destiny do include irrevocable fate, but they also include much more. The verb form of the word, destine, is defined as to ordain, to devote, to consecrate. Destiny is a cognate of the term destination, which implies moving toward a goal. We discern two trends in these different meanings: one the element of direction, and the other the sense of plan or design. These are all aspects of the human condition; our billiard balls have been left far being. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
I define destiny as the pattern of limits and talents that constitutes the givens in life. These may be on a grand scale, like death, or on a minor scale like the gasoline shortage. As we shall see below, it is in the confronting of these limits that our creativity emerges. Our destiny cannot be canceled out; we cannot erase it or substitute anything else for it. However, we can choose how we shall respond, how we shall live out our talents which confront us. Destiny is a term that describes our condition prior to sociological and mortal judgments. One’s destiny is archetypal and ontological; the term refers to one’s original experience at each moment. It is the design of the Universe speaking through the design of each one of us. Destiny confronts us on different levels. There is our destiny on the cosmic level, like birth and death. We may postpone death slightly by giving up smoking, for example, or we may invite it by living; but all the while passing into Heaven stands there irrevocable waiting. Dylan Thomas’s poem on the death of his father is an impassioned and arresting creative work. However, it did not cancel out the fact that his father had to pass into Heaven. Also on this cosmic level are Earthquakes and volcanoes, or we can take our chances, remaining in the path of the eruptions. However, we cannot escape the fact that volcanoes and other such eruptions of the Universe do occur without the slightest concern for us. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
When we admit these so-called destructive aspects of destiny, we also see that the beneficial wide of the pattern includes the pleasure in the pathless woods and the rapture by the lonely shore. There is a second group of givens genetic. Our destiny is expressed in our physical characteristics, like the color of our eyes and skin, the race we happened to be born into, whether we are male or female, and so on. Anatomy is destiny. One’s talents—such as special gifts for music, art, or mathematics—are part of this bundle. One feels possessed by them. There is no denying talents without penalty, and one name for the attempt at denial is neurosis. Third, there is the cultural aspect of destiny. At birth we are thrown into a family we did not pick, into a culture about which we knew nothing, and into a particular historical period about which we had no say. We may, and sometimes need to, fight our family, but there is no successful way of disowning this fount from which we sprang. Freedom’s great emotional potency is due to the fact that human life and indeed the pursuit of happiness depend upon the nature and the efficiency of these means which culture gives mortals in their struggle with the environment, with other human beings, and with Destiny herself. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
A fourth groups of givens is circumstantial. The stock market rises and falls; a war is declared; Pearl Harbor is attacked. Once these happen, they cannot be reversed nor avoided nor ignored nor done over again. One can think of the different forms of destiny on a spectrum with various gradations. On the left-hand extreme position I would put what the philosophers call necessity and the poets call fate, like Earthquakes and volcanoes. These are scarcely at all susceptible to human change. Determinism I would place near this end also. In the middle I would place the unconscious function of the human mind, since this is partly determined and partly influenced by human activity. The cultural aspects of destiny I would place nearer the right end of the spectrum, since, though we have no voice in choosing our society or historical period, we have a good deal of freedom in how we use them. On the extreme right hand I would put talent, for though it is given in once sense, we have considerable freedom with respect to how we use it. There are also varying ways of relating to one’s destiny. One is to cooperate with it. The aspects of destiny assigned to every mortal is suited to one, and suits one to oneself. Another way is be aware of and to acknowledge one’s destiny. Most of us do this, at least superficially with physical size, anatomy, and death. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
A fourth way is the outright confronting and challenging of one’s destiny. A fifth and most active response is encountering and rebelling against destiny. Rage, rage against the dying of the light is an example of this. These ways are not mutually exclusive, to be sure, and we all use all of them at different times. The role of talent as a form of destiny is shown in a letter Beethoven wrote when he was twenty-eight and becoming so hearing impaired that “others heard the shepherd singing and I heard nothing. Oh, if I were rid of this affliction I could embrace the World! I feel that my youth is just beginning and I not always been ill? Grant me but half freedom from my affliction and then—as a complete, ripe mortal I shall return to you and renew the old feelings of friendship. You must see me as happy as it is possible to be here below—not unhappy. No! I cannot endure it. I will take Fate by the throat; it shall wholly overcome me. Oh, it is so beautiful to live—to live a thousand times! I feel that I am not made for a quiet life.” We can, of course, spend our lives trying to falsify or flee from our destiny. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby is the story of a young man who tried to falsify his past. Gatsby changed his name, disowned his parents, cultivated a British accent, and spent the crucial years after the World war trying to win back Daisy, the rich young lady with who he had fallen in love when he was in military training. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
In Fitzgerald’s words, “The truth was that Jay Gatsby of West Egg, Long Island, sprang from his platonic conception of himself. So he invented just the sort of Jay Gatsby that a seven-year-old boy would be likely to invent, and to this conception he was faithful to the end.” At the tragic ending, the fabulous dance orchestras were silenced, the last person had left the once-crowned parties, Gatsby’s big house was empty, Daisy had gone back to her rich husband. And Gatsby’s body floats dead in his own swimming pool. Fitzgerald sums up the tragedy and relates it to us all: “Gatsby had come a long way to this blue lawn, and his dream must have seemed so close that he could hardly fail to grasp it. He did not know that it was already behind him, somewhere back in that vast obscurity beyond the city, where the dark fields of the republic rolled on under the night. Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgiastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that is no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms father….And one fine morning—so we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
With beautiful insight, Fitzgerald sees the human compulsion to repeat behavior: “tomorrow we will run faster.” Id this not our universal hubris? “No man of woman born / Coward or brave, can shun one’s destiny,” Homer proclaimed centuries ago. We human beings beat on like boats against the current, while we are all the time borne back ceaselessly into the past. Fitzgerald rightly observed that each of us to some extent falsifies, denies, or dodges one’s destiny—to commit the errors is all too human. He himself was especially of this type, as imaginative writers often are, and his special difficulty with his own destiny, which obviously included his early fame, led to his alcoholism and early death. So he knows of what he speaks. Destiny is a vital design. This means that destiny is a destination, or the significant direction or conflict of directions each one of us senses within oneself. Our will is free to realize or not to realize this vital design which we ultimately are, but we cannot…change it, abbreviate it, or substitute anything for it. The environment we live in, the outside World we face, and our own character as it has developed up until that moment simply make this task easier or harder. Life means the inexorable necessity of realizing the design for an existence which each one of us is. The sense of life is nothing other than each one’s acceptance of one’s inexorable circumstance and, on accepting it, converting it into one’s own creation. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
Destiny in this sense is that design in our lives that we spend our years trying to find, seeking and groping, trying this job and that one, loving this woman or man and that one, stumbling into this therapist’s office or that one, sometimes with success and sometimes with failure. The tendency, present especially in America, to believe that we can change everything at any time we wish, that nothing in character or existence is fixed or given (in Los Angeles not even death) and that now with psychotherapy or the cults we can remake our lives and personalities over the weekend is not only a misperception of life, but is also a desecration of it. Psychoanalysis and its offspring provide varied ways of trying to discover this vital design of each of us. Gurus—or other persons who claim to have some transterrestial connections—are so prized in our day because they presume to tell us what our vital design is. To the extent that we are able to live out or destiny, we experience a sense of gratification and achievement, a conviction that we are becoming what we were meant to become. It is an experience of authenticity, a feeling of being in accord with the Universe, a conviction of genuine freedom. The huge World that girdles us about puts all sorts of questions to us, and tests us in all sorts of ways. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Some of the test we meet by actions that are easy, and some of the questions we answer in articulately formulated words. However, the deepest question that is ever asked admits of no reply but the dumb turning of the will and tightening of our heartstrings as we say, “Ye, I will even have it so!” When the vital design is covered up and silenced, however, the sensitive person has the experience of acting like a prig—one feels unreal, ungenuine, inauthentic. This design is not an idea or plan thought up by the person involved, and freely chosen. The design is anterior to all the ideas one’s intellect forms, and to all the decisions of one’s will. Life is essentially a drama, because it is a desperate struggle—with things and even with our own character—to succeed in being in fact that which we are in design. Often our pressure to deny our destiny comes from such things as our insecurity, our dread of ostracism, our fear and anxiety, and our lack of courage to risk ourselves. These, in turn, come largely from the pressure to conform: it is safer to belike everybody else. The vital design, the authentic pattern to which we are called can then be left far behind. However, the tendency to deny our destiny may also come from a conflict between possibilities—between, say, being a scientist or a poet, as in Goethe’s life. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
There is the conflict in classical tragedy, for example, between Orestes’ love and pity for his mother and his need to avenge his father, the love-hate dilemma that arises from a fundamental human conflict between desire and destiny. There is a tendency among us to separate that which has an evil connotation in destiny, which we generally call fate, from that which is constructive, which we call destiny. It is crucial to remember that the concept of destiny is prior to the moral criteria of good and evil. So let there be no confounding the ought to be of mortality, which inhabits mortal’s intellectual region, wit the vital imperative, the has to be of personal vocation, situated in the most profound and primary region of our being. We need to accept the negative fate element together with the beneficial destiny. Adolph Hitler developed his great power over the German people by his use of the destiny of the German people, he was using the term correctly no matter how destructive his campaigns turned out to be. “The devil can quote scripture” has a meaning far beyond what we normally assume. Destiny and freedom from a paradox, a dialectical relationship. By this I mean that they are opposites that need each other—like day and night, Summer and Winter, God and the devil. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
Out of encountering of the forces of destiny come our possibilities, our opportunities. In the engaging of destiny our freedom is born, just as with the coming of the light day overcomes the night. Destiny, as we have declared, is not to be thought of as a ball and chain that afflict human beings. It is true that there is a divinity that shapes our ends, rough-hew them how we will. However, it is likewise true, as Shakespeare also points out, “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves, that we underlings.” These statements sounds like a clear contradiction. However, they are paradoxes instead. Freedom is by no means the absence of destiny. If there were no destiny to confront—no death, no illness, no fatigue, no limitations of any sort and no talents to pose against these limitations—we would never develop any freedom. The meaning of the dialectical relation between freedom and destiny is that, even though they are opposites, they are still bound together. They imply each other. If destiny changes, freedom must change, and vice versa. First comes a thesis; this gives rise to its antithesis; and this, in turn, leads to a synthesis. Each not only makes the other possible; each stimulates activity in the other pole, gives power and energy to the other. Thus we can truly speak of destiny being born out of freedom and freedom being born out of destiny. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
For freedom is honed in the struggle with destiny. The freedom that develops in our confronting our destiny produces the richness, the endless variety, the capacity to endure, the ecstasy, the imagination, and the imagination, and the other capacities that characterize the World and ourselves as conscious creatures, free but destined, moving in it. In this sense destiny is personal: Each of us suffers one’s own destiny. It is out of the dialectical relation of destiny and freedom that creativity and civilization are born. Thus freedom and necessity [destiny] meet and fuse not only in my present and future choices but in the very individuality of my existence. Each and every decision establishes a new foundation for the formation of my real historical self: I am bound by the decisive character of my choices; in virtue of these choices I have become what I wanted myself to be. Hence, there are all the paradoxical statements about freedom. We are doomed to be free by the very fact of being born. We are condemned to freedom. Mortals are the being condemned to translate necessity into freedom. Thus mortals begin to have some sense of that cosmic pathos of the I without as yet realizing this. The human body is the carrier of its sensations, from its environment. In this particularity the body learns to know and discriminate itself, but this discrimination remains on the plane where things are next to each other. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
However, once the I of the relation has emerged and has become existent in tis detachment, it somehow eternalizes and functionalizes itself and enters into the natural fact of the discreteness of the body from its environment, awakening I-likeness in it. Only now can the conscious I-act, the first form of the basic word I-It, of experience by an I, come into being. The I that has emerged proclaims itself as the carrier of sensations and the environment as their object. Of course, this happens in a primitive and not in epistemological manner; yet once the sentence “I see the tree” has been pronounced in such a way that it no longer relates a relation between a human I and a tree You but the perception of the tree object by the human consciousness, it has erected the crucial barrier between subject and object; the basic word I-It, the word of separation has been spoken. If we are curious and interested enough to follow up correctly the clues and hints which life gives us sometimes; if we observe, study, analyse, and pray; and if we become sensitive enough, then we shall be driven to become pilgrims with no choice except engagement in a spiritual quest. Our supreme need and deep request is then inner work. When one wakes up to the suspicion that ordinary purposes of human life on Earth hide other much more important ones, and that one will have to find them by oneself, one may begin to seek out and study the teachings of those who have gone farther along this way. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
Whether we are guided by human experience or superhuman revelation, by intuitive feeling or intellectual thinking, we must come in the end to the recognition of the great mystery which surrounds us. The mysterious enigmas of the spiritual life must sooner or later challenge the sleeping mind of mortals into wakeful thoughts. Our so-called intelligentsia, who played with political red fire until they painfully felt its destructiveness on their own persons, played at the same time with intellectual disdain for those who escaped from the World into ivory-towers of spiritual seeking. The second World war, however, began the process of making them feel the barrenness of their own fields and the stark coldness of their own outlooks. So quite a number of them have begun to peep into the ivory-towers and to find out what goes on there. The resultant discoveries are opening their eyes. The spirit’s beauty has lured mortals on a dream of unfound gold. For the heart of mortals has always seemed to me like a grey galleon moving on the green seas of thought and seeking this World of treasure. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
Ineffable bliss and serene joy are at the heart of all things and that is one of the reasons why people seek God’s infinite happiness even though they are not all aware of this. Those who turn to the spiritual life for material benefits, such as better relations with other people and better physical healthy are entitled to do so. However, they should remember Jesus’ counsel: “Seek ye first the Kingdom of of Heaven,” for then not only will “all these things [material benefits] be added unto you” but they have a chance of gaining the kingdom whereas the other approach postpones such a glorious result. God must be sought for his own sake; otherwise the spiritual quest will not be found or else will be found only in fleeting glimpses. That is the goal, that is the final end. However, there are two others pairs of realities which may separate us from the love of God—height and depth, and things present and things to come. Everyone understands their meaning without guidance. However, it is hard to exhaust the richness of this meaning. Height and depth are the highest and lowest points in the movements of the stars; they are the points of their greatest and least influence, for good and for evil. Height and depth are the moments in which a life process reaches its strongest realization, in vitality and success and power, and in which it reaches its weakest realization, perhaps its end. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
Height and depth are the moments of victory and defeat, of fulfillment and emptiness, of elevation and depression, of fascination and of anxiety. And both moments, heights as well as depth, try to separate us from the love of God, the one by its light, the other by its darkness, both making God invisible. Things present and things to come—the first pints to the impact which the present makes upon us. It points to the seductive power of the present, to our refusal to look back or ahead when we are held in the grip of the acute enjoyment or the acute pain of the present moment. And things to come means the expectation of the new, the joy of the unexpected, the courage of the risk. However, it also means the incalculable, the contingent, and the anxiety about the strange and unknown. If we prepare our hearts, feasting upon the words of Chris can happen at any time and on any occasion. Our Heavenly Father loves us. He has provided a perfect plan for us to enjoy his blessings. In this life, we are all invited to come unto Christ and receive the restored gospel of Jesus Christ, receiving the gift of the Holy Ghost, and faithfully living the gospel. We must commit to the strait and narrow path and press forward with a steadfastness in Christ. It is an experience of joy, nourishment, celebration, sharing, expressing love to families and loved ones, communicating our thanksgiving to God, and building relationships while enjoying abundant, incredibly delicious food. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
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
Justice Without Love is Always Injustice Because it Does Not Do Justice to the Other One, Nor to Oneself, Nor to the Situation in Which We Meet!
I stood on the hilltop in the Moonlight and I tried not to see this paradise. I tried to picture those I loved. Were they gathered still together in that fairy-tale wood of beautiful trees? If only I could see their faces or hear their voices. I looked on these verdant green valley, now patched with beautiful contracted Cresleigh homes, a picture book World with flowers blooming in profusion, the red poinsettia as tall as trees. And the clouds, ever changing, borne like the tall sailing ships on brisk winds. What had the first Europeans thought when they looked upon this fecund land surrounded by the sparkling sea? That this was the Garden of God? Even the most uneducated people would not dare to affirm that compassion, gratitude, love of the beauty of the World, love of religious practices, and friendship belonged exclusively to those centuries and countries that recognize the Church. These forms of love are rarely found in their purity, but it would even be difficult to say that they were met with more frequently in those centuries and countries than in the others. To think that love in any of these forms can exist anywhere Christ is absent is to belittle him so grievously that it amounts to an outrage. It is impious and almost sacrilegious. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
These kinds of love are supernatural, and in a sense they are absurd. They are the height of folly. So long as the soul has not had direct contact with the very person of God, they cannot be supported by any knowledge based either on experience or reason. They cannot therefore rest upon any certainty, unless the word is used in a metaphorical sense to indicate the opposite of hesitation. In consequence it is better that they should not be associated with any belief. This is more honest intellectually, and it safeguards our love’s purity more effectively. On this account it is more fitting. In what concerns divine things, belief is not fitting. Only certainty will do. Anything less than certainty is unworthy of God. During the period of preparation, these indirect loves constitute an upward movement of the soul, a turning of the eyes, not without some effort, toward higher things. After God has come in person, not only to visit the soul as he does for a long time beforehand, but to possess it and to transport its center near to his very heart, it is otherwise. The chicken has cracked its shell; it is outside the egg of the World. These first loves continue; they are more intense than before, but they are different. One who has passed through this adventure has a deeper love than every for those who suffer affliction and for those who help one in one’s own, for one’s friends, for religious practices, and for the beauty of the World. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
However, one’s love in all these forms had become a movement of God himself, a ray merged in the light of God. That at least is what we may suppose. These indirect loves are only the attitude toward beings and things here below of the soul turned toward the Good. They themselves have not any particular good as an object. There is no final good here below. Thus strictly speaking we are no longer concerned with forms of love, but with attitudes inspire by love. In the period of preparation the soul loves in emptiness. It does not know whether anything real answers its love. It may believe that it knows, but to believe is not to know. Such a belief does not help. The soul knows for certain only that it is hungry. The important thing is that it announces its hunger by crying. If we suggest to a child that perhaps there is no bread, the child does not stop crying. It goes on crying just the same. The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry. It can only persuade itself of this by lying, for the reality of its hunger is not a belief, it is a certainty. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
We all know that there is no true good here below, that everything that appears to be good in this World is finite, limited, wears out, and once worn out, leaves necessity exposed in all its nakedness. Every human being has probably had some lucid moments in one’s life when one has definitely acknowledged to oneself that there is no final good here below. However, as soon as we have seen this truth we cover it up with lies. Many people even take pleasure in proclaiming it, seeking a morbid joy in their sadness, without ever having been able to bear facing it for a second. Mortals feel that there is a mortal danger in facing this truth squarely for any length of time. That is true. Such knowledge strikes more surely than a sword; it inflicts a death more frightening than that of the body. After a time it kills everything within us that constitutes our soul. In order to bear it we have to love the truth more than life itself. Those who do this turn away from the fleeting things of time with their souls. They do not turn toward God. When they are in total darkness, how could they do so? God himself sets their faces in the right direction. He does not, however, show himself to them for a long time. It is for them to remain motionless, without averting their eyes, listening ceaselessly, and waiting, they know not for what; deaf to entreaties and threats, unmoved by every shock, unshaken in the midst of every upheaval. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
If after a long period of waiting God allow them to have an indistinct intuition of his light or even reveals himself in person, it is only for an instant. Once more they have to remain still, attentive, inactive, calling out only when their desire cannot be contained. If God does not reveal this reality, it does not rest with the soul to believe in the reality of God. In trying to do so it either labels something else with the name of God, and that is idolatry, or its belief in God remains abstract and verbal. Such a belief prevails wherever religious doctrines are taken for granted, as is the cause with those centuries and countries in which it never enters anyone’s head to question it. The state of nonbelief is then what Saint John of the Cross calls a night. The belief is verbal and does not penetrate the soul. At a time like the present, if the unbeliever loves Go, if one is like the child who does not know whether there is bread anywhere, but cries out become one is hungry, incredulity may be equivalent to the dark night of Saint John of the Cross. When we are eating bread, and even when we have eaten it, we know that it is real. We can nevertheless raise doubts about the reality of bread. Philosophers raise doubts about the reality of the World of the senses. Such doubts are however purely verbal; they leave the certainty intact and actually serve only to make it more obvious to a well-balanced mind. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
In the same way one to whom God has revealed his reality can raise doubts about this reality without any harm. They are purely verbal doubts, a form of exercise to keep one’s intelligence in good health. What amounts to criminal treason, even before such a revelation and much more afterward, is to question the fact that God is the only thing worthy of love. That is a turning away of our eyes, for love is the soul’s looking. It means that we have stopped for an instant to wait and to listen. Queen Akasha did not seek Lestat, she waited for him. When she was convinced that he no longer existed, and that nowhere in the whole World was there anything that could be Lestat, she did not on that account return to her former associates. She drew back from them with greater aversion than ever. She preferred the absence of Lestat to the presence of anyone else. Lestat awakened her from her statue state, from her cold slumber. She no longer hoped for that. However, never for an instant did dream of employing another method which could obtain a luxurious and honored life for her—the method of reconciliation with her kith and kin. Akasha did not want wealth and consideration unless they came with Lestat. She did not even give a thought to such things. However, she wanted to turn Earth into a Heaven. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
At that moment Lestat could hold out no longer. He could not help declaring himself. He gave certain proof that he was Lestat. Akasha saw him, she heard him, she touched him. There would be no more question for her not as to whether her savior was in existence. One who has had the same adventure as Akasha, one whose soul has seen, heard, and touched for itself, one will recognize God as the reality inspiring all indirect loves, the reality of which they are as it were the reflections. God is pure beauty. This is incomprehensible, for beauty, by its very essence, has to do with the senses. To speak of an imperceptible beauty must seem a misuse of language to anyone who has any sense of exactitude: and with reason. Beauty is always a miracle. However, when the soul receives an impression of beauty which, while it is beyond all sense perception is no abstraction, but real and direct as the impression caused by a song at the moment it reached our ears, the miracle is raised to the second degree. Everything happens as though, by a miraculous favor, our very sense themselves had been made aware that silence is not the absence of sound, but something infinitely more real than sounds, and the center of a harmony more perfect than anything which a combination of sounds can produce. Furthermore there are degrees of silence. When compared with the silence of God, there is a silence in the beauty of the Universe which is like noise. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
God is, moreover, our real neighbor. The term of person can only be rightly applied to God, and this is also true of the term impersonal. God is one who bends over us, afflicted as we are, and reduced to the state of being nothing but a fragment of inert and bleeding flesh. Yet at the same time he is not some sort of victim of misfortune as well, the victim who appears to us as an inanimate body, incapable of thought, this nameless victim of whom nothing is known. The inanimate body is this created Universe. If we were able to attain it, the love we owe to God, this love that would be our crowning perfection is the divine model both of gratitude and compassion. God is also the perfect friend. So that there should be between him and us, bridging the infinite distance, something in the way of equality, he had chosen to place an absolute quality in his creatures, the absolute liberty of consent, which leaves us free to follow or swerve from the God-ward direction he has communicated to our souls. He has also extended our possibilities of error and falsehood so as to leave us the faculty of exercising a spurious rule in imagination, not only over the Universe and the human race, but also over God himself, in so far as we do not know how to use his name aright. He has given us this faculty of infinite illusion so that we should have the power to renounce it out of love. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
In fact, contact with God is the true sacrament. We can, however, be almost certain that those whose love of God has caused the disappearance of the pure loves belonging to our life here below are no true friends of God. After the soul has had direct contact with God, our neighbor, our friends, religious ceremonies, and the beauty of the World do not fall to the level of unrealities. On the contrary, it is only then that these things become real. Previously they were half dreams. Previously they had no reality. “In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of Heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all peoples, nations, and mortals of every language worshipped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed,” reports Daniel 7.11. Could God possibly forgive people without at least demanding their conversation and some ritual observances? People, at any time, can return and be accepted by God. God can at any time forgive those who repent. Many people say we live in a sick society—and the quality of life might be changed radically by the development of a new sense of community. If every person returns from one’s evil way and from the violence on one’s hands, who knows, God may return. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
Modern mortals are voracious readers who have never learned to read well. Part of the trouble is that one is taught to read drivel that is hardly worth reading well. (There was a time when children learned to read by reading the Bible.) One ends up by reading mainly newspapers and magazines—ephemeral, anonymous trash that one scans on its way to the garbage can. One has no wish to remember it for any length of time; it is written as if to make sure that one will not; and one reads it in a manner that makes doubly sure. There is no person behind what one reads; not even a committee. Somebody wrote it in the first place—if one can call that writing—and then various other people took turns changing it. For the final result no one is responsible; and it rarely merits a serious response. It cries out to be forgotten soon, like the books on which one is learned to read, in school. They were usually anonymous, too; or they should have been. In adolescence students are suddenly turned loose on books worth reading, but generally do not know how to read them. And if, untaught, some instinct prompts them to read well, chances are that they are asked completely tone-deaf questions as soon as they have finished their assignment—either making them feel that they read badly after all or spoiling something worthwhile for the rest of their lives. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
We must learn to feel addressed by a book, by the human being behind it, as if a person spoke directly to us. A good book or essay or poem is not primarily an object to be put to use, or an object of experience: it is the voice of You speaking to me, requiring a response. “So whatever you wish that mortals would do to you, do so to them; for this is the law and the prophets,” reports Matthew 7.12. Recently I have had to think about the relation of love to justice. And it occurred to me that among the words of Jesus there is a statement of what is called the “Golden Rule.” The Golden Rule was well known to Christians and Greeks, although mostly in a negative form: What you do not want that mortal should do to you, do not so to them. Certainly, the absolute for is richer in meaning and nearer to love, but it is not love. It is calculating justice. How, then, is it related to love? How does it fit the message of the kingdom of God and the justice of the kingdom as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount where the Golden Rule appears? Let us think of an ordinary day in our life and of occasions for the application of the Golden Rule. We meet each other in the morning, we expect a friendly face or word and we are ready to give it although our minds are full of anxious anticipation of the burdens. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
Somebody wants a part of our limited time, we give it, having asked somebody else to give us a part of one’s time. We need help and we give it if we are asked, although it includes sacrifice. We are frank with others, expecting that they will be frank with us even if it hurts. We are fair to those who fight against us expecting fairness from them. We participate in the sorrows of our neighbors, certain that they will participate in ours. All this can happen in one day. All this is Golden Rule. And if somebody has violated this rule, consciously or unconsciously, we are willing to forgive as we hope to be forgiven. It is not astonishing that for many people the Golden Rule is considered as the real content of Christianity. It is not surprising that in the name of the Golden Rule criticism is suppressed, independent action discouraged, serious problems avoided. It is even understandable that statesmen ask other nations to behave toward their own nations according to the Golden Rule. And does not Jesus himself say that the Golden Rule is the law and the prophets? However, we know that this is not the answer of the New Testament. The great commandment as Jesus repeats it and the descriptions of love in Paul and John’s tremendous assertion that God is love, infinitely transcend the Golden Rule. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
The Golden Rule must be transcended, for it does not tell us what we should wish that mortal would do to us. We wish to have freedom from heavy duties. We are ready to give the same freedom to others. However, someone who loves us refuses to give it to us, and one oneself refuses to ask us for it. And if one did, we should refuse to give it to one because it would reduce our growth and violate the law of love. We wish to receive a fortune which makes us secure and independent. We would be ready to give a fortune to a friend who asks us for it, if we had it. However, in both cases love would be violated. For the gift would ruin us and the other individual. We want to be forgiven and we are ready to do the same. However, perhaps it is in both cases an escape from the seriousness of a personal problem, and therefore against love. The measure of what we shall do to mortals cannot be our wishes about what they shall do to us. For our wishes express not only our right but also our wrong and our foolishness more than our wisdom. This is the limit of the Golden Rule. This is the limit of calculating justice. Only for one who knows what one should wish and who actually wishes it, is the Golden Rule ultimately valid. Only love can transform calculating justice into creative justice. Love makes justice just. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
Justice without love is always injustice because it does not do justice to the other one, nor to the oneself, nor to the situation in which we meet. For the other one and I and we together in this moment in this place are unique, unrepeatable occasion, calling for a unique unrepeatable act of uniting love. If this call is not heard by listening love, it is not obeyed by the creative genius of love, injustice is done. And this is true even of oneself. One who loves listens to the call of one’s own innermost center and obeys this call and does justice to one’s own being. For love does not remove, it establishes justice. It does not add something to what justice does but it shows justice what to do. It makes the Golden Rule possible. For we do not speak for a love which swallows justice. This would result in chaos and extinction. However, we speak for a love in which justice is the form and structure of love. We speak for a love which respects the claim of the other one to be acknowledged as what one is, and the claim of ourselves to be acknowledged as what we are, above all as persons. Only distorted love, which is a cover for hostility or self-disgust, denies that which united love. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
Love makes justice just. The divine love is justifying love accepting and fulfilling one who, according to calculating justice, must be rejected. This justification of one who is unjust is the fulfillment of God’s creative justice, and of God’s reuniting love. Knowing that the ultimate meaning of freedom will elude us, let us still endeavor to define the term as best we can. The first definition is on the psychological level, the domain of everyday actions: Freedom is the capacity to pause in the face of stimuli from many directions at once and, in this pause, to throw one’s weight toward this response rather than that one. This is the freedom we experience in a store when we pause over the purchase of a necktie or a shirt. We summon up in our imaginations the image of how we will look in this or that tie, what so-and-so will say about it, or how the color will fit such and such a suit. And then we buy the tie or we move on to something else. This is freedom of doing, or existential freedom. This freedom is shown most interestingly in the supermarket, when we push our carts through the aisles between the tumultuous variety of packages and cans of food on the shelves, each one silently shouting through its bright-colored label “Buy me!” We see the shoppers with expressions of hesitancy, vacuity, wonder, pausing for some inspiration as to which of all these foods will be good for dinner tonight. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
The shopper seems hypnotized, charmed, preoccupied. Like patients on a ward in a mental hospital, they do not see me as I walk directly across their line of vision. The expressions of wonder and hesitancy are a readiness, an invitation, an openness to some stimulus on the shelves to persuade them to throw the balance this way of that in making their choice. This first freedom is experienced by each of us hundreds of times every day. It is decked up in respectable terms like decision/choice when we discuss freedom in psychology classes—if we ever discuss freedom in psychology classes at all. The most profound illustration of this kind of freedom is our ability to ask questions. Take, for example, my asking a question after listening to a lecture. The very fact that the question comes up in my mind at all implied that there is more than one answer. Otherwise there would be no point in asking the question in the first place. This is freedom; it implies that there is some possibility, some freedom of selection in what I ask. The speaker then pauses for a few seconds after I have asked it, turning over in his or her mind the possible answers. We sense that there is, in asking and answering questions, a good deal more going on, and it is of a richer nature, than the mere responding to various stimuli and selecting a response. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Each person who lights this candle within one’s own mind will soon begin to attract other mortals like moths to a flame burning by a fire—not all mortal nor many mortals but only those who are groping for a way out of their darkness. Can a scrupulously impartial search through World-thought and experience lead to discovery of truth? “Wilt thou be made whole?” asked Jesus. Questioning implies some value judgment, some investment of the person’s life, some invitation to share, to make contact, some challenge to consider a new idea. Regrettably, in recent decades our very idea of freedom has been diminished and grown shallow in comparisons with previous ages; it has been relegated almost exclusively to freedom from outside pressure, to freedom from state coercion—to freedom understood on the juridical level, and no higher. Only when this search for a higher life has becomes an absolute necessity to a mortal, has one found even the first qualification needed for the Quest. “And the Lord God doth work by means to bring about his great and eternal purposes; and by very small means the Lord doth confound the wise and bringeth about the salvation of many souls,” reports Alma 37.7. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
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
Christ Taught Us that the Supernatural Love of Our Neighbor is the Exchange of Compassion and Gratitude
My gentlemen parents are forever reluctant to illuminate such simple matters. One would think it would be bad taste to dwell on such subjects Louis looks puzzled, then miserable, before he returns to the evening paper. And Lestat, he smiles and plays a little Mozart for me, then answers with a shrug: “It was the day you were born to us.” Just as some people live primarily in the past, others avoid the present by living in the future. Some of us spend most of our time getting ready to do something. Perhaps we say, “Someday I am going to spend a whole Summer traveling through Europe.” However, always we manage to find good and sufficient reasons why now is not the time to do it. Perhaps we manage this by making “The Plan” so grandiose and unrealistic that excuses for postponing its fulfillment will always seem overwhelming. One single, elementary professor had the dream, as she put it, of going to Ireland to find a leprechaun. She sold her Cresleigh home at Rocklin Trails and, at the expressed dismay of a number of friends and relatives, took part of the proceeds and went one Summer to Ireland. She reported on her return that she had not completely found her leprechaun. She discovered, for example, that she could sometimes be lonely and depressed even in that exquisitely beautiful and mystical country, but she missed her Cresleigh home so much. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
However, at least she did not live out her years in the frustrated thought that she could be happy if she could just get to the promised land, and maybe one day she can buy another Cresleigh home. If the Christian life were nothing more than a way of forgetting the dark sorrows of Earthly life, a means of escaping the hard problems of Earthly life, it would still be worthwhile. If its emotional raptures were nothing more than make-believe, it would still be worthwhile. We do not disdain theatres and books, films, and music merely because the World into which they lead us is only one of glorious unreality. However, the fact is that mysticism does seek reality, albeit an inner one. We are not only actors giving a performance on the World-stage. We are also people who must learn to live in the still centre of our being. This is the higher purpose of life; to this mortals must in the end dedicate themselves: for this they must work, study, and pray. Our whole life on Earth is in the end nothing else than a kind of preparation for this quest. Often time people reflect on their families as they grow and evolve. One man describes his father as a sometime guy. “His whole life revolved around this word of his,” says the son. “When I was a child he started to add a room to the house, and he is still living in that house with the skeleton of a room attached, which he is going to finish sometime.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
As we advance on our quest, our values may change. This is partly because we learn by experience what every mortal has to learn, quester or not, that all is passing and nothing is absolute, that the fruits of desire may turn to truth, and every day brings us closer to reaching our goals. Probably all of us lives in the future to some extent. Often it takes the form of doing more planning and more organizing than we need to do. We spend the time now planning the things we will do for the coming week. When the time comes to do what we planned we no longer feel free to let ourselves be aware of whether that is really what we want to do at that moment. So we keep ourselves in a constant state of planning or fulfilling plans and leave ourselves little room to be open and responsive to our feelings of the moment. When we work so hard at it, it is no wonder we sometimes feel trapped. So to live in the present—not in the past, not in the future is very important. It means being sensitive and responsive to our own selves. However, for many people any movement in the direction of spontaneity must be preceded by a rediscovery of the capacity to be self-aware, since many of us have become virtually unaware of the self. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
One man, Armand, who grew up in a Christian household where he gained the impression that he must always be totally unselfish and subjugate any of his desires to those of everyone around him, tells how he woke up the morning after his first visit to a psychotherapist and broke into tears, sobbing for forty-five minutes or an hour. In describing the feeling that he had that mornings, he says, “Somehow that therapist got through to me the fact that I have a self—a self that is separate from anyone else. And it was such a new and reassuring idea to me that I could not stop crying from the relief I felt.” It is not surprising that Armand, like many others, had to go through a considerable retraining effort to become sensitively aware of his feelings. All of his childhood training had been in the other direction. He has been taught to be sensitively aware of and responsive to the needs and desires of others and to turn off any awareness of one’s own desires, which would automatically be regarded as selfish and therefore sinful. The lack of self-awareness often takes the form of being disconnected to the feelings that are unacceptable and frightening to us. This would probably account, for example, for the almost total absence of enjoyable relationships for some men and women. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
The same would be true of the individual whose anger never some into focus, or the one whose anger has a long fuse, so that awareness always comes some time later when the anger producing situation, along with the opportunity for expressing the anger, has become past history. It is not mental slowness but emotion slowness that presents us from thinking until it is too late of just the right angry words we would have liked to have been able to say at the right moment. And now let us look once more at those whom we have described as the righteous ones. They are really righteous, but since little is forgiven them, they love little. And this is their unrighteousness. It is not possessed on the moral level, just as the unrighteousness of Job was not possessed on the moral level where his friends sought for it in vain. It is possessed on the level of the encounter with ultimate reality, with the God who vindicates Job’s righteousness against the attacks of his friends, with the God who defends himself against the attacks of Job and his ultimate unrighteousness. The righteousness of the righteous ones is hard and self-assured. They, too, want forgiveness, but they believe that they do not need much of it. And so their righteous actions are warmed by very little love. They could not have some people seeking forgiveness and acceptance, and they cannot help us, even if we admire them. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
Why do children turn from their righteous parts and husbands from their righteous wives, and vice versa? Why do Christians turn away from their righteous pastors? Why do people turn away from righteous neighborhoods? Why do many turn away from righteous Christianity and from the Jesus it paints and the God it proclaims? Why do they turn to those who are not considered to be the righteous ones? Often, certainly, it is because they want to escape judgment. However, more often it is because they seek a love which is rooted in forgiveness, and this righteous ones cannot give. Many of those to whom they turn cannot give it either. Jesus gave it to the woman who was utterly unacceptable. The Church would be more the Church of Christ than it is now if it did the same, if it joined Jesus and not Simon in its encounter with those who are rightly judged unacceptable. If more were forgiven one, if one loved more and if one could better resist the temptation to present oneself as acceptable to God by one’s own righteousness, each of us who strives for righteousness would be more Christian. Helping individuals recapture self-awareness is often one of the most useful services the competent therapist can provide. It seems likely, however, that the person who is not seriously emotionally damaged can make considerable progress without such help. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
This growth involves learning to listen to one’s self—not shutting out those signals we have become accustomed to ignoring. Often a good way to start is to allow the simplest physical feelings to come through. When we do not let our minds perceive, our bodies may be aware. In an awkward social situation, for example, when we are frightened and want to run even though we have suppressed the fear from conscious awareness, our legs may tense up. Here again a group of intimates can be invaluable. If there are those with whom we can develop sufficient confidence that we can increasingly be ourselves, it will be surprising to us how quickly we can learn to be aware of a wealthy of various feelings we have hitherto suppressed. This is one of the values of group psychotherapy in the professional setting, but the experience need not be limited to therapy groups. Increasing self-awareness opens the door to the possibility of living more spontaneously, but the result is by no means automatically achieved. As we have seen, the possibility of freedom is frightening to us and we build many defenses against the natural life. We may bust ourselves compulsively and develop meaningless rituals to occupy our hours and limit our opportunity for spontaneity; or we may live by rules and put more emphasis than is necessary on the need for self-control; or we may make love seem like slavery. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
To begin to give up these defenses is frightening, because they take mist of the ambiguity out of life and help us keep life cut and dried and our response to life’s situations predictable. We know pretty much what we will do. Our lives are full of activity, the rules are laid out, and we are in tight control of ourselves most of the time. If it were something other than a convention, it would be at least practically human and not totally divine. A real convention is a supernatural harmony, taking the word harmony in the Pythagorean sense. Only a convention can be the perfection of purity here below, for all nonconventional purity is more of less imperfect. That a convention should be real, that is a miracle of divine mercy. We are all conscious of evil within ourselves; we all have a horror of it and want to get rid of it. Outside ourselves we see evil under two distinct forms, suffering and sin. However, in our feeling about our own nature the distinction no longer appears, except abstractly or through reflection. We feel in ourselves something which is neither suffering nor sin, which is the two of them at once, the root common to both, defilement and pain at the same time. This is the presence of evil in us. It is the unattractiveness in us, the uneducated aspect of our being. The more we feel it, the more it fills us with horror. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
The soul rejects evil in the same way we experience emesis. By a process of transference we pass it on to the things that surround us. These things, however, thus becoming blemished and unattractive in our eyes, send us back the evil that we had put into them. They send it back after adding to it. It this exchange the evil in us increases. It seems to us then that they very places where we are living and the things that surround us imprison us in evil, and that it becomes daily worse. This is a terrible anguish. Jesus Christ experienced what he did because no mortal could bare it. When the soul, worn out with this anguish, ceases to feel it any more, there is little hope of its salvation. It is thus that an invalid conceives hatred and disgust for one’s room and surroundings, a prisoner for one’s cell, and only often a worker for one’s factory. It is useless to provide people in this state with beautiful things, for there is nothing which does not eventually become spoiled and sullied by the process of transference, until it ends up as an object of horror. Perfect purity alone cannot be defiled. If at the moment when the soul is invaded by evil the attention can be turned toward a thing of perfect purity, so that a part of the evil is transferred to it, this thing will be in no way tarnished by it, nor will it send it back. Thus each minute of such attention really destroys a part of the evil. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
What the Hebrews tried to accomplish, by means of a kind of magic, in their rite of scapegoat, can only be carried out here on Earth by perfect purity. The true scapegoat is the Lamb. The day when a perfect being was to be found here below in human form, the greatest possible amount of evil scattered around one was automatically concentrated upon one in form of suffering. At that time, throughout the Roman Empire, the greatest misfortune and the greatest crime among mortals was slavery. That is why one suffered the death which was the extremity of affliction possible for a slave. In a mysterious manner this transference constitutes the Redemption. It is the same when a human being turns one’s eyes and one’s attention toward the Lamb of God present in the consecrated bread, a part of the evil which one bears within one is directed toward perfect purity, and there suffers destruction. It is a transmutation rather than a destruction. The contact with perfect purity dissociates the suffering and sin which has been mixed together so indissolubly. The part of evil in the soul is burned by the fire of this contact and becomes only suffering, and the suffering is impregnated with love. In the same way when all the evil diffused throughout the Roman Empire was concentrated on Christ it became only suffering to one. If there were not perfect and infinite purity here below, if there were only finite purity, which contact with evil eventually exhausts, we could never be saved. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
Penal justice affords a frightful illustration of this truth. In principle it is something pure which has goodness for its object. It is, however, an imperfect, finite, human purity. Therefore, uninterrupted contact with a mixture of crimes and affliction wears away this purity and outs in its place a defilement about equal to the totality of crimes, a defilement far exceeding that of any particular criminal. Mortals fail to drink from the source of purity. If this spring did not well up wherever there is crime and affliction, creation would however be an act of cruelty. If there had been no crime in affliction in the centuries further back than two thousand years, and in the countries untouched by missions, we might think that the Church had the monopoly of Christ and the sacraments. How can we bear the thought of a single crucified slave twenty-two centuries ago, how can we help accusing God, if we think that at that time Christ was absent and every kind of sacrament unknown? It is true that we hardly think at all about slaves crucified twenty-two centuries ago. When we have learned to look at perfect purity, the shortness of human life is the only thing to prevent us from being sure that unless we play false we can attain perfection even here on Earth. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
For we are finite being and the evil that is within us is finite too. As sad as it is, we are not immortal because we are not yet perfect and living thousands of years would give some people too much time to cultivate evil and too much power and the World would not be a place worth living in. As it stands now, we know our time is limited and that if we are good beings we will go to Heaven with God and experience not immortality, but eternal life. The difference is eternal life will be different, have other attributes, and we will not be vulnerable to death, starvation, lack, limitation, no more crime, no more tears, unless they are tears of joy. So knowing our years on Earth are limited is a blessing because we are constantly reminded to be good so we can receive all the things God has promised us. The purity that is offered to our eyes is infinite. However little evil we were to destroy at each look, we could be certain, if our time were unlimited, that by looking often enough, one day we should destroy it all. We should then have reached the end of evil magnificently. We should have destroyed evil for the Lord of Truth and we should bring one truth, as the Egyptian Book of the Dead says. One of the principal truths of Christianity, a truth that goes almost unrecognized today, is that looking is what saves us. The bronze serpent was lifted up so that those who lay maimed in the depths of degradation should be saved by looking upon it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
It is at those moments when we are, as we say, in a bad mood, when we feel incapable of the elevation of soul that benefits holy things, it is then that it is most effectual to turn our eyes toward perfect purity. For it is then that evil, or rather mediocrity, comes to the surface of the soul and is in the best position for being burned by contact with the fire. It is however then that the act of looking is almost impossible. All the mediocre part of the soul, fearing death with a more violent fear than that caused by the approach of the death of the body, revolts and suggests lies to protect itself. The effort not to listen to these lies, although we cannot prevent ourselves from believing them, the effort to look upon purity at such times, has to be something very violet; yet it is absolutely different from all that is generally known as effort, such as doing violence to one’s feelings or an act of will. Other words are needed to express it, but language cannot provide them. The effort that brings a soul to salvation is like the effort of looking or of listening; it is the kind of effort by which a fiancée accepts her lover. It is an act of attention and consent; whereas what language designates as will is something suggestive of muscular effort. The will is on the level of the natural part of the soul. The right use of the will is a condition of salvation, necessary no doubt but remote, inferior, very subordinate and purely negative. The weeds are pulled up by the muscular effort of the less affluent, but only Sun and water can make the corn grow. The will cannot produce any good in the soul. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
Efforts of the will are only in the right place for carrying out definite obligations. Wherever there is no strict obligation we must follow either our natural inclination or our vocation, that is to say God’s command. Actions prompted by our inclination clearly do not involve an effort of will. In our acts of obedience to God we are passive; whatever difficulties we have to surmount, however great our activity may appear to be, there is nothing analogous to muscular effort; there is only waiting, attention, silence, immobility, constant through suffering and joy. The crucifixion of Christ is the model of all acts of obedience. Also, there is a supernatural union of opposites, harmony in the Pythagorean sense. That we have to strive after goodness with an effort of our will is one of the lies invented by the mediocre part of ourselves in its fear of being destroyed. Such an effort does not threaten it in any way, it does not even disturb its comfort—not even when it entails a great deal of fatigue and suffering. For the mediocre part of ourselves is not afraid of fatigue and suffering; it is afraid of being killed. There are people who try to raise their souls like an athlete continually taking standing jumps in the hopes that, if one jumps higher every day, a time may come when one will no longer fall back but will go right up to the sky. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
Thus occupied one cannot look at the sky. We cannot take a single step toward Heaven. It is not in our power to travel in a vertical direction. If however we look Heavenward for a long time, God comes and takes us up. He raises us easily. There is no effort in what is divine. There is an easiness in salvation which is more difficult to us than all our efforts. However, the way we busy and over-busy ourselves, whether in work, pleasure, or movement deserves attention. Few take life easily; most take it uneasily. Few go through its daily business serenely; most go through it nervously, hurriedly, and agitatedly. Our activities are so numerous they suffocate us. It is a life without emotional poise, bereft of intellectual perspective. We are intoxicated by action. We moderns give ourselves too much to activity and movement, to little passivity and stillness. If we are to find a way out of the troubles which beset us, we must find a middle way between these two attitudes. The need of silence after noise, peace after feverishness, thought after activity, is wide and deep today. Amid all the nostrums and panaceas offered to humanity there is little evidence of the realization of this need. Indeed, because so many are discouraged and oppressed by the reality of time and do not perceive its true nature, a turning toward the spiritual life is a hope for the immediate present and the near fear. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
Randolph Harris II International Institute 