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An Architect Builds a House with the Same Feeling as that with which a Criminal Commits a Crime!
My dear Mrs. Aaliyah Haughton,
My wife and I were overwhelmed by your beauty and your voice during your concert. If you continue to sing with such grace and beauty, you will certainly die young. No one can sing with such perfection and look so beautiful without provoking the jealousy of the gods. I earnestly implore you to sing something badly every night before going to bed…. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
I Love You Anyway, is it So Rare that I Have Been Sleeping with the Dead?
Refuse to Cover the Signs of the End in Our Lives and in Our Souls–We Are a Generation of the End and We Should Know What We Are!
Every Difficulty Slurred Over Will be a Ghost to Disturb Your Repose Later on
You are afraid. You do not stand en garde against fear. You do not understand the danger of fear itself. We will know these answers when we find those who can tell us, those who have possessed knowledge for centuries, for however long creatures such as ourselves have walked the Earth. That knowledge was our birthright, and he deprived us. Although mass society is a political as well as a cultural phenomenon, many of its critics, among them Ortega y Gasset and T. S. Eliot, have concentrated their attack chiefly against what they regard as its vulgar values, its sameness, its threat to high culture. While one may share their concern about the danger of standardized tastes, or about the threat which mass behavior in politics or in culture poses for individual expression, there is far more to the problem than this—indeed, far more than many aristocratically inclined critics of mass society (and of democracy) want to see. For it is not only beings of sensibility who feel crushed by the sheer weight of mass society and its values. In short, what is alienating in mass society is not merely the corruption of art, or the power of the multitudes—a power often exaggerated—but more importantly, the atomization of individuals who make up the mass. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
We Seek Truth for Various Reasons—One is Because it Possesses Certitude that Gives Us Anchorage and Rest!
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Manifest Destiny—We Have Eaten from the Tree of Knowledge and the United World of America is Our Future!
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden—At Night He Opens the Window and Looks Out into the Infinite Dark!
The World is full of abiding beauty, no soul here is really alone. It did not matter to me. I was getting out of old Egypt, and I had the source of all our power with me. And I was young and foolish and enflamed. There has never been a just place for evil in the Western World. There has never been an easy accommodation of death. No matter how violent have been the centuries since the fall of Rome, no matter how terrible the wars, the persecutions, the injustices, the value placed upon human life has only increase. When we see the effect one person can have, it perhaps is no wonder that the Lord reminded us, “Remember the worth of souls.” It is the belief in the value of human life that has caused the torture chambers and the stake and the more ghastly means of execution to be abandoned all over Europe in this time. And it is the belief in the value of human life that carries mortals now out of the monarchy into the republics of America and France. All the stories I have told you are finally as useless as all ancient knowledge is to mortals and to us. Its images and its poetry can be beautiful; it can make us shiver with the recognition of things we have always suspected or felt. It can draw us back to times when the Earth was new to mortals, and wondrous. However, we can always come back to the way the Earth is now. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
When I started work as a psychotherapist, the relationship of powerlessness and psychosis was impressed upon me a number of years ago. In the mentally troubled person psychotherapists are able to see the extremes of the behavior and the experience of us all. All weakness tends to corrupt, and impotence corrupts absolutely. A young musician, Treasure, was one of my first patients. According to the person who administered her Rorschach, she has “one foot in schizophrenia and other on a banana peel.” In her session with me she would give long, involved comparisons of the colors of the musical notes made by the train from Newark in contrast to those made by the train from New Brunswick. I had not the slightest idea about what she was talking much of the time—and she knew it. However, she seemed to need me as a person who listened, wanting and trying to understand her whether I succeeded or not. She was also a woman with considerable dignity and a sense of humor, which helped us immeasurably. However, she could not get angry. Not at me or her parents or anyone else. Her self-esteem was so shaky and vague as to be almost nonexistent. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
Once a young man in a chorus in a chorus to which Treasure belonged asked her to go to a concert with him. Se accepted. However, the next day, in a surge of self-doubt, she phoned him to say: “If you do not want to, you do not have to take me.” She could not affirm or assert herself enough to conceive that someone might like to go to a concert with her. When, at the age of eight or nine, she would play football with a boy slightly older than she, he would run into her hard enough to hurt her. Another child might have yelled at the boy, or started a fight, or cried, or abandoned the game; these are all, good or bad, ways of coping. However, Treasure could utilize none of these methods; she could only sit there on the ground, looking at him silently thinking that he should not hit her so hard. When she was exploited, as she often was, sexually or financially, she had no defenses, no way of drawing a line beyond which she could firmly say “no,” no anger to support her. (One gets a feeling that such persons almost invite exploitation—it at least gives them some relationship and significance.) Along with her inability to get angry, there went, as a necessary corollary, a deep experience of powerlessness and an almost complete lack of capacity to influence or affect other people in interpersonal relations. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
However, such a person has another aide which, as I have confirmed in working with many borderline patients since, is completely different. Treasure’s dreams were of cut-up bodies put in bags, of blood and battles—in short, as violent as her conscious life was docile. Since that time and partly due to this young woman, I have frequently reflected on the relationship between powerlessness and madness. I am purposely stressing both meanings of the word mad: its personal sense of enragedness to the point of violence; and its historical psychiatric sense of psychosis. There is a relationship between the two, and this double use of the term may lead us to the center of the problem. We know that a common characteristic of all mental patients is their powerlessness, and with it goes a constant anxiety which is both cause and effect of the impotence. The patients’ insignificance is so firmly assumed by them that they accept it as a given, often going through life making sad and pitiful gestures to get whatever bit of significance they can. An adolescent girl came to consult me in the middle of the day wearing a crinoline evening dress, possibly one of the prettiest things she had, as a gesture of how much she needed my attention and concern, unaware that it was likely to be regarded as out of place. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
When a person like Treasure can no longer support this way of life, something cracks within her and she may then move into a state in which she is nothing but mad. The person then seems to be the exact opposite of what she had been. The violence of dreams like Treasure’s then becomes the content of her waking life. The person seems all madness, which is surely why psychosis through the centuries was called madness. Mad now at everybody, including herself, the person threatens or attempts to experience death by suicide, cuts her wrists, smears blood over the doors in hospitals to dramatize her need of the attendants and interns. She does overt violence to herself and whoever gets in the range of her projections. We see the same movement in other patients. In the autobiographical novel on her own schizophrenia I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, Hannah Green was admitted to Chestnut Lodge at sixteen. She was the epitome of docility and placidity, never showing any anger at all. Whenever she needed to, she withdrew into the mythology of her private spirit World and talked with mythical figures. Dr. Frieda Fromm-Reichman, the psychiatrist at Chestnut Lodge who treated her, dealt with this mythology with respect, assuring Hannah that she would not take it away as long as the girl needed it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
However, when Dr. Fromm-Reichman went to Europe one Summer, another, younger doctor was assigned to the girl. He charged in, blithely courageous, to break up her mythological World. The results were disastrous. In her explosion of violence, the patient set fire to herself and to her belongings at the Lodge, scarring herself for life. The error of the young doctor was that he did not appreciate that the mythology was what gave significance to Hannah’s existence. The question was not whether it was theoretically right or wrong, but its function for her. This placid patient, who seemed incapable of any aggressive act, swung from docility into outright violence. This may seem and feel like power to the hospital attendants, but it is a pseudopower, an expression of impotence. The patient may now be spoken of as “mad,” which means that she does not fit the accepted criteria in our society which, like all societies, prefer docile, placid “face.” It is important to see that the violence is the end result of repressed anger and rage, combined with constant fear based on the patient’s powerlessness. Behind the pseudopower of the madness we can often find a person struggling for some sense of significance, some way of making a difference and establishing some self-esteem. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
When Treasure was in treatment with me, she received a newspaper from her home town in which it was reported that a certain man in her village had experienced death by suicide. She said to me: “If only one other person in that town had known him, he would not have experienced death by suicide.” Note that she did not say, “If he had known someone,” but “if someone had known him.” She was telling me, I believed, that she would not put a violent end to her life so long as I was related to her. However, she was also describing something critically important for a human being—the necessity of having somebody listen, recognize, know him. It gives a person the conviction that one counts, that one exists as a part of the human race. It also gives one some orientation, point where one can find meaning in an otherwise meaningless World. It would be a red-letter day when Treasure could get angry with me, for I knew that she could then begin to protect herself in her contacts with other people in the wide World. And what is more, she could dare to live out her considerable capacities as an original and loveable as well as loving human being. “And now, my beloved brethren, behold, I declare unto you that except ye shall repent your houses shall be left unto you desolate,” reports Helaman 15.1. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Yet in all these relations the questions arise: Is our way of having these pleasures right or wrong? Do we use them for pleasure’s sake or because we want to unite in love with all that to which we belong? We never know with certainty. And those of us together with those in the past history of Christianity who have an anxious conscience, prefer to renounce pleasures although they are established as good by creation itself. They hide their anxiety behind parental or social or ecclesiastical prohibitions, calling these prohibitions Divine commands. They justify their fear to affirm the joy of life by appealing to their conscience, calling then the “imitation of Christ.” However Jesus, in contrast to John the Baptist, was called a glutton and a drunkard by his critics. In all these warnings against pleasure, truth is mixed with untruth. Insofar as they strengthen our responsibility, they are true; insofar as they undercut our joy, they are wrong. Therefore let me give another criterion for accepting or rejecting pleasures, the criterion indicted in our text: Those pleasures are good which go together wit joy; those are bad which prevent joy. In the light of this norm we should risk the affirmation of pleasures, even if our risk may prove to have been an error. It is not more Christian to reject than to accept pleasure. Let us not forget that the rejection implies a rejection of creation, or as the Church Fathers called it, a blasphemy of the Creator-God. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
And every Christian should be aware of a fact of which many non-Christians are keenly aware: the suppression of the joy of life produces hatred of life, hidden or open. It can lead to a self-destruction, as many physical and mental diseases prove. Such sweeping statements not only need qualification but also translation into recognizable and verifiable terms. Who are the alienated? Is the phenomenon of alienation new in history, or is it age-old? If age-old, are its present-day manifestations more widespread? And if so, how can measure the differences? Should mention alienation par excellence and point to the prevalence of experiencing death by suicide today? Old Testament princes and Roman soldiers, defeated or disgraced, ran upon their spears or hanged themselves from trees. Shall we cite modern rates of homicide? The cave man too could be homicidal. Shall we refer to the numbers of insane, unknown as well as institutionalized? However, mortals have always been mad. So it is not to gross statistics that we look, but to the untold lives of quiet desperation that mark our age—the multitudes of factory and white-collar workers who find their jobs monotonous and degrading; the voters and non-voters who feel hopeless or do not care. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
There are also the juveniles who commit senseless acts of violence; the growing army of idle and lonely old people; the African Americas who want to be treated like human beings; the women who want equal pay; the stupefied audiences of mass media; the people who reject the prevailing values of our culture but cannot—or may not—find any alternatives, the escapists, the retreatists, the nihilists, and the desperate citizens who would solve all major political problems by moving our society underground and blowing up the planet. There are few statistics to tell us about them, especially as many continue to function with the appearance of normality. Yet even with indirect evidence it seems safe to assume that there is something in common between them, something that touches the very roots of our social order. There are particular conditions in modern industrial society (especially under capitalism) that have led to mortal’s estrangement, and there are some ways both creative and destructive in which men and women have responded to that estrangement. What is it in our technological and social environment that leads to alienation? How can we so order society and integrate people that they do not merely exchange their unbearable sense of powerlessness and isolation for spurious togetherness or for new forms of coercion? #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
What does alienation mean? The word has an ancient history, being used in common discourse to identify feelings of estrangement, or of detachment from self and others; and in law to describe the act of transferring property or ownership to another. An illustration of the second usage is the alienation of church property which, after the Reformation, meant a transfer from religious to secular ownership. The two meanings converge in cases of law, now rare, when one sues some third party for alienating the affections of one’s spouse, the affectionate feelings being regarded as property which has been diverted to the third person’s use. In another common usage, alienation has long meant insanity; and in Europe to this day an alienist is one who treats persons suffering from mental disorders. In modern terms, however, alienation has been used by philosophers, psychologists and sociologists to refer to an extraordinary variety of psycho-social disorders, including loss of self, anxiety states, anomie, despair, depersonalization, rootlessness, apathy, social disorganization, loneliness, atomization, powerlessness, meaninglessness, isolation, pessimism, and the loss of beliefs or values. Obviously when we speak of alienation, we are dealing with a word that lends itself to many different meanings. To deal with all of them we would truly need an encyclopedia of the social sciences. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
The prestige of institutional mysticism, like that of official religion, mesmerizes nearly everyone interested in the subject. The independent mystic, who refuses all affiliation with any sect, school, ashram, monastery, group or society, is suspect and finds oneself left almost in isolation. However, although this may seem unfortunate, it is so only in some ways. In other ways, it leaves one entirely free from the bonds of strict and rigid doctrine, free to remain faithful to truth irrespective of all other considerations, free to speak in a voice whose authority comes not from Worldly power but from spiritual status. One should not change one’s chains by going from one master or one sect to another. Rather should one drop all chains. One is entitled to be set free from one’s former dependence on the church so that one may live one’s own individual inner life. How can one bring oneself to join any group, cult, or sect when one believes all of them to be right, only some are more right than others, and all of them to be wrong, only some are more wrong than others? There is not one whose limitations one does not see. One prefers the truthfulness of being uncommitted to any “ism,” and the freedom of being unjoined to any group. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
One is not likely to be a member of any organized movement because one’s mind is too large to be exclusive. One is outside all organized groups because, in spirit, one is inside all of them. Far from the din and disparagements of jarring sects, one lives unlabeled and free. One belongs to no particular named, classified, and indoctrinated group, and this keeps one’s own freedom while excluding none from one’s general goodwill. At the same time one stays open to truth and avoid the closed mind, fixed only on its own strict and rigid doctrine opinions and beliefs. The only group one is likely to be a member of is the human race! One is unwilling to be tired to any sect or coterie, established orthodoxy or organizational unorthodoxy. One may even refuse to fit into any of the any of the accepted patterns. One has to follow a light of one’s own. Such an anarchistic attitude is likely to provoke hostility and create detractors. It is said further that the religious mortal steps before God as one who is single, solitary, and detached insofar as one has also transcended the stage of the ethical mortal who still dwells in duty and obligation to the World. The latter is said to be still burdened with responsibility for the actions of agents because one is and ought, and into the unbridgeable gap between both one throws, full of grotesquely hopeless sacrificial courage, piece upon piece of one’s heart. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
This religious person is supposed to have transcended this tension between World and God; the commandment for one is to leave behind the restlessness of responsibility and of making demands on oneself; for one there is no longer any room for a will of one’s own, one accepts one’s place in the Plan; any ought is dissolved in unconditional being, and the World, while still persisting, has lost its validity; one still has to do one’s share in it but, as it were, without obligation, in the perspective of the nullity of all activity. Thus mortals fancy that God has created his World to be an illusion and one’s mortal to reel. Of course, whoever steps before the countenance has soared way beyond duty and obligation—but not because one has moved away from the World; rather because one has come truly close to it. Duties and obligations one has only toward the stranger: toward one’s intimates one is kind and loving. When mortal steps before the countenance, the World becomes wholly presented to one for the first time in the fullness of the presence, illuminated by eternity, and one can say You in on word to the being of all beings. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
There is no longer any tensions between World and God but only the one actuality. One is not rid of responsibility: for the pains of the finite version that explores effects one as exchanged the momentum of the infinite kind, the power of loving responsibility for the whole unexplorable course of the World, the deep inclusion in the World before the countenance of God. Ethical judgments, to be sure, one as left behind forever: evil people are for one merely those commended to one for a deeper responsibility, those more in need of love; but decisions one must continue to make in the depths of spontaneity unto death—calmly deciding ever again in favor of right action. Thus action is not null: it is intended, it is commanded, it is needed, it belongs to the creation; but this action no longer imposes itself upon the World, it grows upon it as if it were non-action. “For the Lord worketh not in secret combination, neither doth he will that mortals should shed blood, but in all things hath forbidden it, from the beginning of humanity,” reports Ether 8.19. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
A Teacher—When Will God Send Me One with Truth and of Boundless Benevolence?
When I turned around, Marius was gone. The sack was gone. However, Nicki’s violin and my valise of belongings lay on a stone table in the middle of the room. We know in psychotherapy that often despair is essential to the discovery on the part of the client of his or her hidden capacities and basic assets. The function of despair is to wipe away our superficial ideas, our delusionary hopes, our simplistic mortality. There are some misguided therapists who feel that they must reassure the patient at ever point of despair. However, if the client never feels despair, it is doubtful whether one ever will feel any profound emotion. Apropos of considering Voltaire’s remark “Despair has often gained battles,” a friend wrote this limerick: There once was a man named Voltaire who found his best hope in despair. If that sounds perverse, it could have been worse. Voltaire could declare, “I do not care.” There is surely value in the client’s experience that one has nothing more to lose anyway so one may as well take whatever leap life requires to make of one. I suggest that this is what is meant by that sentence in folklore “Despair and confidence both banish fear.” #RandolphHarris 1 of
Since there are a number of signs that we in America may be on the threshold a period as a nation when we shall no longer be able to camouflage or repress our despair, it is important to remind ourselves of the points that despair and confidence both banish fear. Those who can feel healthy despair are often those who also can at the same time experience the most intense pleasure and joy. Sartre was talking about a life-enhancing despair when in his play The Flies, after Zeus has pointed out al the despair Orestes will face, Orestes asserts against Zeus, “Human life begins on the far side of despair!” He could as well have said that human freedom and human joy also begin on the far side of despair. This is why we believe more firmly in the dignity and the nobility of being human after seeing a performance of tragedy rather than comedy: the character and the tragic downfall of Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, or even Harry in The Iceman Cometh give us a conviction of the significance of life. As we leave the theater, we are not only relieved, we are inspired. The despair we have felt in the drama highlights its opposite, the nobility of life. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Despair is a desperate refusal to be oneself. There different levels of despair at not willing to be one’s self, or still lower, despair at not willing to be a self’ or lowest of all, despair at willing to be another then one’s true self. Despair is a failure of spirit, a spiritlessness. When mortals are characterized as a spirit-less has become a talking-machine, and there is nothing to prevent one from learning a philosophical rigmarole just as easily as a confession of faith and a political recitative repeated by rote. Again: Despair is a qualification of spirit, it is related to the eternal in mortals. In unconsciousness of being in despair a mortal is furthest from being conscious of oneself as spirit. This thing of despairing is inherent in mortals; but if one were not a synthesis of finite and infinite, and this is what makes despair possible. One also emphasizez that the worst condition of all is to boast about never having been in despair, for that means that the person has never been authentically conscious of oneself. This leads us to another characteristic of seeing, the most significant of all. We never see only what we see; we always see something else with it and through it! Seeing creates, seeing unites, and above all seeing goes beyond itself. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
If we look at a stone we see directly only the colors and forms of the side which is turned toward us. However, with and through this limited surface we are aware of the roundness, of the extension and mass of the structure of the whole thing. We see beyond what we see. If we look at an animal we see directly the colors and forms of its skin. However, with it and through it we are aware of the tension and power of its muscles, of its inner strivings which are covered as well as revealed by the skin. We see not color sports, but a living being. If we look at a human face, we see lines and shades, but with it and through it we see a unique, incomparable personality whose expressions are visible in one’s face, whose character and destiny has left traces which we understand and in which we can even read something of one’s future. With and through colors and forms and movements we see friendliness and coldness, hostility and devotion, anger and love, sadness and joy. We see infinitely more than we see when we look into a new depth. Again the language gives us a help when it speaks of con- templation. Con- templation means going into the temple, into the sphere of the holy, into deep roots of things, into their creative ground. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
We see the mysterious powers which we call beauty and truth and goodness. We cannot see them as such, we can see them only in things and events. We see them with and through the shape of a rose and the movements of the stars and the image of a friend. We can see them, but it is not necessary that we see them. We can close our eyes, we can become blind. Some are blind to any beauty which is more than a pleasant feeling, some are blind to any truth which is more than correct observation and calculation, some are bind to any goodness which is more than usefulness. And some are blind to any ground which is the unity of these powers and which we call holy. It is the ultimate, the last which we can see with and through all things; and therefore it is the end of all seeing. It is the light itself and therefore it is darkness for our eyes. Only with and through can we see it, through things and mortals, through events and images. This seeing and not seeing at the same time is what we call faith. Nobody can see God; but we can see him with and through. Here the conflict ends between seeing and hearing. He word tells us where to see and when we have seen we pronounce what we have seen and heard. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
In the state which we call faith, sound and vision are united and perhaps this is the reason why the holy likes to be expressed in music more than in any other medium. Music gives wings to both, word and image, and goes beyond both of them. However, for a second time we are called down from the flight above to the lowliness of our human situation. Our Gospel calls us blind, all of us. And Jesus says that we are blind because we believe we see and do not know that we are blind; and Christ then threatens that we shall be thrown into more blindness if we insist that we are seeing. The question is: Where of all places can and shall we see into the ground of all Being? Who can lead our contemplation into the temple, into the holy itself? Seeing gives us a World, the order and unity of the many. However, we see within this order, disorder; within the unity, conflict threatening to explode the World itself and to being back the old darkness of the chaos. And order and chaos are so mixed with each other that we often feel dizzy, without ground and meaning, desiring to keep our eyes closed. Seeing unites us with what we see. However, we see so many things and beings with which we do not want to be untied, towards which we are indifferent or hostile, which are indifferent or hostile to us, which are repulsive and which we hate to see just because every seeing unites, even if it is through hate. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
And it may be even our own self that we do not want to see because we are repelled by our image and because we hate it if we see it. Not in love but in hate are we untied with ourselves, and perhaps we want to deprive ourselves of our eyes like Lestat in The Queen of the Damned, of our eyes which first did not see what they ought to see and now cannot stand to see what they must see. And is not that which we love to see and that which we hate to see so mixed that we often praise the poverty of not seeing? Seeing is seeing with and through beings into their depth, into the good and the true and into their holy ground. However, which are the beings and images that shall lead us to this temple? Those whom Jesus called blind believed they knew the way to the temple, to the holy and the holiest. Innumerable temples all over the World contain things and images with and through which we can see God. However, what we see are idols, fascinating, horrible, overwhelming in seductive beauty or destructive power, demanding what cannot be fulfilled, promising what cannot be given, giving what elevates and lowers at the same time. And this is so because they hold us fast to themselves and do not lead us beyond. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
Our eyes are bound by them, often bound by the demonic fascination they exercise and with which they take possession of us. We contemplate them, we go into their temples, we unite with them in self-surrender, and we leave them emptied, despairing, destroyed. This is the great temptation of seeing. This is the reason why hearing was put against seeing. It is the reason why images were destroyed again and again and every image forbidden, why the temples were burned and God was called the Infinite Void. However, this cannot be the last word. Emptiness can be both light and darkness; and we want light, the lights which is life and vision. Jesus also could have become an idol, a national and religious hero, fascinating and destructive. This is what the disciples and the masses wanted Christ to be. They saw him the good and the true, the holy itself. However, the succumbed to the temptation of seeing. They kept to that which must be sacrificed if God shall be seen with and through any mortal being. And when Christ sacrificed himself, they looked away in despair like those who image and idol is destroyed. However, he was too strong; he drew their eyes back to him, but now to Christ crucified. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
However, of hum it is true. Certainly Christ is not the only one to look at intuition and contemplation. We are not asked to stare at Christ, as some do. We are not asked to look away from everything for his sake, as some do. We are not asked to give up the abundance of his creation as some do. We are not asked to refuse union with what we see as some do. However, we are asked to see wit and through everything into the which Christ shows the way. We shall see into it unimpeded by that which tries to keep us, away from the last dept. And when we are tired of seeing the abundance of the World with all its disorder, its hate and separation, its demonic destruction, and if we are also unable to look into the blinding light of the divine ground, then let us close our eyes. And then it might happen that we see the picture of someone who looks at us with eyes of infinite human depth and therefore of divine power and love. And those eyes say to us “Come and see.” Human’s religious situation, existence in the presence, is marked by its essential and indissoluble antinomies. That is these antinomies are indissoluble constitutes their very essence. Whoever affirms the thesis and repudiates the antithesis violates the sense of the situation. Whoever tires to think a synthesis destroys the sense of the situation. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Whoever would settle the conflict between antinomies by some means short of one’s own life transgresses against the sense of the situation. It is the sense of the situation that it is to be lived in all its antinomies—only lived—and lived ever again, ever anew, unpredictably, without any possibility of anticipation or prescription. A comparison of the religious and the philosophical antinomy will make this clearer. We can relativize the philosophical conflict of freedom and necessity by relegating the latter to the World of appearance and the former to that of being, so that the two positions no longer really oppose one another but rather get along with one another as well as do the two World in which each is valid. However, when I mean freedom and necessity not in Worlds that are thought of but in the actuality in which I stand before God; when I know, I have been surrendered and know at the same time, it depends on me, then I may not try to escapes from the paradox I have to live by relegating the irreconcilable propositions to two separate realms; neither may I seek the assistance of some theological artifice to attain some conceptual reconciliation: I must take it upon myself to live both in one, and lived both are one. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
We regard Ralph Waldo Emerson as the perfect example of spiritual independence. He seems beholden to no mortal and draws all one’s light from within. How did he arrive at this condition? For in his early thirties, he wrote to his Aunt Mary, “A teacher–when will God send me one full of truth and boundless benevolence?” This question was written soon after he came to Europe. There were four literary heroes across the Atlantic among whom he hoped to find his teacher. They were Carlyle, Landor, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. However, when he met them in the flesh, Landor severely disappointed him. The Coleridge visit was “of no use beyond the satisfaction of my curiosity.” Emerson’s interview with Wordsworth was more successful but still so fruitless that he was glad to end it. The first glance at Carlyle made him believe that his search for a teacher was over, that there was his man. The actuality was the he found a lifelong friend, even a fellow-pilgrim and seeker. However, he did not become a pupil. He had gone in search of a master. He failed to find one. Indeed he tells his aunt as much, that he seeks a man who is wise and true but that he never gets used to men. “They always awaken expectations in me which they always disappoint.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Ralph Waldo Emerson left Europe, writing in his journal in his journal on shipboard the melancholy after-reflection, “I shall judge more justly, less timidly, of wise men forevermore.” And it was there, in his little cabin, that he received the illumination which he could not find in Europe. He need look outside himself no more. Out of his illumination, whilst still afloat on the ocean he wrote down such sentences as these: “A man contains all that is needful within himself.” “Nothing can be given to him or take away from him but always there is a compensation.” “The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man with himself.” One’s attraction toward this or that teacher may weaken and die but one’s attraction toward the Inspirer of all teachers, God, will keep on growing stronger in one. One alone must answer this question, and one can best answer it by listening for and obeying that deep inner feeling which is called intuition. The rarity of competent teachers in the World, and especially in the Western World, forces seekers to practice self-reliance and cultivate independence, unless they are willing to accept substitutes for competence or join organizations making unsubstantiated claims. God will not neglect determined seekers and through circumstances, events, books, or otherwise gives them the particular guidance or instruction needed at a particular time. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
The aspirant of today who is thoroughly discriminating will generally fail to find the support of a competent teacher. Usually one will have to depend on the inner Self alone. If one will listen to the voice of the Silence and accept its invisible leadership, one need not accept any human leadership. What one learns from outside one’s self, from teacher or tradition, will never lead to one’s true fulfilment until one joins it with what one learns in the stillness from inside oneself. People tie themselves to some one mortal, living or dead, and worthy of one. Yet one is outside themselves, and the divine is within, themselves. They contemplate one’s form, surrender to one’s personality, refuse to look within. As long as they do this, so long does the Consciousness elude them. When a mortal recognizes that all one really needs come to one from the higher self, and not from other mortals, and in the measure that one uses one’s own efforts to complete one’s development and so come closer in consciousness to that self, in that measure will one gain what one needs. Books however sacred, ceremonies however impressive, lecture however learned, even Masters however wise are still only outer helps and as such must in the end be discarded. “The Lord liveth, and as we live, we will not go down unto our father in the wilderness until we have accomplished the things which the Lord have commanded us,” reports 1 Nephi 3.15. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
I Will Take Fate By the Throat, it Shall Not Wholly Overcome Me: Oh, it is So Beautiful to Live—to Live a Thousand Times!
When I awoke, I was on board a ship. I could hear the creak of the boards, smell the sea. I could smell the scent of those who manned the ship. And I knew that it was the galley because I could hear the rhythm of the oars under the low rumbling of the giant canvas sails. I could not open my eyes, could not make my limbs move. Yet I was calm. I did not thirst. In fact, I experienced an extraordinary sense of peace. My body was warm as if I had only just fed, and it was pleasant to lie there, to dream waking dreams on the gentle undulation of the sea. The mind began to clear. I knew that we were slipping very fast through rather still waters. And that the Sun had just gone down. The early evening sky was darkening, the wind was dying away. And the sound of the oars dipping and rising was as soothing as it was clear. My eyes were open now. I did not turn away from life toward some mystical Nirvana. I forgot none of the joy, the effort, or the pain. I abandoned nothing. What I achieved was something much more wonderful than an old man’s serenity. I will take fate by the throat. It shall not wholly overcome me. Oh, it is so beautiful to live—to live a thousand times! #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
God is the only true sense of the World: he does not have to copy others, only to express one’s own individuality, most his higher spirituality. God takes care to remain what he is, he is true to himself, high holy self. However, insofar as we let our happiness depend on another person and lose our independence, one becomes weakened. Even if the other gives one knowledge or love or support, one should still not cease to look within as deeply as one can for the idyllic Peace. In the end a mortal must come to oneself, one’s diviner self, one’s essential being. And where shall one look for it if not there where Jesus pointed within? Not outside, not to some other mortal, however high one’s repute as guru, not to some book, however sacrosanct its scriptural authority. Both mortal and book must, if loyal to the highest, also direct one inward. The Kingdom is within you, not somewhere else, not in an ashram, not even at the feet of a guru: Jesus’ declaration is literally accurate. One of the reasons we are so reluctant to confront the aspects of destiny called fate is that we are afraid it will lead us into despair. We Americans are taught always to wear a garment of optimism, and we believe that with despair all hope is lost. So we cling to any false hope we can conjure up to serve as a bulwark against despair, unaware that a hope that has to be striven for is no hope at all. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong things. This beginning for some hope opens us to exploitation by any psychoreligious charlatan who appears on the horizon. All to escape the demon of despair! However, suppose that despair were basically a constructive emotion? Suppose despair is often a necessary prelude to the greatest achievement? Not all seeing has this character of union. If we look at things and observe them merely to control and to use them, no real union takes place. We keep them at a distance. We try to bring them into our power, to use them for our purposes, as means for our ends. There is no long in this kind of seeing. We glimpse the beings that shall serve us coldly; we have for those which we use a look, curious or indifferent, sensational or aggressive, hostile or cruel. There is abuse in the looking at those which we use. It is a seeing that violates and separates. This is the look of masses who in medieval paintings are looking at the Crucified. However, even this kind of seeing creates some union, though union through separation. However, it is the seeing that really unites is different. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Our language has a word for seeing that really unites: Intuition. This means seeing into. It is an intimate seeing, a grasping and being grasped. It is a seeing shaped by love. Plato, the teacher of the centuries, whose visions and words have deeply influenced the Fourth Gospel and the Church, knew about the seeing which unites. He called the love which drives us to a genuine intuition the child of poverty and abundance. It is the love which fills our want with the abundance of our World. However, it fills us in such a way that the disrupted multitude is not the last we see—a view which disrupts ourselves. The last we see lies in that which unites, which is eternal in and above the transitory things. Into this view Plato wanted to initiate his followers. The individual seeker should take one’s own soul—one’s higher self—as one’s guide. By prayer and reading of the holy scriptures, one may attain glimpses of it occasionally and receive the needed guidance. This is safer than bonding oneself to any institution or a so-called master. If one can put as much faith in the existence and power of one’s soul as most seekers put into their blind following of these masters, one’s efforts should prove sufficiently effective. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
When we annul suffering, it is a way of saying we are becoming and passing away—the salvation from the wheel of rebirth. Henceforth there is no recurrence is to be the formula for those who had liberated themselves from the desire for existence and thus from the compulsion to become again ceaselessly. We do not know whether there is a recurrence; the line of this dimension of time in which we live we do not extend beyond this life; and we do not try to uncover what will reveal itself to us in its own time and law. However, if we do not know that there is recurrence, then we should not seek to escape from it: we should desire not crude existence but the chance to speak in every existence, in its appropriate manner and language, the eternal I of the destructible and the eternal You of the indestructible. Whether people will obtain the goal of redemption from having to recur, we do not know. Certainly one leads to an intermediate goal that concerns us, too: the unification of the soul. However, one leads there not only, as is necessary, away from the jungle of opinions, but also away from the deception of forms—which for us is no deception but (in spite of all the paradoxes of intuition that make for subjectivity but for us simply belong to it) the reliable World. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
One’s path, too, is a way of ignoring something, and when one bids us become aware of the processes in our body, what one means is almost the opposite of our sense-assured insight into the body. Nor does one lead the unified being further to that supreme You-saying that is open to it. One’s inmost decision seems to aim at the annulment of the ability to say You. Saying You to a mortal—that is clear from one’s greatly superior, but also greatly direct, intercourse with one’s disciples—but one does not teach it: to this love, which means boundless inclusion in the heart of all that has become, the simple confrontation of being by being remains alien. In the depths of one’s silence one certainly knows, too, the You-saying to the primal ground, transcending all the gods whom one treats like disciples; it was from a relation process the became substance the one’s deed came, clearly as an answer to the You; but of this one remains silent. One’s following among the nations, however, the great vehicle, denied one gloriously. They addressed the eternal You of mortals—using the name of God. And they expect as the coming of God, the last one of his eon, him, that shall fulfill love. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
All doctrines of immersion are based on the gigantic delusion of human spirit bent back into itself—the delusion that spirit occurs in mortals. In truth it occurs from mortal—between mortal and what one is not. As the spirit bent back into itself renounces this sense, this sense of relation, one must draw into mortal that which is not mortal, one must psychologize World and God. This is the psychical delusion of the spirit. In this fathom-sized, feeling-afflicted ascetic’s body dwell the World and the origin of the World and the annulment of the World and the path that leads to the annulment of the World. That is true, but ultimately it is no longer true. Certainly, the World dwells in me as a notion, just as I dwell in it as a thing. However, that does not mean that it is in me, just I am not in it. The World and I include each other reciprocally. This contradiction for thought, which inheres in the It-relation, is annulled by the You-relation which detaches me from the World in order to relate me to it. The self-sense, that which cannot be included in the World, I carry in myself. The being-sense, that which cannot be included in any notion, the World carries in itself. However, this is not a thinkable will but the whole Worldliness of the World, just as the former is not a knowing subject but the whole I-likeness of the I. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
No further reduction is valid here: whoever does not honor the ultimate unities thwarts the sense that is only comprehensible but not conceptual. The origin of the World and the annulment of the World are not in me; neither are they outside me; they simply are not—they always occur, and their occurrence is also connected with me, with my life, my decision, my work, my service, and also depends on me, on my life, my decision, my work, and my service. However, what it depends on is not whether I affirm or negate the World in my soul, but how I let the attitude of my soul toward the World come to life, life that affects the World, actual life—and in actual life paths coming from very different attitudes of the soul can cross. However, whoever merely has a living experience of one’s attitude and retains it in one’s soul may be as thoughtful as can be, one is Worldless—and all the games, arts, intoxications, enthusiasm, and mysteries that happen within one do not touch the World’s skin. As long as one attains redemption only in one’s self, one cannot do any good or harm to the World; one does not concern it. Only one that believes in the World achieves contact with it; and if one commits oneself one also cannot remain Godless. Let us love the actual World that never wishes to be annulled, but love it in all its terror, but dare to embrace it with our spirit’s arms—and our hands encounter the hands that hold it. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
I know nothing of a World and of Worldly life that separate us from God. What is designated that way is life with an alienated It-World, the life of experience and use. Whoever goes forth in truth to the World, goes forth to God. Concentration and going forth, both in truth, the one-and-the-other which is the One, are what is needful. God embrace but is not myself. On account of this which cannot be spoken about, I can say in my language, as all can say in theirs: You. For the sake of this there are I an You, there is dialogue, there is language, and spirit whose primal deed language is, and there, in eternity, the word. Let us look at the experience of a young man named Britain. He came into therapy feeling sad, hopeless, lonely, lost. He felt everybody had died—his mother, his sister Britney—and the relation with Celeste was nearly dead, and now, at the end of therapy, the relation with the therapist was dying. He was in clear, unadulterated despair. However, halfway through the session he began his recovery. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
The despair was essential in bringing Britain to the point where he could give up his previous neurotic ways of behaving in his overwork and in his failure to have full relationships with other people. This experience when he had been a young man had been one turning point in his life, just as he and I believed this therapy, ten concluding, would be a turning point in one’s overcoming his love bind with Celeste. Thus, despair can lead to highly constructive action. It can be a flushing out of the Augean stables. Despair can be a giving up and a letting go of neurotic problems that had been solidifying since one was an infant. In this sense despair plays the constructive role reserved for it in every psychotherapy. I am speaking of despair not as a cosmic pout nor as any kind of intellectual posture. If it is a mood put on to impress somebody or to express resentment toward anybody, it is not genuine despair. Authentic despair is that emotion which forces one to come to terms with one’s destiny. It is the great enemy of pretense, the foe of playing ostrich. It was once thought that when an ostrich was in danger it hid its head in the ground believing that if it could not see anyone, no one could see it. That has led to the idea that is people refuse to face painful facts or unpleasant truths, they play ostrich. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
We have imposed on us a demand to face the reality of one’s life. The letting go that we noted in despair is a letting go of false hopes, of pretended loves, of infantilizing dependency, of empty conformism which serves only to make one behave like sheep huddling in a flock because they fear the wolves outside the circle. Despair is the smelting furnace which melts out the impurities in the ore. Despair is not freedom itself, but is a necessary preparation for freedom. The Grand Inquisitor is right: we would not choose to go into despair if we consulted only our rational choices. However, there is no denying destiny or fate, and reality comes marching up to require that we drop all halfway measures and temporary exigencies and ways of being dishonest with ourselves and confront our natural lives, uninhibited by external influences, which may be toxic. It is well known that in successful therapy sessions, that organizations which are far and away the most effective in treating people, state frankly that the assistant for the injured or disabled or an individual with special needs cannot be cured until he or she is in complete despair. It is only then that the individual can give up the need for the source of their dependence as a solace for his or her forlorn hopes or to bolster his or her false expectations. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Those who have been through a rehabilitation program and then help new members simply laugh outright at the predespair of unrealistic grandiosity, one’s pompous I-am-the-master-of-my-fate-attitude, and one’s vain resolutions to control one’s dependency by one’s own will power, come to understand that one has to find a higher faith in the power of God to resolve and heal situations. Then the Lord will let one see why there is none upon the Earth that can speak to my condition, namely, that one might give God all the glory. Because sometimes we hope for the wrong things, and hopes themselves can become the most seductive delusions. When a person reached the lowest point, state, or condition, for instance, when one has reached ultimate despair—one can then surrender to eternal forces; this process as giving up the delusion of false hopes and, thus, acknowledging fully the facts of destiny. Then and only then can this person begin to rebuild oneself. It is superb demonstration of the hypothesis that freedom begins only when we confront destiny. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
The same was true of Synanon, the drug rehab turned violent cult, as the system became a nest for fraud. There was failure to define and enforce clear ethical standards governing their business practices, an it rendered the treatment program to become field of predator’s paradise. Synanon started in Santa Monica, California by Charles Dederich, and morphed into a utopian community, then a religion and a cult with more than $30 million in assets and upward of 1,300 followers. True believers shaved their heads, wore overalls, and lived together at Synanon compounds, professing and almost slavish obedience to Charles Dederich, no matter how brutal his methods. They were said to even kidnap people. Despite all the high idealistic talk of oneness, fraternity, and egolessness, each of us is still an individual, still has to dwell in a body of one’s own, to use a mind of one’s own and experience feelings of one’s own. To forget this is to practice self-deception. Each will come to God in the end but one will comes as a purified transformed and utterly changed person, lived in and used by God as one will live in and be conscious of the presence of God. “And Christ hath said: If ye will have faith in me ye shall have power to do whatsoever thing is experiment in me,” Moroni 7.33. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
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If We Take Eternity to Mean Not Infinite Temporal Duration but Timelessness, then Eternal Life Belongs to those Who Live in the Present!
If one would give birth to a dancing star, I tell you one must harbor chaos. I hide nothing from you, not my ignorance, not my fear, not the simple terror that if I try I might fail. I do not even know if it is mine to give more then once, or what is the price of giving it, but I will risk this for you, and we will discover it together, whatever the mystery and the terror, just as I have discovered alone all else. Most of us are so preoccupied with the noise, the uproar, the cacophony of the modern World that we have no energy left for constructive living. We long to pause, to absorb into our day-to-day existence, some calmness, some inner order in which we can call our soul our own, in which we take time to experience some beauty, to know and enjoy our friends, and to let whatever creative impulses or visions we have be heard, listened to, have their moment. This pressing need coincides with influx of Christian influence, especially among the young people in this country, shown by the wide sale of books on religion, and the endless listening to preachers. There can be no doubt of the depth and urgency of the hunger for some psychoreligious center of life. However, it often happens that aspirants put off the sacrifice of time which prayers and meditation call for because, they complain, they are too busy with this or that. Eternal anxiety is the lot of the free mortal. Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Thus they never make any start at all and the years slip uselessly by. In most cases this involves no penalty other than the spiritual stagnation to which it leads, but in some cases where a higher destiny has been reserved for the individual or where a mission has to be accomplished, the result is far different. Everything and everyone that such a person uses as an excuse for keeping away from the practice of meditation, the exercise of devotion, and the communion of prayer may be removed from one’s external life by the higher self. Thus, through loss and suffering, one will be forced to obey the inward call. Human beings are given more than one chance to redeem themselves. Such is the mercy of the higher power. Prayer is a way, available for most of us without a radical changing of our vocation, by which we can put meaningful content into the pause. No matter what form or stripe this prayer may take—yoga of the physical or mental variety—all have in common the aim of providing channels to deeper levels of experience by means of the pause. When I, for example, am overburdened with fatigue or gloom or the distress of problems and the sleeplessness that goes with these things, I may pause temporarily to withdraw myself from the ego-self. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
I cannot withdraw myself from the ego-self by the head-on force of thinking. However, it can be done, sometimes with the help of a prayer, or through relaxation, or pausing and letting be. I seek to move into the psyche-self, in which I see tings sub specie aeternitatis, in which I no longer feel the pain described above—the ego-self that feels the pains described above—the ego-self that feels them is temporarily transcended. The fatigue, the distress, the gloom all seem to vanish. They psyche-self, freed from the groveling kind of pain, freed from the narcissism, freed from ego-centered misery, can be a channel to awareness of infinite possibilities. Time-backed and Earth-bound as one is, it is not surprising that one often tries to evade the Quest, to ignore it in various ways such as always keeping bust truing to fulfill increasing ambition, cultivating skepticism disguised as practicality, or demanding instant and demonstrable proofs. However, most often one deflects the thoughts of it or changes the conversation abruptly. If pursued by oneself or others, the very idea makes one nervous. One is uneasy at the thought of higher laws to be obeyed. One is fearful of what one will be asked to do and of the discipline to be practiced. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
It is sadly human to want to digress from the straight path of the Quest at times. This happens to many and a proportion of them yields to the desire. Invariable, however, the passing years bring them back to either the leaving point or the starting point. Experience always points up the lesson that the initial urge faith conviction or reasoning which put them on the path was a wise and necessary one. When they learn at first hand with sorrow, loss, or frustration, the picture of life grows a little clearer to them, what the teachers offered free without such unpleasant consequences. One can understand how in the modern World, left to itself, untouched and unthawed by the emergence of any individual, should become alienated and turn into an incubus; but how does it happen at, as you say, the I of mortal is deactualized? Whether it lives in relation or outside it, the I remains assured of itself in its self-consciousness, which is a strong thread of gold on which the changing states are strung. Whether I say, “I see you,” or “I see the tree,” seeing may not be equally actual in both cases, but the I is equally actual in both. Prayer is, par excellence, a concentration of the void, the pause, the no thing. It is a freeing of the self from the clutter of life, giving one a pleasantly dizzy and mildly ecstatic experience. This dizziness is an attractive state that one likes to come back to, at least in memory, in moments throughout the day. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
In this sense meditation is a relief and a freedom from our buying and selling, our technological culture. Prayer seems magical and curative because it opens one’s vision and being to a New World, a brightly colored World, conducive to calmness and peacefulness. In general it seems to be a less intense form of the World than the mystics describe, but in quality the same, a World which has within it sweetness, overflowing love, beauty now all about it. This is the common denominator of many diverse methods of prayer. They seem to have in common: stopping the machinery, the noise, the pressure, the haste, the compulsive driveness, and a higher level of consciousness, what was called oceanic. One experiences being absorbed into the Universe and the Universe being temporarily absorbed into one’s self. Egos appear by setting themselves apart from other egos. Persons appear by entering into relation to other persons. One is the spiritual form of natural differentiation, the other that of natural association. The purpose of setting oneself apart is to experience and use, and the purpose of that is living—which means dying one human life long. The purpose of relation is the relation itself—touching the soul. For as soon as we touch the soul, we are touched by a breath of eternal life. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Whoever stands in relation, participates in an actuality; that is, in a being hat is neither merely a part of one nor merely outside oneself. All actuality is an activity in which I participate without being able to appropriate it. Where there is no participation, there is no actuality. Where there is self-appropriation, there is no actuality. The more directly the soul is touched, the more perfect is the participation. The I is actual through its participation in actuality. The more perfect the participation is, the more actual the I becomes. However, the I that steps out of the event of the relation into detachment and the self-consciousness accompanying that, does not lose its actuality. Participation remains in it as a living potentiality. To use words that originally refer to the highest relation but may also be applied to all others: the seed remains in one. This is the realm of subjectivity in which the I apprehends simultaneously its association and its detachment. Genuine subjectivity can be understood only dynamically, as the vibration of the I in its lonely truth. This is also the pace where the desire for ever higher and more unconditional relation and for perfect participation in being arises and keeps rising. In subjectivity the spiritual substance of the person matures. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
The person becomes conscious of oneself as participating in being, as being-with, and thus as a being. The ego becomes conscious of oneself as being this way and not that. The person says, “I am”; the ego says, “That is how I am.” “Knowing thyself” means to the person: know yourself as being. To the ego it means: knows your being-that-way. By setting oneself apart from others, the ego moves away from being. This does not mean that the person give up one’s being-that-way, one’s being is different; only, this is not the decisive perspective but merely the necessary and meaningful form of being. The ego, on the other hand, wallows in one’s being-that-way—a fiction that one has devised for oneself. For at bottom self-knowledge usually means to one the fabrication of an effective apparition of the self that has the power to deceive one every more thoroughly; and through the contemplation and veneration of this apparition one seeks the semblance of knowledge of one’s own being-that-way, while actual knowledge of it would lead one to self-destruction—or rebirth. The person beholds one’s self; the ego occupies oneself with one’s My: my manner, my race, my works, my genius. The ego does not participate in any actuality nor does one gain any. One sets oneself apart from everything else and tries to possess as much as possible by means of experience and use. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
This is one’s dynamics: setting oneself apart and taking possession—and the object is always It, tat which is not actual. One knows oneself as a subject, but this subject can appropriate as much as it wants to, it will never gain any substance: it remains like a point, functional, that which experiences, that which uses, nothing more. All of its extensive and multifarious being-that-way, all of its eager individuality cannot help it to gain any substance. There are two kinds of human beings, but there are two poles of humanity. No human being is pure person, and none is pure ego; none is entirely actual, none entirely lacking in actuality. Each lives in a twofold I. However, some mortals are so person-oriented that one may call them persons, whiles are so ego-oriented that one may call them egos. Between these and those true history takes place. The more a human being, the more humanity is dominated buy the ego, the more does the I fall prey to inactuality. In such ages the person in the human being and in humanity comes to lead a subterranean, hidden, as it were invalid existence—until it is summoned. There is always the danger that some people will be too separate from the reality of most people’s experience. Let us keep in mind that prayer occurs, often silently, in all gradations, from a chance insight on a crowded elevator to the conscious cultivation of the sense of peace to regular discipline of meditating for short periods several times a day. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
There are also dangers in becoming isolated from the World of social action by praying too much, and it can be a detriment to one’s own creativity, which means we should not only pray, but take corrective actions to help assist our prayers. We never wholly leave the ego-self behind, and we still live in the real World with its rationality and irrationality, and with our responsibility toward this World. However, it is precisely in this ever-present World that prayer can give meaning to our pauses. All forms of prayer seek to change the character of the self, a change that involves a new relationship with the void. Many people will be familiar with at least the beginning stages of the void by their practice of meditation. I speak of the holy void because holy, coming from the root whole, refers to the mystical experience of grasping the wholeness of the Universe in one’s prayer. The feeling of the World as bounded whole is the spirituality of God. The holy void is the pause appearing in imaginary spatial form. This is one reason the mystics are so often shepherds since they look out continuously on the endless desert. One has this experience of the void in looking steadily out over the sea, an experience rightly termed oceanic since it gives one feeling of infinity. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Being in the desert or at the ocean where our vision can seemingly go on for ever can give us acute anxiety, since the eyes have no boundaries with which to orient us; or it can give us a sense of profundity, of eternity, or of infinity, all of which are pleasurable. This is why floating in a stimulus-free tank, where we are insulted from every sound and every glimmer of light can bring either intense anxiety or a transcendent, holy experience. In the void the experience of nothingness occurs, and in this one’s spiritual inspirations are called forth and one’s deepest thoughts are made manifest. In the experience of nothingness, we find ourselves cleansed of the chatter and the clatter of a World which is too much with us. If a mortal is born with spiritual capacity but refuses to use it, and even deliberately shuts it away, a day will come wen it will thrust itself up into one’s conscious self for acceptance and use. If one continue to deny it, the capacity will then operate against one, until one’s sanity becomes questionable or one’s fortunes become adverse. No mortal can afford to fail to heed the summons to the Quest. If one does, it is at one’s own peril and one will then fail in everything else, for this is an imperative call coming from the highest part of one’s being. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
In is not by accident the people love to believe in myths in searching for ways things can be said and done, for Greek mythic language is one of the ways such truths can be made manifest. In the holy void the nothingness that we experience gives our deeper thoughts room to make themselves manifest, and the otherwise silent inner voice can be heard. This is the equivalent of the listening to the silence we referred to earlier. One method of prayer consists of continuously clearing the mind of all content until God—or being, as some would prefer—can speak to us out of the void. The nothingness then becomes a something; a something that comes, the Christians would say, from the depths of our soul. The void is the dimension of eternity. If we take eternity to mean not infinite temporal duration but timelessness, then eternal life belongs to those who life in the present. Our human hope is these experiences of timelessness—such as when we see something breathtakingly beautiful or hear a piece of music that seems to raise us into that seems to raise us into eternity—is to hang on to the experience of forever. Those who have been personally confronted by an illuminated mortal with the Quest of the God and reject it to continue their quest of the ego instead, are destined to suffer. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
On hearing a Symphony of Ruben de Ronde called Save Me I thought the of the sweet sounds, oh, beautiful music, do not cease! Reject me not into the World again. And again in God’s World: O World, I cannot hold thee close enough! Lord, I do fear. Thou has made the World too beautiful this years; my soul is all but out of me—let fall. No burning leaf: prithee, let no bird call. The warning which Light on the Path gives to disciples, but if thou look not for one, if thou pass one by, then there is no safeguard for thee. Thy brain will reel, thy heart grow uncertain, and in the dust of the battlefield thy sight and senses will fail, and thou wilt not know thy friends from thy enemies—this warning is apposite here and should be taken deeply to heart. Necessity will with time force this comprehension on them. Prophets and teachers will disclose this truth to them but if they do not listen then hard experience must disclose it. The void may seem to be contact with pure being, but I prefer a more modest judgment, that one gets glimpses of being, but I prefer a more modest judgment, that one gets glimpses of being, awareness that there is a beckoning path to pure being even though none of us gets very far on it. The concentration on the spaces between words, the intervals, the pauses in life—these yield the touch of ecstasy. However, the moment formulation in words occurs, the no thing becomes a something. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Obviously, one listens with care to any message that may be formulated in moments like these, and one need not worry too much about its origin. It may be interpreted as coming from one’s deeper self, or from the various autosuggestions that occur, or from contact with the being of the Universe. The last may be experiences as a glimpse of Go—assuming that God is conceived as the ground of being and meaning in the Universe. At this point I feel, as I gotten have, what we cannot speak about, we must pass over in silence. How long can a mortal withstand this silent call of the God within one? –as long as one’s hopes and desires can find some measure of satisfaction, as long as frustration does not crush them, or until destiny itself overrides one’s indifference and compels one to heed it. The Call of the Quest once heard may be lost for a while, even a long while, but it will return. The need of truth is an irrepressible one but it may take a long time to come through in all its force and clarity. One is left free to save or destroy oneself, to accept the truth or turn one’s face away from it. “Learn wisdom in thy youth; yes, learn in thy youth to keep the commandments of God. Yea, and cry unto God for all thy support; yea, let all thy doings be unto the Lord, and whithersoever thou goest let it be in the Lord; yea, let all thy thoughts be directed unto the Lord; yes, let the affections of thy heart be placed upon the Lord forever,” reports Alma 37.35,36. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Randolph Harris II International Institute 