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And How do We Relight the Flame When it is Cold, Why do We Dream When Our Thoughts Mean Nothing?

August 6, 2019 8:17 am

God said: “Wait!” So I found myself stopped at the gates of Heaven, along with all my companions, the Angels who generally went and did what I did, and Michael and Gabriel and Uriel, though not among my companions, were there, too. “Memnoch, my accuser,” said God, and the words were spoken with the characteristic gentleness and a great effulgence of light. “Before you come into Heaven, and you begin your diatribe, go back down to the Earth and study all you have seen thoroughly and with respect—by this I mean humankind—so that when you come to me, you have given yourself every chance to understand and to behold all I have done. I tell you now that Humankind is part of Nature, and subject to the Laws of Nature which you have seen unfold all along. No one should understand batter than you, save I. But go, see again for yourself. Then, and only then, will I call together a convocation in Heaven, of all Angels, of all ranks and all endowment, and I will listen to what you have to say. Take with you those who seek the same answers you seek and leave me those Angels who never cared, nor taken notice, nor though of anything but to live in My Light.” Parts of the psychoanalysis of a young man will demonstrate what happens when an individual’s power cannot be admitted consciously and openly, much like Memnoch In Anne Rice’s Memnoch the Devil. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

The power is not erased but comes out in a myriad of other, separate ways. These ways may be camouflaged power or they may be pseudopower. Soren, a Ph.D. student, good-looking, tall, appeared younger than his twenty-six years. He was the third and last child of an affluent Italian family of which the oldest child, Soren’s brother, who was nine years his senior, had always been successful both socially and on the athletic field. Soren’s sister, who was seven years older, had been in some form of therapy most of her life, had been hospitalized after a schizophrenic breakdown, and had been mute for two years in the mental hospital where she now was. His father, the treasurer of a large chain of stores, was detached, successful at work, and hypochondriacal at home—kind at times, but completely unpredictable, wanting the children to be “sweet” to him and reacting to family disagreements by becoming sick and withdrawing. Soren’s mother, who had been and still was a beauty, dominated the family constellation. She was flighty, subtle, inconsistent, intelligent, and in arguments would change her viewpoint with every sentence in order to put the other person on the defense. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

She had “spoiled” Soren—preparing his favorite cuisine, driving him to school so that he would not have to take the subway like the other boys—and was more than glad when Soren, who disliked school consistently and strongly, would feign illness in order to stay home with her. Soren’s mother was delicate toward him, actively opposing his ineffectual efforts later to date girls. The mean table was a constant battlefield of bickering, with one member of the family not speaking to another for weeks on end. This technique of cutting the resented person dead (“I would walk by my father as though he was not there,” said Soren) was resorted to particularly by Soren and his sister, the weakest members of the family. Soren’s sister eventually enlarged the pattern to include the whole World by her muteness at the hospital. Our opening question is: How was Soren to achieve any power in such a family and such a World? Caught in a double bind, with a mother who would change her stance at the drop of a word, with a father who would withdraw with the threat of a heat attack whenever the smoldering undercover warfare of the family burst out into the open, a pawn between his sister who was mentally disturbed and a successful brother who did come to protect Soren at school but teased him mercilessly at home—what was Soren to do? #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

Should Soren try, now that he had grown to six feet and was good-looking, to assert himself on the social scale? However, the girls at high school had always called him the “baby” (which he had been), and this still bedogged him. The athletic field? He was a novice there; and besides his brother had completely usurped that mode of recognition. Intellectually? For his entire life, until he got into college, he had hated school, did not prepare his work. All of this in spite of the fact that he basically was highly imaginative and, as it later turned out, demonstrated a rich mind and active intelligence. In his boyhood Soren presents the picture of the “little fellow,” who had learned early to be “sweet” to others, never to blow up, and, like the little countries in Europe in the eighteenth century, to get some protection by making alliances with different important members of the family. This self-deprecation pattern went so far, he confessed, that he preferred to be disliked in high school (the other boys had for him a disparaging nickname, “Sappo”) because that at least brought him some attention. Where does his power go? When he was sixteen he had had two epileptic attacks and had been on a daily dose of Dilantin since. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

These epileptic attacks are interesting for our purpose as a symptom of the seething cauldron of emotions under the surface in Soren. Whatever these attacks show physically, the psychological dimension is generally a massive rage. This rage builds up and finally explodes in the periodic seizure. The explosion is blotted out of consciousness, so the individual never has to be aware of, or has to be responsible for, what he does. However, it turns out to be violence directed chiefly against himself—the person himself gets physically hurt, to a greater or lesser degree, as he falls at the time of the seizure. Furthermore he is, like Soren, chronically crippled by having this Damocles’ Sword hanging over his head, never knowing when it will fall. All the while Soren denied this, saying: “I never get emotional or upset—I saw what it does to my sister so I vowed I would never get that way.” Soren’s dreams early in the therapy were frequently of thieves breaking into the house, which was a kind of fortress for him. The only thing he could do was to play dead, the ultimate symbol of impotence and innocence: A group of thieves was in the house. Someone came downstairs—I curled up as though dead. He looked at me a long time. After a while I went outside. The thieves grabbed me. Then a crowd of people were outside, where a woman began to chase me with a meat cleaver in her hand, and then a man took the cleaver and began to chase me. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

“I remember moments of unhappiness,” said Soren, “never any joy in our family. I learned to roll with the punches in family fights, to go along, never to expect anything—you get hurt that way. Why struggle? It is painful, and I learned early never to believe in pain of any sort…Nobody paid any attention to my feelings. I was always belittled.” This is similar to the way Memnoch felt about God creating human beings and their suffering. “I went up to Heaven,” he said, “ablaze with thoughts and doubts and speculations. I knew wrath. The cries of suffering mammals had taught me wrath. The screams and roars of wars amongst beings had taught me wrath. Decay and death had taught me fear. Indeed all of God’s Creation had taught all I needed to speed before him (God) and say, ‘Is this what you wanted! Your own image divided into male and female! The spark of life now blazing huge when either dies, male or female! This grotesquerie; this impossible division; this monster! Was this the plan?’” Soren and Memnoch are both like Gulliver, all tied up with ropes by Lilliputians, this is a symbol which betrays their own image of hidden power. Memnoch’s only happy time was before the creation of humans. Soren’s only happy time was the year he went to Israel. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

The Israeli-Arab war was beginning, and Soren covered it for an American newspaper. He looked back upon this period with fond memories; he loved the excitement, the enforced relationship with death in his walking along the Gaza strip among the bodies of fallen soldiers. For a brief period he left himself to be of some significance. He was twenty-four at this time, and Soren fell in love with a girl—the first time he had ever been in love. The occasion, as distinguished from the cause, of his coming for psychoanalysis was his turmoil over whether to marry this girl or not. His family was aligned against her, but when I met her she seemed a sympathetic though somewhat optimistic person who was someone Soren could talk and who gave him some recognition. About three months after his psychotherapy started, he told me that he believed he could influence distant objects to change. He was shy and hesitant in telling me this, saying he knew it sounded irrational and adding that if I did not believe what he said he could not tell me. I replied that my task was not to argue the truth or falsehood of such ideas; but to find out what function they served for him; and obviously the ideas were significant for him. This apparently satisfied him, for Soren then began to reveal a whole system of belief in “retribution” at the hands of God and in harm being meted out to others and punishment for wrongs they had done. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

When we awakens in the morning, Soren must think of his family or else they would get hurt. He must lift the sheets up two feet, look at an exact spot on the wall, stand up exactly the right way on the floor, go to the bathroom and urinate, all before he exchanged a word with anyone. He must take his clothes out, put on his undershirt, sit down on the bed and put his left shoe on first, then his trousers. If he makes a mistake in this ritual, he must go back to bed and start the whole thing over. After that he must say “good morning” to Charlotte (the maid) or to his brother. At breakfast he had to eat in the same rigid order; he must drink his orange juice, then eat his egg, then drink his milk. And so on. When he does something wrong in this system, his father will have a heart attack or something will happen to his mother. Punishment and happiness, he believed, were portioned out by God. Several years earlier Soren had been relatively happy when enrolled in journalism school. As a “result” his grandmother died because he had placed the book Huckleberry Finn in a certain position on his desk or because of the way he had placed his pennies on his dresser. When I, testing the rigidity of the system, asked whether his grandmother might not have died anyway, he replied, not at the time or in some other way. If Soren does right, others will benefit; if he does wrong, others, especially those in his own family, will get sick or have accidents. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

Soren cannot have pleasures of the flesh, nor must he enjoy it very much. When he did experience pleasures of the flesh, he waited in fear for several days for the retribution to fall. Surely enough, two days later his mother was mugged and robbed in the train station in a neighboring city. What strikes us immediately in this complex system is the tremendous power it gives him. Any chance deed of his could decide whether someone lived or died. He even had power over the weather: “When it rains, the rain is sent by God to punish me.” He actually controlled the Universe that way. “I have to control everything about my life. I could not live if I did not control the future.” It is worthy of note that “control” was one of Soren’s favorite words, and he used it often. I contended myself at first by remarking that he must feel as if he were in a strait jacket with all those rigid compulsions, and did not he find it a heavy weight upon him? He agreed that it was difficult, but he had no choice. Moreover, he had not been able to read Faust when in high school because of all the “demons” running around in it, and even Mary Poppins was prohibited when it became filled with devils. He could not say the word that goes before Yankees in the title of a contemporary play. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

Soren did see the vast power that his system gave him, after I pointed it out to him. However, Memnoch was also very powerful. God created him and his followers first—the archangels were Memnoch, Michael, Gabriel, Uriel, and many others whose names have never been discovered—either inadvertently or deliberately. There were actually fifty archangels, and they were the first made. Memnoch is actually Satan. The archangels are very powerful because they are the ones who communicated in the most direct way with God, and also with the Earth. That is why they were labeled Guardian Angels, as well as Archangels. Much like Soren, the Archangels were sometimes given a low rank in religious literature, but they do not have a low rank. What they have is the greatest personality and the greatest flexibility between God and humans. However, whenever the Angels have a problem with God, they would take their concerns to Memnoch, so much like Soren a lot of power rested on his shoulders. Also, like Soren, Memnoch became rejected as he was deemed God’s accuser. Satan means accuser. “And the early religious writers, knowing only bits and pieces of the truth, thought it was man whom I accused, not God; but there are reasons for this, as you will soon see. You might say I have become the Great Accuser of everybody,” says Memnoch. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

Much like Soren, some thought Memnoch seemed “exasperated.” Soren have lived as a child, he knew, in such emotional disorder that he had to have something solid. He was compensating for a boyhood that was completely powerless. “I would allow people to use me to build themselves up,” he said; and one can be sure Soren have to take revenge. The neurotic power (or magic) is in direct proportion to the early powerlessness. Such a person will not and cannot five up his system until he experiences some real power in the actual World. That Soren had plenty of threats against which to protect himself is shown in several dreams that occurred during the weeks he was telling me about his retribution system. One was: “I was left in the house alone. A masked man and woman disguised as my mother and father broke into our house to attack me.” He also often dreamed of the Mafia, and suddenly asked one day: “Is my mother this Mafia, the enemy? Sometime pain is the punishment or is an alleviating factor. I then can give up the compulsions. Generally the compulsions does not affect my life, but it leaves me very frightened. In some ways it is like voodoo. I keep thinking may I have dome something I should not have. I do not want to be responsible for all those things happening.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

Memnoch feels the say way as Soren, he does not want to be held responsible for everyone’s mistakes. “At times when I am angry and making speeches to all of Heaven, I accuse them…if you will pardon the expression again—of being held to Go as if by a magnet and not having a free will or personality such as we possess. But they have these things, they do, even the Ophanim, who are in general the least articulate or eloquent—in fact, Ophanim are likely to say nothing for eons—and any of these First Triad can be sent by God to do this and that, and have appeared on Earth, and some of the Seraphim have made rather spectacular appearances to men and women as well. To their credit, they adore God utterly, the experience without reserve the ecstasy of his presence, and he fills them completely so that they do not ask questions of him and they are more docile, or more truly aware of God, depending on one’s point of view,” Memnoch. So, you can see that both Memnoch and Soren feel frustrated and like they are the only ones who can keep the order and peace. However, is it not that Soren and Memnoch want the controlling the system not to continue—it gives their lives a tremendous sense of significance—but neither wants to accept the responsibility for the power. It is to be kept secret, not admitted openly; they both are a controller of life and death for countless people related to them, and no one but the both of them know it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

By acting as controller, Memnoch and Soren can preserve their façade of innocence. When people have to ask for help, and feel a need to be in control, it can be humiliating. Therefore, they have to work out a covert system of secret control over others while doing so. Much like Memnoch, Soren was a puppeteer, pulling wires, in reality or in fantasy, to direct his therapist, his girl friend, his professors, and everyone around him. Memnoch had to direct God, the Angels, and humans. They both are weak, greatly needing an authority figure and tried to maneuver people into taking the responsibility they felt they had. One must, at all costs, not let one’s power come out into the open or let oneself be seen as powerful; one must forever remain the innocent little boy or Angel. To make someone else responsible but powerless—this is the bind the Soren and Memnoch tried to put their authority figure in. It is the bind both of them had been in all of their lives. The pattern of God and retributions, I proposed, must have the effect of reversing the above pattern: it must be a way that one can be powerful with no responsibility. Memnoch and Soren had no confidence in the possibility of their changing; change must come from the outside. This conviction was necessary to keep the whole retribution system intact. Memnoch and Soren get their power by being secretly allied with God. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

All power remains with God; God requires that Soren and Memnoch have no autonomous power to assert themselves. If one once decided that one could make a fateful decision on one’s own, God himself would be challenged and the whole system would fall away like mist under the morning Sun. Taking responsibility upon one’s self, asserting one’s own autonomy, was challenging God and committing the sin of hubris. “Angels are not perfect. You can see that already. They are Created Beings. They do not know everything God knows, that is obvious to you and everyone else. However, they know a great deal; they know that all can be known in Time if they wish to know it; and that is where Angels differ, you see. Some wish to know everything in Time, and some care only for God and god’s reflection in those of his most devoted souls,” Anne Rice. One who has attained the consciousness of Overself puts in no claim to the attainment. One accepts it in so utterly natural and completely humble a manner than most people are deceived into regarding one as ordinary. One has not attained who is conscious that one has attained, for this very consciousness cunningly hides the ego and delivers one into its power. That alone is attainment which is natural, spontaneous, unforced, unaware, and unadvertised, whether to the being or to others. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

At this stage there is no struggle for further growth; it comes as softly and as naturally as a flower’s. There is no sacrifice of things the ego desires or clutches to itself, for there is such insight as to their worth or worthlessness that they stay or fall away of themselves. It is better to attain such high status without knowing it. For this absence of pride and presence of humility keeps the ego from threatening it. The actions of a being who has attained this degree are inspired directly by one’s Overself, and consequently are not dictated by personal wishes, purposes, passions, or desires. They are not initiated by one’s ego’s will higher than one’s own. Since there is no consciously deliberating thinking, no broken trends. There is only spontaneous thought, feeling, and action, all being directed by intuition. For one not to be aware that one is acting virtuously, courageously, wisely, or practicing contemplation beautifully, free from interfering mental images and thought, this is the ideal disposition. For then, if one does not know that one—the person—is doing so, no egoism will taint one’s consciousness. It will be pure being. One will do whatever has to be done by one as a human creature—whether it be a physical act or a mental one, one will respond to all situations that call for a human response, but neither the act nor the response will be accompanied by the personal ego. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

This does not mean that one’s Worldly life or one will suffer loss of identity—only that one will be isolated from the Worldly self-centered thought, desire, and motive which prompts the existence of the mass of people. One feels no need—so conspicuous in neurotics with a message—to call attention to oneself. Rather does one seek to keep it away. The strength of the enlightenment will determine the extent of its effects. An illumination maybe permanent but at the same time it may be only partial. Not until it is complete and lasting is it really philosophic. It is not only true that there is variety in the types of illumination but also true that there is a scale of degrees in the illumination itself. Until one has established permanently, although not necessarily at the very highest level, the consciousness can become corrupted, the being can fall back. “As I sit here and slowly close my eyes, I take another deep breath and feel the wind pass through my body. I am the one in your soul, reflecting inner light. Protect the ones who hold you, cradling in your inner child. I need serenity in a place where I can hide. I need serenity, nothing changes, days go by. Where do we go when we just do not know and how do we relight the flame when it is cold. Why do we dream when our thoughts mean nothing and when will we learn to control? Tragic visions slowly stole my life. Tore away everything, cheating me out of my time,” Serenity by Godsmack. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

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

August 6, 2019 12:14 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

And with Some Sweet Oblivious Antidote Clean the Stuffed Bosom of that Perilous Stuff which Weighs Upon the Heart?

July 28, 2019 11:45 pm

All around me, mortals seemed subdued. There was little talk. People were gathered up on the windy prow to pay homage to this moment. The breeze was silken and fragrant. The dark orange Sun, visible as a peeping eye on the horizon, suddenly sunk beyond sight. A glorious explosion of yellow light caught the underside of the great stacks of blowing clouds. A rosy light moved up and up into the limitless and shining Heavens, and through this glorious mist of color came the first twinkling glimmer of the stars. From the moment that one has embarked on this quest one has, in a subtle and internal sense, separated oneself from one’s family, one’s nation, and one’s race. A formal, rationally organized social structure involves clearly defined patterns of activity in which, ideally, every series of offices, of hierarchized statuses, in which inhere a number of obligations and privileges closely defined by limited and specific rules. Each of these offices contains an area of imputed competence and responsibility. Authority, the power of control which derives from an acknowledged status inheres in the office and not in the particular person who performs the official role. Official action ordinarily occurs within the framework of pre-existing rules of the organization. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

The system of prescribed relations between the various offices involves a considerable degree of formality and clearly defined social distances between the occupants of these positions. Formality is manifested by means of a more or less complicated social ritual which symbolizes and supports the pecking order of the various offices. Such formality, which is integrated with the distribution of authority within the system, serves to minimize friction by largely restricting (official) contact to modes which are previously defined by the rules of the organization. Ready calculability of others’ behavior and a stable set of mutual expectations is thus built up. Moreover, formality facilitates the interaction of the occupants of offices despite their (possibly hostile) private attitudes toward one another. In this way, the subordinate is protected from the arbitrary action of one’s superior, since the actions of both are constrained by a mutually recognized set of rules. Specific procedural devices foster objectivity and restrain the quick passage of impulse into action. The ideal type of such formal organization is bureaucracy and, in many respects, the classical analysis of bureaucracy indicates bureaucracy involves a clear-cut division of integrated activities which are regarded as duties inherent in the office. A system of differentiated controls and sanctions is stated in the relations. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

The assignment of roles occurs on the basis of technical qualifications which are ascertained through formalized, impersonal procedures (e.g., examinations). Within the structure of hierarchically arranged authority, the activities of trained and salaried experts are governed by general, abstract, and clearly defined rules which preclude the necessity for the issuance of the specific instructions for each specific case. The generality of the rules requires the constant use of categorization, whereby individual problems and cases are classified on the basis of designated criteria and are treated accordingly. The pure type of bureaucratic official is appointed, either by a superior or through the exercise of impersonal competition; one is not elected. A measure of flexibility in the bureaucracy is attained by electing higher functionaries who presumably express the will of the electorate (e.g., a body of citizens or a board of directors). The election of higher officials is designed to affect the purposes of the organization, but the technical procedures for attaining these ends are carried out by continuing bureaucratic personnel. Most bureaucratic offices involve the expectation of lifelong tenure, in the absence of disturbing factors which may decrease the size of the organization. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

Bureaucracy maximizes vocational security. The function of security of tenure, pensions, incremental salaries and regularized procedures for promotion is to ensure the devoted performance of official duties, without regard for extraneous pressures. The chief merit of bureaucracy is its technical efficiency, with a premium placed on precision, speed, expert control, continuity, discretion, and optimal returns on input. The structure is one which approaches the complete elimination of personalized relationships and nonrational considerations (hostility, anxiety, affectual involvements, etc.). With increasing bureaucratization, it becomes plain to all who would see that beings are to a very important degree controlled by their social relations to the instruments of production. This can no longer seem only a tent of Marxism, but a stubborn fact to be acknowledged by all, quite apart from their ideological persuasion. Bureaucratization makes readily visible what was previously dim and obscure. More and more people discover that to work, they must be employed. For to work, one must have tools and equipment. And the tools and equipment are increasingly available only in bureaucracies, private or public. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

Consequently, one must be employed by bureaucracies in order to have access to tools in order to work in order to live. It is in this sense that bureaucratization entails separation of individuals from the instruments of production, as in modern capitalistic enterprise or in state communistic enterprise (of the midcentury variety), just as in the post-feudal army, bureaucratization entailed complete separation from the instruments of destruction. Typically, the worker no longer owns one’s own tools, nor the soldier one’s weapons. And in this special sense, more and more people become workers, either blue collar or white collar or stiff shirt. So develops, for example, the new type of scientific worker, as the scientists is separated from one’s technical equipment—after all, the physicist does not ordinarily own ones cyclotron. To work at one’s research, one must be employed by a bureaucracy with laboratory resources. Bureaucracy is administration which almost completely avoids public discussion of its techniques, although there may occur public discussion of its policies. This secrecy is confined neither to public nor to private bureaucracies. It is held to be necessary to keep valuable information from private economic competitors or from foreign and potentially hostile political groups. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

And though it is not often so called, espionage among competitors is perhaps as common, if not as intricately organized, in systems of private economic enterprise as in systems of national states. Cost figure, list clients, new technical processes, plans for production—all these are typically regarded as essential secrets of private economic bureaucracies which might be revealed if these bases of all decisions and policies had to be publicly defended. In these bold outlines, the beneficial attainments and functions of bureaucratic organization are emphasized and the internal stresses and strains of such structures are almost wholly neglected. The community at large, however, evidently emphasizes the imperfections of bureaucracy, as suggested by the fact that the horrid hybrid, bureaucrat, has become an epithet, a Schimpfwort. If one wishes to walk one’s desired path, one must be prepared to accept an appalling loneliness. However, the loneliness will be limited to this novitiate. For a new presence will slowly and quietly enter one’s inner life during its advanced stage. There is a point at which no aspirant can surrender one’s ideals under the compulsion of a materialistic society, can no longer come to terms with it. Such a point will be vividly indicted to one by one’s own conscience. It is then that, of one’s own free will, one must accept the cup of suffering. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

One must not shirk the isolation of one’s inner position, must not resent the loneliness of one’s spiritual path. One must accept what is in the very nature of the thing one is attempting to do. He aloneness that one feels must be accepted. Only then, only when one understands and dwells calmly in it, will the great power of the Saint come forth and dwell with one in turn. It is mot pleasant for a mortal to feel oneself at one with the crowd, most uncomfortable to feel oneself at variance with it. Yet the seeker who has heard truth’s call, had no other choice than to accept this intellectual loneliness and emotional discomfort if one is not to find what, for one, is the worse fate of violating one’s spiritual integrity. The cure for loneliness is company; but if there is no affinity in the company, then it is only a quick cure. This prescription is true for everyone, even the sage, for one finds one’s company in the Overself’s self-presence. The attempt to follow a lone path may well make one wonder at times, whether or not one is making a mistake. It needs more than ordinary stubbornness to remain in a minority of one or two. One will certainly need at times, and gladly welcome, some reassurance from others. One must be willing to stand alone, although that may not prove to be necessary. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

The quest seems to life a being out of the heard, to make one no longer average, to make one different from other beings around one. Its goals do not accord with the other beings around one. Its goals do not accord with the ordinary human desires and the common instincts. There is only one real loneliness and that is to feel cut off from the higher power. A way of finding release from anxiety is to narcotize it. This may be done consciously and literally by taking to alcohol or drugs. There are, however, many ways of being it without the connection being obvious. One of them is to plunge into social activities because of fear of being alone; it does not alter the situation whether this fear is recognized as such or appears only as a vague uneasiness. Another way of narcotizing anxiety is to drown it in work, a procedure to be recognized from the compulsive character of the work and from the uneasiness that appears on Sundays and holidays. The same end may be served by an inordinate need for sleep, although usually not much refreshment results from the sleep. Finally, pleasures of the flesh activities may serve as the safety-valve through which anxiety can be released. It has long been known that compulsive masturbation may be provoked by anxiety, but the same holds true for all sorts of relationships involving pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

If they have no chance for pleasures of the flesh, if even for a short time, persons for whom pleasures of the flesh activities serve predominantly as a means of allaying anxiety will become extremely restless and irritable. Love and power are traditionally cited as opposites of each other. The common argument goes as follows: the more power one shows, the less love; the more love, the less power. Love is seen as powerless and power as loveless. The more one develops one’s capacity for love, this less one is concerned about manipulation and other aspects of power. Power leads to domination and violence; love leads to equality and human well-being. This argument, which we have inherited from the Victorian period, is often, though not always, given as the foundation for the pacifist position. At times it is even cited as the basis for moral law. I believe that this argument is based on superficial reasoning and leads us into gross errors and endless trouble. Our failure comes from our seeing love as purely an emotion and our not seeing it as also ontological, a state of being. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

In bringing up children, for example, the inherited argument is that the more a parent loves one’s child, the less one asserts oneself or in other ways shows power. This was part of the structureless permissiveness that characterized many of the parent-child relationships of the past several decades. I do not wish to condemn permissiveness as a whole. Much of it was a reaction against Victorian authoritarianism and resulted in sound freedom and an increase of responsibility for youngsters. However, this was chiefly in cases where the parent did not repress one’s power but let the child frankly see the structure by which one (the parent) lived. However, the parent, on the other hand, who tires to continue showing love on the assumption that love is the renunciation of power will be manipulated by the child. Often the parent, now pushed to the wall, will try harder and feel guiltier because of one’s resentful attitude toward the child; and ultimately, in this vicious circle, one may blow up in rage and possible violence. These structureless families, which operate supposedly on love without power, lead to the development of rootless children, who later in life rebuke their parents for having never said “no” to them. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

This endeavor to love with the renunciation of power is a product of the tendency toward pseudoinnocence. It underestimates the difficulty of loving, overlooks the fact that love is always, no matter how profound and lasting, afflicted by its moments of dishonesty. Such love is based upon our unawareness of our complicity in the inescapable ambivalence of human life. That power and love are interrelated is proved most of all by the fact that one must have power within oneself to be able to love in the first place. Until one has the power to assert one’s own “no” to those who seek to exploit one sexually, one cannot build a gratifying relationship. Until one has developed one’s self-esteem through such experiences as death in the dentist chair can one not enter with any depth into a love relationship. A person must have something to give in order not to be completely taken over or absorbed as a nonentity. The fallacy of this juxtaposition of love and power comes from our seeing love purely as an emotion and power solely as a force of compulsion. We need to understand them both as ontological, as states of being processes. The glimpse, in anticipation and retrospect, as well as when it first happens, is abnormal and extraordinary. However, in the sage the divine presence is always available, and the awareness of it comes effortlessly, naturally, and easily to one. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

When the mystery of it all is solved, not merely intellectually but in experience, not only in the person oneself but in transcending it, not only in the dept of meditation but in the World o activity; when this answer is richly felt as Presence and God, clearly known as Meaning and Mind, then, if one were to speak one would exclaim: “Thus It Is!” However, this is not the beginner’s glimpse: it is the sage’s settled insight. Too often beginner regard lofty emotions or extraordinary powers or ecstatic rapture as the measure of attainment, when the only genuine measure is awareness. As the human mind develops, it forms higher and higher conceptions of the deity until, finally, it is lifted above itself into a tremendous experience. It loses itself in the deity itself, and when it returns to normal living, it does not need to seek further. I do not refer here to the experience which several mystics have called the glimpse, but something which is of a once-and-for-all nature and which does not, in its essence, ever leave one. The glimpse, because it is situated between the mental conditions which exist before an afterwards, necessarily involve striking—even dramatic—contrast with their ordinariness. It seems to open on the ultimate light bathed height of human existence. However, this experience necessarily provokes a human reaction to it, which is incorporated into the glimpse itself, become part of it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

Ince it is clam, balances, and informed, the permanent and truly ultimate enlightenment is pure, free from any admixture of reaction. The Glimpse, even at its fullest extent is only intermittent. If it becomes continuous, an established fact during the working and resting states, both, only then is it completed. The awareness of Truth is constant and perennial. It cannot be merely glimpsed; one must be born into it, Jesus’ words, again and again, and perceive it permanently. One must be identified with it. Quite a number of people have experienced a Glimpse like an eruption that begins and soon ends, but few are the beings who have experiences a settled enlightenment of their being like a plateau that continues at a great height for a great distance. The realization of truth is one thing; the inspiration to seek truth is another. The first is being, the second is experience. The first abides for life; the second is only a glimpse, hence passes and returns intermittently. It is best to know thyself for life without enquiry is not worth living. If beings set their sights on the precious things in life, one will achieve both knowledge and compassion—or what is referred to as soul. Be persuaded, both young and old, not to care for your bodies or your monies first, and to care more exceedingly for the soul, to make it as good as possible. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

Whoso takes this survey of oneself will be terrified at the thought that one is upheld between these two abysses of the infinite and nothing, one will tremble at the sight of these marvels. For after all what are beings in nature? A nothing in regard to the infinite, a whole in regard to nothing, a mean between nothing in regard to the infinite, a whole in regard to nothing, a mean between nothing and the whole; infinitely removed from understanding either extreme. What shall one do then, but discern somewhat the middle of things in an eternal despair of knowing either their beginning or their end? Let us then know our limits; we are something, but we are not all. Compensatory theory of creativity states that human beings produce art, science, and other aspects of culture to compensate for their own inadequacies. The oyster producing the pearl to cover up the grain of sand intruding into its shell is often cited as a simple illustration. Beethoven’s deafness is one of the many famous examples of how highly creative individuals compensate for some defect or organ inferiority by their creative acts. Civilization was created by beings to compensate for their relatively weak position on this unfriendly crust of Earth as well as for their inadequacy of tooth and claw in the animal World. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14

It is a State Which Has Been Attained in its Fullness by Only a Few Persons During Each Century but Glimpsed at Least Once in a Lifetime by Many More!

July 27, 2019 3:13 am

What have the many towers of great Rocklin to do with this endless sprawling World that comes so close to it. Wence came this metropolis of America with its clear blue skies and its vast teeming hillside McMansions? Beauty is beauty where you find it. At night, even these Spanish colonial cottages as they call them—the thousands upon thousands of houses that cover the streets on either side with their beautiful green lawns—are darling, for they have water, landscaping, sewerage, electricity, and they are peaceful and beyond all modern questions healthy and comfortable, and are strung with bright, shining electric lights. Sometimes it seems that light can transform anything! That is an undeniable and irreducible blessing of God’s grace. However, do the people of the suburbs know this? Is it for beauty that they do it? Or do they merely want a comfortable illumination in their beauty Cresleigh Homes? It does not matter. We cannot stop ourselves from making beauty. We cannot stop the World. Of course there is a way to stop the rampant spread of beauty. It has to do with regimentation, conformity, assembly-line aesthetics, and the triumph of the functional over the grandeur and marvelous. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

One of the by-produces of the development of mechanical devices and mechanical standards has been the nullification of skill. What has taken place here within the factory has also taken place in the final utilization of its products. The safety razor, for example, has changed the operation of shaving from a hazardous one, best left to a trained barber, to a rapid commonplace of the day which even the most inept males can perform. The automobile has transformed engine-driving from the specialized take of the locomotive engineer to the occupation of millions of amateurs. The camera has in part transformed the artful reproduction of the wood engraver to a relatively simple photo-chemical process in which anyone can acquire at least the rudiments. As in manufacture the human function first becomes specialized, then mechanized, and finally automatic or at least semi-automatic. When the last stage is reached, the function again takes on some of its original non-specialized character: photography helps recultivate the eye, the telephone the voice, the radio the ear, just as the BMW motor car has restored some of the manual and operative skills that the machine was banishing from other departments of existence at the same time that it has given to the driver a sense of power and autonomous direction—a feeling of firm command in the midst of potentially constant danger—that had been taken away from one in other departments of life by the machine. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

So, too, mechanization, by lessening the need for domestic service, has increased the amount of personal autonomy and personal participation in the household. In short, mechanization creates occasions for human effort; and on the whole the effects are more educative than were the semi-automatic services of slaves and menials in the older civilizations. For the mechanical nullification of skill can take place only up to a certain point. It is only when one has completely lost power of discrimination that a standardized Campbells canned soup can, without further preparation, take the place of a home-cooked one, or when one has lost prudence completely that a four-wheel brake or a BMW with XDrive can serve instead of a good driver. Inventions like these increase the province and multiple the interests of the amateur. When automatism becomes general and the benefits of mechanization are socialized, beings will be back once more in the Edenlike state which they have existed in regions of natural increment, like the South Seas: the ritual of leisure will replace the ritual of work, and work itself will become a kind of game. That is, in fact, the ideal goal of a completely mechanized and automatized system of power production: the elimination of work: the universal achievement of leisure. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

In pondering slavery, when the shuttle wove by itself and the plectrum played by itself chief working people would not need helpers nor masters slaves. It is believed that beings were in the process of establishing the eternal validity of slavery; but for us today, this is just a way of justifying the existence of the machine. Work, it is true, is the constant form of being’s interaction with one’s environment, if by work one means the sum total of exertions necessary to maintain life; and lack of work usually means an impairment of function and a breakdown in organic relationship that leads to substitute forms of work, such as invalidism and neurosis. However, the work in the form of unwilling drudgery or of that sedentary routine which the Athenians so properly despised—work in these degrading forms if the true province of machines. Instead of reducing human beings to work-mechanisms, we can now transfer the main part of burden to automatic machines. This potentiality, still so far from effective achievement for beings at large, is perhaps the largest justification of the mechanical development of the last thousand years. From the social standpoint, one final characterization of the machine, perhaps the most important of all, must be noted: the machine imposes the necessity for collective effort and widens its range. To the extent that beings have escaped the control of nature they must submit to the control of society. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

As in a serial operation every part must function smoothly and be geared to the right speed in order to ensure the effective working of the process as a whole, so in society at large there must be a close articulation between all its elements. Individual self-sufficiency is another way of saying technological crudeness: as our technics becomes more refined it becomes impossible to work the machine without large-scale collective cooperation, and in the long run a high technics is possible only on a basis of Worldwide trade and intellect intercourse. The machine has broken down the relative isolation—never complete even in the most primitive societies—of the handicraft period: it has intensified the need for collective effort and collective order. The efforts to achieve collective participation have been fumbling and empirical: so for the most part, people are conscious of the necessity in the form of limitations upon personal freedom and initiative—limitations like the automatic traffic signals of a congested center, or like the red-tape in a large commercial organization. The collective nature of the machine process demands a special enlargement of the imagination and special education in order to keep the collective demand itself from becoming an act of external regimentation. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

To the extent that the collective discipline becomes effective and the various groups in society are worked into a nicely interlocking organization, special provisions must be made for isolated and anarchic elements that are not included in such a wide-reaching collectivism—elements that cannot without danger be ignored or repressed. However, to abandon the social collectivism imposed by modern technics means to return to nature and be at the mercy of natural forces. The regularization of time, the increase in mechanical power, the multiplication of goods, the contraction of time and space, the standardization of performance and product, the transfer of skill to automata, and the increase of collective interdependence—these, then, are the chief characteristics of our machine civilization. They are the basis of the particular forms of life and modes of expression that distinguish the World, at least in degree, from the various earlier civilization that preceded it. Least anyone think the myth of Prometheus can be brushed aside as merely an idiosyncratic tale concocted by playful Greeks, let me remind you that in the Judeo-Christian tradition almost exactly the same truth is presented. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

I refer to the myth of Adam and Eve. This is the drama of the emerging of moral consciousness. In relation to this myth (and to all myths), the truth that happens internally is presented as though it were external. They myth of Adam is re-enacted in every infant, beginning a few months after birth and developing into recognizable form at the age of two or three, though ideally it should continue enlarging all the rest of one’s life. The eating of the apple of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil symbolize the dawn of human consciousness, moral consciousness and consciousness being at this point synonymous. The innocence of the Garden of Eden—the womb and the dreaming consciousness of gestation and the first month of life—are destroyed forever. The function of psychoanalysis is to increase this consciousness, indeed to help people eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If this experience is as terrifying for many people as it was for Oedipus, it should not surprise us. Any theory of resistance that omits the terror of human consciousness is incomplete and probably wrong. In place of innocent bliss, the infant now experiences anxiety and guilt feelings. Also, as part of the child’s legacy is the sense of individual responsibility, and, most important of all, developing only later, the capacity to love. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

The shadow side of this process of individuality is the emergence of repression and, concomitantly, neurosis. A fateful event indeed! If you call this the fall of man, you should join Hegel and other analysts of history who have proclaimed that it was a fall upward; for without this experience there would be neither creativity nor consciousness as we know them. However, again, God was angry. Adam and Eve were driven out of the garden by an Angel with a flaming sword. The troublesome paradox confronts us in that both the Greek and the Judeo-Christian myths present creativity and consciousness as being born in rebellion against an omnipotent force. Are we to conclude that these chief gods, Zeus and Yahweh, did not wish humankind to have moral consciousness and the arts of civilization? It is a mystery indeed. The most obvious explanation is that the creative artist and poet and saint must fight the actual (as contrasted to the ideal) gods of our society—the god of conformism as well as the gods of apathy, material success, and exploitative power. These the idols of our society that are worshiped by multitudes of people. However, this point does not go deeply enough to give us an answer to the riddle. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

In my search for some illumination, I read the legends of Anne Rice and discovered that perhaps Lestat gave up his vampire body, to switch places with Raglan James and become a human because he knew that David Talbot was old and could die and was his only true friend, but David refused to take the dark gift. So, Lestat figured if he gave up his body, even with a $20 million reward for the return of it, that Raglan would not want to give it up and David would be the only one willing to help him, and that perhaps that when they performed the body switching the Raglan, instead of going back into the beautiful tall, tan, body with blonde hair that he had stolen, that he would jump into David’s body, forcing David into the beautiful body because Raglan wanted nothing more than to become a vampire. And posing as David, Ragland could then get this dark gift, and have the power and immortality that he wanted. Raglan was really an old man and had stole the body from a young man and once that man was in his body, he hit in the dead to kill him. So the legend is all about Raglan ending his own torture by trading bodies until he could become immortal. This conclusion to the myth, if you can follow, tells us that the riddle of Prometheus is also connected with the problem of death. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

The same with Adam and Eve. Enraged at their eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, God cries out that he is afraid that they will eat of the tree of eternal life and become like one of us. So! Again the riddle has to do with the problem of death, of which eternal life is one aspect. The battle with the gods thus hinges on our own mortality! Creativity is a yearning for immortality. We human beings know that we must die. We have, strangely enough, a word for death. We know that each of us must develop the courage to confront death. Yet we also must rebel and struggle against it. Creativity comes from this struggle—out of rebellion the creative act is born. Creativity is not merely the innocent spontaneity of our youth and childhood; it must also be married to the passion of the adult human being, which is a passion to live beyond one’s death. Michelangelo’s withering, unfinished statues of slaves, struggling in their prisons of marble, are the most fitting symbols for our human condition. Although the higher consciousness may vary in vividness, before settling down to a fixed evenness of quality, it remains permanent at this stage. All problems vanish from one’s mind as though they have never been. One is under no necessity to concern oneself about anything or anyone. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

God in his Heaven and all is well with the World. There is no tormenting situation to be cleared up, no difficult decision to be made, no quest to be followed through drawn-out struggles and personal self-disciplines, and inevitable disappointments. One has now the secret of it all, the blissful state of enlightenment. Hitherto one has been only partially oneself. Now, with this radiant entry into the eternal, one is completely oneself. Now one can speak to others, move in the World, and work out relationships, solely from one’s centre, straight from one’s core: no distortions, no hypocrisies, no insincerities. Here at last is true normality, existence as it was meant to be but is never found to be. One has attained the delight and freedom of spontaneous living. The savage may have it, to, but on a lower level. When the knowledge of the soul is not merely intellectual, however convincing, not only a matter of belief, however firm, but an unchangeable awareness of its ever-present existence, it is true knowledge authentic revelation, and blissful salvation. We move up from being to Being. It is a state which has been attained in its fullness by only a few persons during each century but which has been glimpsed at least once in a lifetime by many more. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

There is another kind of power called integrative and this power is with the other person. My power then abets my neighbor’s power. A European friend of mine, when he was in this country working on his influential ideas and forming them into a book, would offer them for criticism; but the rest of us, rightly understanding how tender ideas can be when they are being born, would politely hold back any negative reaction. However, our friend would regularly react with impatience, protesting: “I want you to criticize me.” By this he meant that if we proposed an antithesis against his thesis, he would be forced to reform his thinking into a new and better synthesis. If opponents of all important truths do not exist, it is indispensable to imagine them and supply them with the strongest arguments which the most skillful devil’s advocate can conjure up. An audience rarely realizes how valuable its questions are to a speaker after a lecture, for they stimulate and compel one to alter or defend one’s position with renewed insight. I was tempted to call this kind of power cooperative, but I realized it too often beings with the victim having to be coerced into the cooperation. Our narcissism is forever crying out against the wounds of those who would criticize us or point out our weak spots. We forget that the critic can be doing us a considerable favor. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

Certainly criticisms are often painful, and one has to brace one’s self in the face of them. We can slide back into manipulative power (by forcefully silencing the critic) or competitive power (by making the critic look silly). Or we can even protect our thin skins by means of nutrient power (patronizing the critic by implying one is confused and needs our care). However, if we do regress in these ways, we are losing an opportunity for new truth that the questioner, hostile or friendly as the case may be, may well be giving us. I recall my own experience in psychoanalysis. When my analyst would point out something about my character structure which I found painful, I would at first deny it out of hand. However, later on, as realized the truth of the insight, I would have to suffer the pain of changing my character structure according to this new truth. This confession is not as dramatic as it sounds, for everyone I have ever met also react in exactly this way in similar situation. Integrative power, I have said, can lead to growth by Hegel’s dialectic process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. All growth, even that of molecular structures, proceed in this way: there is one body, then there is its anti-body, and growth proceeds by the repulsion or attraction of these two into a new body. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

Integrative power can be used with nonviolent methods on one’s opponents. One way of disarming the opponent is to expose their moral defenses. It weakens their morale and at the same time it works on their conscience. One just does not know how to handle it. No one can deny that this is describing a kind of power. It depends for its success not only on the courage of the nonviolent one, but also upon the moral development and awareness of the persons who are the recipients of the nonviolent power. One must be disciplined and adhere rigidly to nonviolence, it is incontestable that these same methods brought great psychological and spiritual power to bear upon the British rulers. Even if pitted against an entire empire, one can move it with eminent success by one fasting and prayer in a way that never could have been done by military power. It works on the conscience. Nonviolent power depends n memory, which in turn depends on the moral development of the persons against whom this kind of power is directed. The opponent has to live with one’ self, and this puts one in the position of having to remember that he, or she, or they have injured you. There was a judge, who shall remain nameless, who used his power to sentence two men to death. This judge spends his senile years going from person to person trying to explain and justify his act. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

The judge cannot forget, and he cannot integrate his action with his self-image; and the conflict this sets up preys upon him and contributes, if not causes, his senile psychosis. Beings are curious creatures who are afflicted with memory. If one cannot integrate one’s memories into one’s self-image, one must pay for one’s failure by neurosis or psychosis; and one tries, generally in vain, to shake oneself loose from the tormenting memories. Truth exists only as the individual produces it n action. The aim of existential philosophy is so comprehend the human being’s immediate, unfolding situation in the World or, being-in-the-World. Our goal is to clarify the life-designs or experiential perimeters within which we live. What are their shapes, how much freedom, meaning, value and so on do they permit us? How can we optimize them in order to lead fuller, more productive lives? The impetus for existential speculation is almost always a profound crisis. Why else would people ask such poignant questions about who or what they are or where they are head? Such questions are almost invariably a response to individual or collective breakdown—a point at which the old patterns no longer work or lead toward catastrophe. It is precisely this speculation that makes the emergence in the context of crises—points of disruption and alarm—that give existential philosophy its depth. It is precisely complacency against which existential philosophers take their stand. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

Existence is beyond the power of words to define: terms may be used but none of them is absolute. Existence by nothing bred, breeds everything, parent of the Universe. A way of escaping anxiety is to deny its existence. In fact, nothing is done about anxiety in such cases except denying it, that is, excluding it from consciousness. All that appears are the physical concomitants of fear or anxiety, such as shivering, sweating, accelerated heart-beat, choking, vomiting, and in the mental sphere, a feeling of restlessness, of being rushed or paralyzed. We may have all these feelings and physical sensations when we are afraid and are aware of being so; they may also be the exclusive expression of an existing anxiety which is suppressed. In the latter cases al that the individual knows about one’s condition is such outward evidence as the fact that one has to urinate frequently in certain conditions, that one becomes nauseated on trains, that at times one has night-sweats, and always without physical cause. It is also possible, however, to make a conscious denial of anxiety, a conscious attempt to overcome it. This is akin to what happens on the normal level, when it is attempted to get rid of fear by recklessly disregarding it. The most familiar example on the normal level is the soldier who, driven by the impulse to overcome a fear, performs heroic deeds. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

The fact may be noted without reproach and without antagonism, without surprise and without arrogance, that beings are the victims of the very institutions they have themselves created and maintained. The individual who refuses to be lost in their mesmerized surrender to the false prestige of these institutions must go forth alone into an arid and empty wilderness, must set oneself apart from the World around one. One has entered a World of being where few beings will be able to follow one. Their lack of understanding will be the bar. One will find that few of one’s kind are settled in this World, a discovery which one may meet either with disappointment or with resignation. The being who is travelling this inner way soon finds and feels its loneliness. One may try to get rid of the feeling by joining a group, but this can give only a partial liberation and, in the end, only a temporary one. However, this loneliness need not be a cause of suffering. Rather one may come to enjoy it. The feeling of being isolated, the sense of walking a lonely path, is true outwardly but untrue inwardly. For there one is companioned by the Overself’s gentle ever-drawing love. One has only to grope within sufficiently to know this for oneself, and to know it with absolute certitude. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

Why Does He Have to Weep to Have His Love? Why Can He Not Enjoy His Love?

July 23, 2019 2:12 am

Deep drifts of snow lay everywhere. The streets were clearly impassable to traffic, and there were times when I fell on my knees again, arms going deep into the snow, and Nacho liked my face as though he were trying to keep me warm. But I continued, struggling uphill, whatever my state of mind and body, until at last I turned the corner, and saw the lights of the familiar Cresleigh Homes Rocklin Trails House ahead. In the year 1619 the bakers of London applied to increase the price of bread. The pâtissiers sent in support a complete description of a bakery and of its weekly costs. Thirteen people there were in such an establishment: the baker and his wife, four paid employees who were called journeymen, two maid-servants, two apprentices, and the baker’s three children. Food cost more than anything else, more than raw materials, and nearly four times as much as wages. Clothing was charged up, too, not only for man, wife, and children but for the apprentices as well. Even school fees were included in the cost of baking bread for sale. A London bakery was undoubtedly what we should called a commercial or industrial undertaking, turning out loaves by the thousand. Yet it was carried on in the house of the baker himself, an ordinary house with a few extra sheds. #RandolphHarris 1 of 24

All these people, moreover, took their meals in the house, every meal of the day. They even slept there at night; indeed they were obliged to do so, expect for the journeymen. In short, universal custom and law of the land obliged these thirteen people to live together as a family. They only word ever used at that time to describe such a group of people was the word “family.” The man at the head of the group, the man we should call the entrepreneur, or the employer or the manager, was then known as the master, or head of the family. He was father in fact to some of its member, in place of father to the rest. There was no distinction between his domestic and his economic functions. His wife was both his partner and his subordinate, a partner because she ran the family, took charge of the food and managed the women servants, a subordinate because she was woman and wife, mother and in place of mother to the rest. The paid servants had their specified and familiar position in the family, as much part of it as the children, but not quite in the position of the children. The apprentices were well fed, obliged to obedience and forbidden to marry, unpaid and absolutely dependent until the age of twenty-one. And if apprentices were workers who were also children, the children themselves, the sons and daughters of the master and mistress, were workers too. #RandolphHarris 2 of 24

At the end of the century John Locke laid it down that when they reached three, the children of the poor must begin work for some part of the day. We may see at once, therefore, that the World we have lost, as I have called it, was no paradise, no golden age of equality, tolerance, and loving-kindness. It is so important that I should not be misunderstood on this point that I will say at once that in my view the coming of industry cannot be shown to have brought economic oppression and exploitation with it. It was there already. The patriarchal arrangements which I have begun to describe were not new in the England of Shakespeare and of Elizabeth. These arrangements were as old as the Greeks, as old as European history, and they abused and enslaved people quite as remorselessly as the economic arrangements which had replaced them in the England of Blake and Victoria. However, there were differences in the manner of oppressing and exploiting. The ancient order of society which gave way before the coming of industry was felt by those who supposed, enjoyed, and endured it to be eternal and unchangeable. There was no expectation of reform. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24

When economic relationships were domestic relationships, and domestic relationships were rigidly regulated by the social system, by the content of Christianity itself, how could there be expectation of reform? This is in sharp contrast with social expectations in Victorian England, and in all industrial society since. Since the coming of industry, societies have been far less table than their predecessors. They lack the extraordinary influence for cohesiveness which familiar relationships carry with them, that power of reconciling the frustrated and the discontented by emotional means. You have noticed that the roles we have allotted to all the members of the extended family of the master baker of London in 1619 are all, emotionally, highly symbolic and highly satisfactory. In a whole society organized like this, everyone belongs, everyone has one’s circle of affection, every relationship can be seen as a love relationship. It may indeed well be a love relationship. Not so with us. Even if he were a bully and a beater, a usurer and a hypocrite, who could love the name of a limited company as an apprentice could love one’s superbly satisfactory father-figure master? However, if a family is a circle of affection, it can also be the scene of hatred. The true tyrants among beings, the villains and the murderers, are jealous husbands and resentful wives, tyrannical fathers, deprived children. #RandolphHarris 4 of 24

Concerning aggression, I mean, in contradistinction to the attitudes of self-assertion, acts of going against someone, attacking, disparaging, encroaching, or any form of hostile behavior—disturbances of this kind show themselves in two entirely different ways. One way is a propensity to be aggressive, domineering, over-exacting, to boss, cheat or find fault. Occasionally persons who have these attitudes are aware of being aggressive; more often they are not in the least aware of it and are convinced subjectively that they are just being honest or merely expressing an opinion, or even being modest in their demands, although in reality they are offensive and imposing. In others, however, these disturbances show themselves in the opposite way. One finds on the surface an attitude of easily feeling cheated, dominated, scolded, imposed on or humiliated. These persons, too, are frequently not aware that this is their own attitude, but believe sadly that the whole World is down on them, imposing on them. Peculiarities of another kind, those in the pleasures of the flesh sphere, may be classified roughly as either a compulsive need for activities to please the flesh or inhibitions toward such activities. Inhibitions may appear at any step leading to satisfaction of the flesh. They may set in at the approach of persons of the other gender, in wooing, in the functions of the pleasures of the flesh themselves or in the enjoyment. All the peculiarities describe in the preceding groups will appear also in the attitudes dealing with pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 5 of 24

In the traditional patriarchal society of Europe, which I am trying to describe, where everyone lived one’s whole life in a family, often in the same family, such tension must have been incessant and unrelieved, incapable of release except in crisis. Men, women, and children have to be very close together and for a very long time indeed to generate the emotional power which can give rise to a tragedy of Sophocles, or Shakespeare, or Racine. Conflict then was between individual people, on the personal scale. Clashes between whole groups, such as those which go to make our twenty-first century society the scene of perpetual revolution as we call it, could arise far less often then. This can only have been so if the little knot of thirteen people making bread was indeed the typical social unit of the old World, typical in size, in scale, in composition. In fact we can take the bakery to be the limiting case for the family which was sovereign in the society of our ancestors, the society of these days before the industrial revolution. We shall see in a moment what form the family took over the great expanse of society which lived on the land. However, our chosen example has other things to tell us. We may notice, for one thing, that our folk-memory of the World we have lost is in much these terms, rather than in rural terms. #RandolphHarris 6 of 24

We still talk to children about apprentices who marry their master’s daughter, of bakers who really bake, in their houses, in their homes, of spinster who really sit by the fire and spin. Nursery rhymes and fairy tales preserve the language pretty well unaltered. In fact a reliable guide to the subject in hands is Grimm’s Fairy Tales, even Walt Disney. Which means that it is already half known to the historian before one starts, known by rote and not by understanding. Therefore one has neglected it, and neglecting it has failed to set up the correct contrast with the social order which has now succeeded. Without contrast there cannot be understanding, and I submit that we are unable to comprehend our industrial society because the historian whose job it is has not told us what society was like without industry. However, we do know that being a housewife is the true oldest profession in the World, it dates all the way back to the very first human beings, Adam and Eve. The working family of the London baker vividly illustrates the scale of life under the antiquated social order: no group of persons larger than a family, fifteen or twenty at most; no object larger than the London Bridge or St. Paul’s Cathedral; no workaday building larger than an ordinary house. Everything physical was on the human scale. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24

The death of the head of a family in the World of commerce and industry which we have been describing was almost certainly the end to its existence. The hope was that a son would succeed, or, if there was no son, an apprentice instead, which was why I was important that he should marry the master’s own kin. Often, surprisingly often, the widow would herself carry on, though it could not be for long. Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire paints accurate picture of what it was like in the eighteenth century for women, when Lestat kills the Freniere boy who was master of the plantation. With the death of Freniere, the plantation would collapse because it was a fragile economy, a life of splendor based on the perennial mortgaging of next year’s crop, and it was in his hands alone. After the death of the Freniere boy, the five Freniere sisters were agonizing. However, another Vampire called Louis convinces Babbette that she can save the plantation as long as she was confident. He told her, “Stop at nothing until you have the answers. And take my visitations to you to be your courage whenever you waver. You must take the reins of your own life. Your brother is dead.” However, later on Babette became the scandal of the neighborhood because she chose to run the plantation on her on. She had scandalized the coast by remaining alone on the plantation without a man in the house, without even an older woman. #RandolphHarris 8 of 24

Babette’s greatest problem was that she might succeed financially only to suffer the isolation of social ostracism. She has such a sensibility that wealth itself meant nothing to her; family, a long…this meant something to Babette. Though she was able to old the plantation together, the scandal was wearing on her. She was giving up inside. However, as you know jealous people will use your life as if it were oil for a lamp. This, then, was not simply a World without factories; it was a World without firms, a World without economic continuity. Since every activity was limited by what could be organized within a family, and within the lifetime of a family, there as an unending struggle to manufacture continuity, to provide an expectation for the future. “One hundred and twenty family uprising and downlying, whereof you may take out six or seven, and all the rest were servants and retainers”: this was the household of the Herberts, Earls of Pembroke in the years before the Civil War, and it illustrates the symbolic function of the aristocratic family—to defy the limitation on size, to build big, to raise up a line which should remain forever. However, what do these words mean? Who was England in, say the year 1650? Not every single person living then within our boundaries no one with historical sense would claim that. #RandolphHarris 9 of 24

However, only a recognition that people came no in individuals but in clots, in families of the sort I have described, only that recognition makes clear that England in its final definition meant only those grown males who were heads of households, who were literate and who had some degree of individuality. This at once excludes all women, all those under the age of nearly thirty, for all these persons were caught up, so to speak—subsumed is the ugly word I shall use—in the personalities of the heads of the families to which they belonged. England, in fact, meant a far, far smaller number off persons even than this would imply. Historians have not, it seems to me, tended to talk about important qualifications as to the use of the word. However, they seem, of recent years anyway, to be fairly confident that they know what it was that transformed this patriarchal World into the World we live in now. Capitalism did a great deal of it, they say, and it is capitalism which we must contrast with the patriarchal society: capitalism with its new spirit, whatever that dangerous word may be doing in the historian’s vocabulary, was the great disruptive force which broke up the World we have lost and dethroned the family from its sovereignty in society. However, by the seventeenth century capitalism was at least 300 years old, and perhaps much older. #RandolphHarris 10 of 24

We have seen, in the example of the way in which the putting-out system of industry came to the rescue of the laborer on the land, that capitalism was perfectly compatible with family economic arrangements. Capitalism, we shall conclude, is an incomplete description: it simply cannot do the historian’s work which has been thrust upon it. The historical distortions which have risen from the word capitalism are a result, I believe, in some degree to a faulty sense of proportion, which we can only bow begin to correct. With the “capitalism-changed-the-World” way of thinking goes a division of history into the ancient feudal, and bourgeois eras or stages. I think that the contrast which we have been trying to draw here between the World we have lost and the World we now inhabit makes all other divisions into subdivisions. European society is of the patriarchal type, and with some variations, of which perhaps the feudal variation went furthest, it was patriarchal in its institutions right up to the coming of the factories, the offices, and the rest. It is now patriarchal no longer, except in a vestigial way, and in its emotional predisposition. It is now time that we divided up history up again in accordance with what is really important. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24

The word alienation is part of the cant of the twenty-first century, and it began as an attempt to describe the separation of the worker from a World of work. We need not accept all that this expression has come to convey in order to recognize that it does point us the way to realizing something of the first importance to us all in relation to our past. Time was, and it was all time up to 260 years ago, when the whole of life went forward in the family, in a circle of loved, familiar faces, known and fondled objects, all to human size. That time has gone forever. It makes us very different from our ancestors. However, there still remains a therapeutic problem; many people possess a sense of emptiness that some clients feel—even when they are convinced that they are full. What they are actually full of are false highs, dreams with no substance, hypomanic reactions, and an array of compulsions. These extravagances lead inexorably to collapse—and the cycle repeats once again. Client need to pause over their emptiness, to explore it, in order to break their dysfunctional cycle. They may be less affluent than other, or deprives or deflated, but they do not have to collapse or overreach. One can find possibilities within their restrictedness, to wonder, for example, and to consciously transcend their despair. #RandolphHarris 12 of 24

Many beings believe that they can recreate themselves, deny their parentage and their roots and build a new identity. In their imaginations, some have never really accepted their parents as their parents because they are ashamed of where they come from. The heart of the problem this generation faces is that they are haunted by a sense of Sin and Fall, and assume all the weakness and depravity of human nature. While it is important to accept your roots and where you come from as apart of your identity, have complete faith, in typical American fashion, that you can transform your dreams into action. Acknowledging your roots will help to fortify this foundation, and makes it easier to transform dreams into action. Let people see that there is something gorgeous about you, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life. It is important to gave an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as no one has never found in any other person and which they know they likely shall never find again. Believe unconditionally in the powerful American myth of the Green Light, a symbol that represents dreams, hopes, and desires. It means we have the clearance to reach our goals. The Green Light is like a symbol from God that he has blessed the path we are on. Everything is ahead; we make anything we choose of life. #RandolphHarris 13 of 24

The Green Light beckons us onward and upward with a promise of bigger and better things in higher and higher skyscrapers, interminably rising into infinity. The Green Light turns into our greatest illusion, covering over our difficulties, permitting us to depend on the Light and Power which is there and which, with enough patience, will be found there. Many beings believe that the important thing in the American Dreams has been to get rich, and then those very riches give a sanction to your situation. The fact of your being successful is supposedly proof that God smiles on you and that you are among the saved. It is not hard to see how this, in true Calvinistic tradition, drifted into getting rich as the eleventh commandment. The success and the money may flesh out the vast dream which many hold in its thrall and they take that as the reality of life. Money can buy the vast parties, the glitter of mansions, the freely flowing spirits, the smooth jazz music which floats from the orchestras as the hundred of people flock to the lights like moths at night. These things are important to some because sooner or later these accoutrements of Babylon will draw in true love. Yet we must also keep purity of heart in mind. We must be people who possess complete integrity. Preserving one’s fundamental integrity, one’s spiritual intactness is an essential part, maybe even the very key to life. Glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s. We are created in the image of God and are given something of that Godliness, but under the most serious and sacred of restrictions. #RandolphHarris 14 of 24

The only control placed on us is self-control—self-control born of respect for the divine sacramental power this gift God has given us represents. Do not be deceived and do not be destroyed. Unless such powers are controlled and commandments kept, your future may be burned; your World could go up in flames. Penalty may not come on the precise day of transgression, but it comes surely and certainly enough. And unless there is true repentance and obedience to a merciful Go, then someday, somewhere, the morally cavalier and unclean will pray like the rich man who wished Lazarus to “dip my finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.” Our bodies are therefore and extension of our spirit and eternal existence and is something to be kept pure and holy. Do not be afraid of soiling its hands to do honest labor. This is not just the Age of Information that we are feeling, but we do not want to lose the old warm World, and pay a high price for living too long with a single dream. Achieving the American Dream takes time and it make mean to progress our lives seem to be a repetition, every day and every act being forever the same in a perpetual monotonous toil and sweat. But that is the crucial meaning, we are in control of our fate. #RandolphHarris 15 of 24

With many a weary step, and many a groan, up the high hill we heave a huge round stone: the huge round stone, resulting with a bound, thunders impetus down. Nothing can be more important for human life than these circular journeys of the Sun. For we face monotony in all we do; we draw in and exhale breath after breath in ceaseless succession through every moment of our lives, which is monotony par excellence. However, out of this repetitiveness of breathing many have formed their life plan and found a way of achieving their goals. We then become a model of a hero who always is devoted to creating a better kind of life; one who presses on in spite of his or her despair. Without such a capacity to confront despair we would not have Beethoven, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Dante, Goethe, William and Sarah Winchester, William Randolph Hearst, Harriet Tubman, Richard Aoki, Joan Baez, Tawakkol Karman, Anne Rice, Chris Rice, Reese Witherspoon, Aaliyah, Meghan Markle, and Tee Grizzly or any others of the great figures in the development of culture. This is why we are taught the imagination, the purpose of human faiths which we construct, as it gives us courage to move beyond the rock, beyond the monotony of day-to-day experience. If you reply on an external teacher you rely on something which you may have to drop tomorrow or on somebody you may have to change the day after. #RandolphHarris 16 of 24

This brings us to the most important kind of courage of all. Whereas moral courage is the righting of wrongs, creative courage, in contrast, is the discovering of new forms, new symbols new patterns on which a new society can be built. Every profession can and does require some creative courage. In our day, technology and engineering, diplomacy, business, and certainly teaching, all of these profession and scores of others are in the midst of radical change and require courageous persons to appreciate and direct this change. The need for creative courage is in direct proportion to the degree of change the profession is undergoing. However, those who present directly and immediately the new forms and symbols are the artists—the dramatists, the musicians, the painter, the dancers, the poets, and those poets of the religious sphere we call saints. They portray the new symbols in the form of images—poetic, aural, plastic, or dramatic, as the case may be. They live out their imaginations. The symbols only dreamt about my most human beings are expressed in graphic form by the artists. But in our appreciation of the created work—let us say a Mozart quintet—we also are performing a creative act. When we engage a painting, which we have to do especially with modern art if we are authentically to see it, we are experiencing some new moment of sensibility. #RandolphHarris 17 of 24

Some new vision is triggered in us by our contact with the painting; something unique is born in us. This is why appreciation of the music or painting or other works of the creation person is also a creative act on our part. If these symbols are to be understood by us, we must identity with them as we perceive them. In Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, there are no intellectual discussions of the failure of communication in out time; the failure is simply presented there on the stage. We see it most vividly, for example, when Lucky, who, at his master’s order to “Think,” can only sputter out a long speech that has all the pomposity of a philosophical discourse but is actually pure gibberish. As we involve ourselves more and more in the drama, we see represented on stage, larger than life, our general human failure to communicate authentically. We see on the stage in, Beckett’s play, the lone, bare, tree, symbolic of the lone, bare relationship the two men have as they wait together for a Godot who never appears; and it elicits from us a similar sense of the alienation that we and multitudes of others experience. The fact that most people have no clear awareness of their alienation only makes this condition more powerful. In Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, there are no explicit discussions of the disintegration of our society; it is shown as a reality in the drama. The nobility of the human species is not talked about, but is presented as a vacuum on the stage. #RandolphHarris 18 of 24

Because this nobility is such a vivid absence, an emptiness that fills the play, you leave the theater with a profound sense of the importance of being human, as you do after have seen Macbeth or King Lear and after have reading Interview with the Vampire and Tales of the Body Thief by Anne Rice. O’Neill’s capacity to communicate that experience places him among the significant tragedians of history. Artists can portray these experiences in music or words or clay or marble or on canvas because they express the collective unconscious. This phrase may not be the most felicitous, but we know that each of us carries in buried dimensions of our being some basic forms, partly generic and partly experiential in origin. It is these the artist expresses. Thus the artists—in which term I hereafter include the poets, musicians, dramatists, plastic artists, as well as saints—are a dew line; they give us a distant early warning of what is happening to our culture. In the art of our day we see symbols galore of alienation and anxiety. However, at the same time there is form amid discord, beauty amid ugliness, some human love in the midst of hatred—a love that temporarily triumphs over death but always loses out in the long run. #RandolphHarris 19 of 24

The artists thus expresses the spiritual meaning of their culture. Our problem is: Can we read their meaning aright? The teaching of a higher individual needs to be correctly understood. It is not that a separate one exists for each physical body. The consciousness which normally identifies itself with the body—that is, the ego—when looking upward in highest devotion or inward in deepest mediation, comes to the point of contact with universal beings, World-Mind. This is its own higher self, the divine deputy within its own being. However, if devotion or prayer is carried still further, to the very utmost possible stretch of consciousness, the point itself merges into its source. At this moment the being is one’s source. However, “Man shall not see My face and live!” One returns eventually to Earth-consciousness, where one must follow out its requirements. Yet the knowledge of what one is in essence remains the presence of the deputy is always there meanwhile, always felt It may fittingly be called one’s higher individuality. The uniqueness of each person, one’s difference from every other person, may be metaphysically explained as due to the effort of Infinite Mind to express itself infinitely within the finite limitations of time and space, form and appearance. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24

Take Giotto, as a creator to further illustrate this point, in what is called the “little Renaissance” which burgeoned in the fourteenth century. In contrast to the two-dimensional medieval mosaics, Giotto presents a new way of seeing life and nature: gives his paintings three dimensions, and we know see human being and animals expressing and calling forth from us such specific human emotions as care, or pity, or grief, or joy. In the previous, two-dimensional mosaics in the churches of the Middle Age, we feel no human being is necessary to see them—they have their own relationship to God. However, in Giotto, a human being viewing the picture is required; and this human being must take one’s stance as an individual in relation to the picture. Thus the new humanism and the new relation to nature that were to become central in the Renaissance are here born, a hundred years before the Renaissance proper. In our endeavor to grasp these symbols of art, we find ourselves in a realm that beggars our usual conscious thinking. Our task is quite beyond the reach of logic. It brings us to an area in which there are many paradoxes. Take the idea expressed in Shakespeare’s four lines at the end of Sonnet 64: Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate, that time will come and take my love away. This thought is as a death, which cannot choose, but weep to have that which it fears to lose. #RandolphHarris 21 of 24

If you have been trained to accept the logic of our society, you will ask: “Why does he have to weep to have his love? Why can he not enjoy his love?” Thus our logic pushes us always toward adjustment—and adjustment to a crazy World and to a crazy life. And worse yet, we cut ourselves off from understanding the profound depths of experience that Shakespeare is here expressing. We have all had such experiences, but we tend to cover them over. We may look at an autumn tree so beautiful in its brilliant colors that we feel like weeping; or we may hear music so lovely that we are overcome with sadness. The craven thought then creep into our consciousness that it would have been better not to have seen the tree at all or not to have heard the music. Then we would not be faced with this uncomfortable paradox—knowing that time will come and take my love away, that everything we love will die. However, the essence of being human is that, in the brief moment we exist on this spinning planet, we can love some persons and some things, in spite of the fact that time and death will ultimately claim us all. #RandolphHarris 22 of 24

That we yearn to stretch the brief moment, to postpone our death a year or so is surely understandable. However, such postponement is bound to be a frustrating and ultimately a losing battle. By the creative act, however, we are able to reach beyond our own death. This is why creativity is so important and why we need to confront the problem of the relationship between creativity and death. Exploitative power is the simplest and, humanly speaking, most destructive kind of power. It is subjecting persons to whatever use they may have to the one who holds the power. Slavery is, of course, the obvious example—when one person has the power over the bodies and, indeed, over the whole organisms of many persons. Exploitative power identifies power with force. In pioneer America the use of bullets to transform others into lifeless hulks, as well as most other example of physical force, fall into this category. In this sense the use of firearms, when employed at the whim of the person who happens to possess a gun, is a form of exploitative power. In everyday life this kind of power is exercised by those who have been radially rejected, whose lies are so barren that they know no way of relating to other people except exploitation. It is sometimes rationalized as the masculine way of dealing with women during pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 23 of 24

It is interesting that courtly love in the Middle Ages guarded against this kind of power—which would otherwise have been rampant in the society of knights and maidens—by the rule that force was never to be used in love. Exploitative power always presupposes violence or the threat of violence. In this kind of power there is, strictly speaking, no choice or spontaneity at all on the part of the victims. It is true that the subject in consciousness cannot make an object of itself, cannot perceive itself, but there is a being another self which knows the subject, is aware of the subject although the subject is not aware of it. However, there is an important difference to be noted here. First, the transcendental self does not know in the same way that the thinking self knows (by thinking self I mean the subject) for its knowledge is immediate, swifter than the swiftest computing machine. Secondly, it is part of the universal mind, the World Mind, yet mysteriously connected with a limited human mind. Union wit the Overself is not the ultimate end but a penultimate one. What we look up to as the Overself looks up in its own turn to another higher entity. God will strengthen you when you waver. He will be your light when it seems most dark. He will take your hand and be your hope when hope seems to have left. God’s compassion and mercy, with all their cleansing and healing powers, are freely given to all who truly wish to complete forgiveness and will take the steps that lead to it. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24

A Glowing Tripod Will at Last Give Sign that You Have Reached the Deepest, Nethermost Shrine and by its Light You Will Behold the Mothers!

July 22, 2019 1:31 am

Within moments of leaving of the Cresleigh Homes Rocklin Trails House, stepping out into the glorious daylight, I knew that this experience would be worth all of the trials and the pain. And no mortal chills, with all its debilitating symptoms would keep me from frolicking in the morning Sun. Never mind that my overall physical weakness was driving me mad: that I seemed to be made of stone as I plodded along with Nacho, that I could not jump two feet in the air when I tried, or that pushing open the door of the butcher shop took a colossal effort; or that my cold was growing steadily worse. Once Nacho had devoured his breakfast of scraps, begged from the butcher, we were off together to revel in the light everywhere, and I felt myself becoming drunk on the vision of the Sunlight falling upon windows and wet pavements, on the gleaming tops of brightly enameled BMWs, on glassy puddles where the snow had melted, upon the plate-glass shop windows, and upon the people—the thousands and thousands of happy people, scurrying busily about the business of the day. In our society most men and women spend the major portion of their waking hours at work, a fact which should not be taken to mean that beings find or express themselves only in their work. Yet far beyond the workplace and the time spent in it, the work we do and the way we do it shape our lives—our image of ourselves and our relations with others. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22

The World we have lost, a World based on the patriarchal productive unit of preindustrial times was an intimate Word in which work was inseparable from other family activities. Let it be noted, however—especially for those who would turn the clock back—that this was an authoritarian World, ruled by a father or father-figure who was absolute boss. But along with the power and control exercised by this figure went duties and responsibilities toward those whose work he supervised. He ruled his flock, but he also tended it. With large-scale industrialism this type of family industry as the basic productive unit came to an end, never to be restored. In the rise of industrial capitalism, handicrafts were replaced by machine-tool production. What this transformation meant for the ordinary worker, turn from the roots of their medieval past, is the beings are alienated from a World in which nature, others, and them as living beings become objects. The object produced by being’s labor—its produce—now confronts one in the shape of an alien thing, a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor given embodiment in a material form this product is the objectification of labor. Furthermore, the worker is estranged from the very process of production, which is controlled not by one, but by an alien being. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22

Having lost control of one’s work, beings are alienated from others—and from oneself as well. Both labor and the possessing class represent the same self-estrangement. Alienated labor is not the result, but the cause of private property because people want to see the emancipation of themselves as creative and self-expressive, free to product the things they desire with love and passion. However, today we are confronted with the ambivalent machine—an instrument of liberation and of repression. As a result of innovation and globalization in America, we are seeing the heartland being eroded. United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported that licensed dairy farm numbers in the country declined by 2,731 farms, a drop of 6.8 percent, leaving just 37,468 licensed dairy farms America, compared to 40,199 last years. Wisconsin is the state with the most dairy farms in American, but 590 dairy farms went out of business. Decline in American production is also because we are confronted by a formidable counterpart of the machine—bureaucracy. While bureaucracy aims at the rationalization of human behavior, it rarely achieves this goal. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22

Blind adherence to the rules may be dysfunctional, that is, it will prevent the bureaucracy from performing its intended function. For instance, former governor Jerry Brown signed a law that mandates cutting methane from livestock 40 percent by 2030 from 2013 levels. Dairy Farmer Kim Jorgensen has 270 cows. The cow tax would cost him an estimated $93,126.00. This mandate will cost a number of farmers their livelihoods and it will have an effect on competition. It means that farmers in California will have to compete with colleagues who do not have this mandate, and California dairy famers will be at a disadvantage. Consumers will prefer to buy their milk if it is affordable, but if diary famers are penalized, consumers will switch to milk produced outside of California, or the Untied State or switch to an alternative like cashew milk, almond milk, soy milk, or camel’s milk. If our goal is to create jobs and support local business, by taxing cow emission and buying milk and beef from other countries, where it is not regulated by the USDA will cause Americans to lose more jobs in the future. Therefore, as you can see whether bureaucracy is efficient or inefficient, it can be inherently impersonal and defeat the purpose of what it is intended to do. This impersonal character makes bureaucracy a hated and feared institution. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22

Although Americans tend to dislike bureaucracy because it tends to over regulate the beings and their production, and it has run amuck, many democrats are pushing for socialism and want to actually expand the government and put the government in more control of their lives. By forcing the government to provide healthcare for everyone, pay for college educations, tax foods and drinks that can lead to obesity to curb their popularity and control who can own guns. If democrats have their way, there will even be mandated wages and your education, experience, and performance will not matter because democrats want their “fair share,” even if they have not worked for it nor earned it. For instance, with democrats demanding their “fair share” to help people in retail jobs earn a living wage, they could reduce a doctor’s pay from $50 an hour to $25 an hour to supplement people’s wages in retail jobs so bureaucrats can equalize the wage disparity in California. This impersonal character makes bureaucracy a hated and feared institution, which capitalist want less government and less regulation so people have a fair chance at succeeding in life. When personal feelings and needs are permitted to intrude into its deliberations, there is a danger for bureaucracy. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22

However, bureaucracy is not supposed to be only an alien governing power that provides welfare and handouts to those who do not want to work, while over taxing and oppressing those who want to get an education and work; it is for increasing numbers of professional and white-collar workers a workplace. However, life in the crystal palace is not a government bureau or dreary counting house, but more of what many would consider the ideal corporate environment—physically luxurious and at least superficially warm and friendly in its human relationships. And yet, the crystal palace is less alienating than the assembly line because it is safe, clean, nice and peaceful. People are artificially caring, but not snarky, sarcastic nor vindictive. Both the assembly line and crystal palace turn out robots, but with the crystal palace you get cheerful robots, instead of cheerless robots, even though both are victims of impersonal and remote power. When not at work is where beings find themselves, in leisure hours, if they have any. However, some people have no training for leisure. And so, like the work from which it provides escape, leisure becomes a great void and these people usually fill that void with sinful activities. The Devil finds work for idle hands. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22

For some people their leisure time is occupied with productive activities so they stay out of trouble. Out of all the other I’s some are chosen as a pattern that is me. However, there are all the other possibilities of patterns within what all the others say which come into me and become other I’s which is not myself, and sometimes these take over. Then who am I? The personal self is not formed in isolation. It is built out of both our private and our shared experiences. We tend to evaluate ourselves, at least in our early years, by comparing ourselves to others or by patterning our behaviors and ideas on those of people whom we feel to be significant. Peer and authority figures are often role models for our personal selves. Even if you are not in your ideal career, or ideal environment, I myself choose to occupy myself with reading psychology, religion and other subjects for 3-7 hours every day. I truly believe that an education, even if it is not formal, will help my mind develop and eventually elevate me to a place where I can achieve my dreams. Some people run hither and thither, from teacher to teaching to a different teacher or teaching, from Euramerica to India, to Japan, to China, looking away from their own being for that which is the essence of that being. They are like the man who looked everywhere for his spectacles. At last he gave up the search—only to find the spectacles resting on this own nose. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22

However, had this man’s attention had first to be drawn to his nose by someone—or by the book of someone—who could see his spectacles there. These seekers are not ordinarily aware of what is continually present within them, the stillness of the centre of their being, and instead of looking there for it, they look elsewhere, or to other beings. The real service which is rendered them by others is to tell them where to look; the rest is for them to do. However, the lazy, or those who want something for nothing, expect or want the gurus to do it for them—a false idea. The other great error of these confused minds is to seek from the crystal palace what it is not rejecting. The best in the crystal palace are not rejecting spirituality but ignorance, superstition, unbalance, futility, narrowness, and excess of liberalism. The Westerner who adores American’s past want to copy it, picturing it as a golden age of excess and abundance (which it never was). One tries to restore it for oneself and in oneself, becoming an ape and a parrot. If some have found their way to this illumination by following slavishly the details of a special teaching, others have found it by following their faith in God. It is not uncommon for inexperienced beginners on the Quest, who are ignorant of the serious and often harmful results of such associations, to turn to untrustworthy so-called occult teachers. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22

In most cases, it would be far safer, and more satisfactory in the end, for them to depend solely upon their own unassisted efforts than to follow such a dangerous method. One of the predominant trends of neurotics of our time is their excessive dependence on the approval or affection of others. We all want to be liked and to feel appreciated, but in neurotic persons the dependence on affection or approval is disproportionate to the real significance which other persons have for their lives. Although we all wish to be liked by persons of whom we are fond, in neurotics there is an indiscriminate hunger for appreciation or affection, regardless of whether they care for the person concerned or whether the judgment of that person has any meaning for them. More often than not they are not aware of this boundless craving, but they betray its existence in their sensitivity when the attention they want is not forthcoming. They may feel hurt, for example, if someone does not accept their invitation, does not telephone for some time, or even only if one disagrees with them in some opinion. This sensitivity may be concealed by a “do not care” attitude. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22

Furthermore, there is a marked contradiction between their wish for affection and their own capacity for feeling or giving it. Excessive demands concerning consideration for their own wishes may go with just as great a lack of consideration for others. The contradiction does not always appear on the surface. The neurotic may, for example, be overconsiderate and eager to be helpful to everyone, but if this is the case it is noticeable that one acts compulsively, not out of a spontaneously radiating warmth. The inner insecurity expressed in this dependence on others is the second feature that strikes us in neurotics on surface observation. Feelings of inferiority and inadequacy are characteristics that never fail. They may appear in a number of ways—such as a conviction of incompetence, of stupidity, of unattractiveness—and they may exist without any basis in reality. Notions of their own stupidity may be found in persons who are unusually intelligent, or notions about their own unattractive in the most beautiful person. These feelings of inferiority may appear openly on the surface in the form of complaints or worries, or the alleged defects may be taken for granted as a fact on which it is superfluous to waste any thought. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22

On the other hand, feelings of inferiority may be covered up by the compensating needs for self-aggrandizement, by a compulsive propensity to show off, to impress others and one’s self with all sorts of attributes that lend prestige in our culture, such as money, possession of antique pictures, antique furniture, women and/or men, social contacts with prominent people, travel, or superior knowledge. One or the other of these tendencies may be entirely in the foreground, but more generally one will feel distinctly the presence of both tendencies. The third set of attitudes, those concerning self-assertion, involve definite inhibitions. By self-assertion I mean the act of asserting one’s self or one’s claims, and I use it without any connotation of undue pushing forward. In this respect neurotics reveal a comprehensive group of inhibitions. They have inhibitions about expressing their wishes or asking for something, about doing something in their own interest, expressing an opinion or warranted criticism, ordering someone, selecting the people they wish to associate with, making contact with people, and so on. There are inhibitions also in reference to what we might describe as maintaining one’s stand: neurotics often are incapable of defending themselves against attack, or of saying “no” if they do not wish to comply with the wishes of others, as for example to a saleswoman who wants to sell them something they do not want to be, or to a person who invites them to a party, or to a woman or man who wants to experience pleasure of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22

There are finally the inhibitions toward knowing what they want: difficulties in making decisions, forming opinions, daring to express wishes which concern only their own benefits. Such wishes have to be concealed: a friend of mine in her personal accounts puts “movies” under “education” and “liquors” under “health.” Particularly important in this latter group is the incapacity to plan, whether it be a trip or a plan of life: neurotics let themselves drift, even in important decisions such as a profession or marriage, instead of having clear conceptions of what they want in life. They are driven exclusively by certain neurotic fears, as we see in persons who pile up money because they fear impoverishment, or take part in endless love affairs because they fear to enter a constructive piece of work. However, God is immanent in us, that through realization of our higher self we become more like God, but that God never ceases to be the Unattainable, the Incomprehensible. The individual is as inseparable from the Infinite as the ray from the Sun. Nevertheless one differs from it in degree and in attribute. Just as a little child may be closely intimate with its mother but not with its mother’s mind, so the human being may be closely intimate with the World-Mind but not with Its full consciousness. The higher kingdoms of Nature cannot be understood by denizens of lower ones. Beings can grow, move, and reflect, but as far as we know cannot enter into God’s infinitely mysterious consciousness. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22

Being itself infinite, the World-Mind is able to express itself in an infinite number of souls. How is your mood? The mother, from whom one is born, who gives us form to start with, who carries the survival of the race in her womb—no topic can be more important. Every patient, in learning to love, must confront the psychological remains of his or her mother’s imprinting. However, we have to take responsibility for our own anxiety and our own distress—blame but yourself that it has come to that. Something of importance is occurring beyond the achievement of Helen, who represent feminine beauty raised to an ethical level in ancient Greece. A goal for the development of the virtue, so prized by the Greeks, was the “Mothers” ultimate importance. The form of forms participates in the Universe of reproduction of the species. The one in whose womb life is created, the one who carries the implantation of new life, also has these powers such as intuition that alternate between knowledge and magic. Wizards of femininity, they (the Mothers) must be rescued to help form and reform the new culture. The Mothers have, by nature of reproducing the race, whether they are conscious of it and take responsibility for it or not the key to transformation as they had been for the forming of the fetus in the womb at pregnancy. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22

However, this Age of Information is one of force. Such power is gained by overcoming the competitors; it works by thrust, tax, by attack, by fake news and systematic discrimination of traditional ways of life and my usurping patriarchal power, deconstructing gender roles, and by cyber activity. The seamy side of the Age of Information is green energy over jobs, life-killing drugs to abort the elderly and terminally ill (which 88 percent of is used by White people), a housing and homeless crisis nationwide, the whole arsenal of competitive, adversarial systems. The feminine characteristics ideally are receptivity rather than aggression, tenderness and creating rather than destroying. Many people still believe in the patriarchal gospel and it is balanced with a traditional family union of man and women. It is not about fighting your opponent and being militant, but showing your skills and talents to appeal to others. Power, strength, dependability—all these are called masculine and patriarchal. Only the bastard child wants to fight his father, instead of showing his intelligence. Mothers are the source of love, tenderness, caring, instead of toughness, cruelty, slaughter. When life is not in balance with the feminine and masculine, the drama is bound to come to grief. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22

We must explore humanism, to search out every way to help human beings and other beings discover and live by their greatest callings. Progress does not mean simply mechanical achievements or achieving wealth, it means that human beings are learning to be conscious of their richest unique capacities, and thus have life and have it more abundantly. Stretching up toward the divine is a way to transcend being. Evil acts must be changed to good. Eventually, the devil is duped, betrayed by his own powers. When people use their powers in a petty and selfish fashion, it always rebound upon them. Thefts are symbolic. This is a creature of compulsion and obsession. It is a game. That is why they cannot hand on to what they steal. It is the process that counts with those types of beings more than anything else. It is an endlessly destructive game. Beings who are possessed by the devil’s nature always have a pattern. They rise from the lowest caste in society to living in extravagant luxury, running up ludicrous accounts for fine clothing, motorcars, jet excursions here and there, sports terms, and then it all collapses in the face of their petty crimes, treachery, and betrayal. They cannot break the cycle. It always brings them down. “And the mists of darkness are the temptation of the devil, which blindeth the eyes, and hardeneth the hearts of the children of men, and leadeth them away into broad roads, that they perish and are lost,” 1 Nephi 12.17. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22

A curious paradox characteristic of every kind of courage here confronts us. It is the seeming contradiction that we must be fully committed, but we must also be aware at the same time that we might possibly be wrong. This dialectic relationship between conviction and doubt is characteristic of the highest types of courage, and gives the lie to the simplistic definitions that identify courage with ere growth. People who claim to be absolutely convinced that their stand is the only right one are dangerous. Such conviction is the essence not only of strict and rigid doctrines, but of its more destructive cousin, fanaticism. It blocks off the user from learning new truth, and it is a dead giveaway of unconscious doubt. The person then has to double his or her protests in order to quiet not only the opposition but his or her own unconscious doubts as well. Whenever I heard—as we all did during the Obama days—the “I am absolutely convinced” tone or the “I want to make this absolutely clear” statement emanating from the White House, I braced myself, for I knew that some dishonesty was being perpetrated by the telltale sign of overemphasis. Shakespeare aptly said, “The lady [or the politician] doth protest too much, methinks.” In such a times, one longs for the presence of a leader like Lincoln, who openly admitted his doubts and as openly preserved his commitment. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22

It is infinitely safer to know that the being at the top has his or her doubts, as you and I have ours, yet has the courage to move ahead in spite of these doubts. In contrast to the fanatic who has stockade oneself against new truth, the person with the courage to believe and at the same time to admit one’s doubt is flexible and open to new learning. Paul Cezanne strongly believed that he was discovering and painting a new form of space which would radically influence the future of art, yet he was at the same time failed with painful and ever-present doubt. The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt, but in spite of doubt. To believe fully and at the same moment to have doubts is not at all a contradiction: it presupposes a greater respect for truth, an awareness that truth always goes beyond anything that can be said or done at any given moment. To every thesis there is an antithesis, and to this there is a synthesis. Truth is thus a never-dying process. We then know the meaning of the statement attributed to Leibnitz: “I would walk twenty miles to listen to my worst enemy if I could learn something.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 22

There is, among intellectuals, a tendency to deny and renounce power. Some have done this under the rubric: “Intellectuals and power are incompatible.” Others have said: “Ought we to redefine [power] in a clear way, or ought we to banish it altogether? My initial reaction is that it should be banished altogether. Indeed, outside Marxist circles, the subject has unfortunately been generally banished. There is a suspicious of the whole topic as through it were like Faust: whoever seeks power has already sold his soul to Mephistopheles. Some intellectuals propose that they deal in influence, and that influence is the opposite to power in that it restructures or alters preference. These intellectuals believe that power is the restructuring of action without altering preferences; you are made to do something irrespective of whether it is your preferred course of action. However, is not this distinction between influence and power essentially false? If we take the university as the setting, we need only ask any graduate student whether one’s professors have power over one, and one will laugh at our naivete. Of course the professors have power; the perpetual anxiety of some graduate students as to whether they will be passed or not is proof enough. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22

The professors’ power is even more effective because it is clothed in scholarly grab. It is the power of prestige, status, and the subtle coercion of others that follows from these. This is not due to the professors’ conscious aims; it has more to do with the organization of the university and the teachers’ unconscious motivations for being part of it. The more powerless the teacher feels oneself to be, the more destructive, even though subtle and covert, will be one’s influence. Influence is surely a form of power—intellectual power, but power all the same. I agree that being coerced into doing something regardless of whether it is the preferred course of action is a form of power (albeit a kind we are all used to and accept a hundred times a day, from waiting for red light to change to paying taxes). However, the emphasis on altering preferences can actually be harmful in that it leads to the state of the de Tocqueville described as characteristics of Americans—that we are bodily freer than Europeans, but intellectually more conformists and spiritually more in bondage. Many academic examinations fall into this category, in which it is psychologically healthier for the student to realize that one is required to take the examination and one does not like it, and to study for it with that realization in mind. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22

The damage to one’s integrity comes when one tries to persuade oneself that one does like the examination, and really does not. The idea of liking what you have to do is an illusion, and an unhealthy one at that. If we can like and choose a proportion of what we have to do, and do the rest because we are required to without trying t delude ourselves, we shall have more effectively preserved out autonomy and our humanity. The denial of power in society on the part of the professor is an example of pseudoinnocence. The professor proposes an idea, which in turn has power. One ducks out by letting the idea be powerful, not him. It is as though one says: “I said it, but the ‘it’ is responsible for my action, not me.” No doubt this syndrome is related by both cause and effect to the general American tendency toward anti-intellectualism, the distrust of the intellectuals on the frontier. However, one cannot purchase innocence so easily. Ideas unmated with reality produce few offspring. When the intellectual realizes that one has been increasingly pushed from the battlefield [of power] and put to flight, the reason may be that one has defined oneself out of the battle to begin with. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22

If the intellectual were to admit that one also has power, although a different kind from that of the politician, the businessman, and the military leader, it would clear the air. Furthermore, modern society clearly needs the intellectuals and their guidance; the corporate power needs to be shared with them as well as with the other disinherited groups of society. It is worthwhile to recall that in The Queen of the Damned, by Anne Rice, Lestat de Lioncourt, the intellectual vampire appears to be getting ready to be decapitated, but is pulled in by Queen Akasha, the 6,000-year-old most powerful and first vampire in the World. However, later Queen Akasha faces a struggle, when all the vampires turn against her and is herself decapitated by one of the redhead witches the was responsible for bring the dark forces into her life that cursed her with vampirism. This is a graphic allegory of the role of intellectual and the nutrient power that one can express in our day. Be careful who you are willing to die for, as they may not be there to nourish you in your time of need. I have argued against the idea that there is an irreconcilable incompatibility between power and the intellectual. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22

However, there is creative tension, which takes the form of pull between power and consciousness. This is why beings of intensive consciousness—like Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Pascal—have preferred an ascetic life, in which there were at least periods of freedom from the paraphernalia of the World. It is the function of consciousness to be, as Sokrates described himself, “a gadfly to the state.” Consciousness can disturb the establishment of power. It leads to conflicts which can be turned into new integration. It is the function of consciousness to keep us alert, to keep our imaginations functioning, to keep us forever curious, forever ready to explore infinite possibilities. Whereas power requires decision and dispatch, consciousness requires a loosening of controls, a freedom to wander where the spirit listeth, and exploration of new forms of existence which may be far out on the frontiers of knowledge. Enactment of the master-pupil relationship, with the subordinate and submissive role allotted to one, is far better if it happens within one’s own person that if it is objectified without. Then the lower ego will have to play this role. Only when one is beginning to find one’s own way to the inner reality and feel its support, only when one is lessening one’s dependence on some other human being (call one a professor or what you like), can it be truly said that one is a disciple of the Holy Spirit itself—not some particular being’s disciple. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22

Fortune is Mistress and Foreknowledge of Nothing Sure for the God Who Threw You Down Sustain You Now!

July 12, 2019 12:09 am

Capture She never loved you, you know. Not in the way that I loved you, and the way that I loved us both. I knew this! I understood it! And I believed I would gather you to me and hold you. And time would open to us, and we would be the teachers of one another. All the things that gave you happiness would give me happiness; and I would be the protector of your pain. My power would be your power. My strength the same. However, you are dead inside to me, you are cold and beyond my reach! It is as if I am not here, beside you. And not being here with you, I have the dreadful feeling that I do not exist at all. And you are as cold and distant from me as those strange modern paintings of lines and hard forms that I cannot love or comprehend, as alien as those hard mechanical sculptures of this age which have no human form. When I am near you, I shudder. I look into your eyes and my reflection is not there. A crucial problem is the distinction between experience and what the younger generation calls mere thinking or mere words. This is particularly important for us here since historically experience has also been set in opposition to innocence. A person who buys a BMW is a consumer, whereas an auto science engineer works on cars and is experienced in the mechanical function of them. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

Experience is set over against ideas. Existentialism, for example, is often mistaken for a denial of thinking; and new adherents are often surprised when they read Sartre and Tillich to find that these existentialists are thinkers and logicians of great power. Experience puts the accent on action, living out something, or feeling it as a person tastes apple in one’s mouth. By experiencing something, we let its meaning permeate through us on all levels: feeling, acting, thinking, and, ultimately, deciding, since decision is the act of putting one’s total self on the line. The passion for experience is an endeavor to include more of the self in the picture; one experiences as a totality. Experience is set over against any partial view of beings. Behaviorism, for example, is certainly a part of experience, but when behaviorism is turned into a total way of understanding beings and philosophy of life—which amounts to intellectual naivete—it becomes destructive. One can, and ought, to reflect on experience. This is not only gives power to thinking but also communicates being. In my education the most important and engulfing experience was the lectures of Paul Tillich. Paul Tillich, a German and a scholar of the first order, believed in lecturing. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

However, Paul Tillich was a thinker of great logical ability which he did not hesitate to use. Thus every lecture was an expression of Paul Tillich’s being, and it awakened my being. It became my ideal of what a lecture out to do. It is arbitrary and confusing to say that reflection is also part of experience; we must keep the thinking function in its own right. The error is in using experience as a way to shut out thinking or in using immediate experience to evade the implications of history. The younger generation is right in its attack on mere thought, mere words, and so on; but it makes the same error when, under the guise of experiencing life, it seizes on mere feelings, mere actions, or any other partial function of being. The experience then becomes intellectual laziness, an excuse for sloppiness of execution. Culture is a result of communication between beings, a slow building process, a hard-won gain, that takes tens of thousands of years. In it, communication and conceptual thought go together: one implies and assists the other. Culture can die even though beings survive, and that is what threatens us today, because the growth, the expansion of this immense body of cumulative knowledge requires brains, books and traditions. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

Culture is not something that soars over being’s heads. It is living beings and spiritual beings themselves. Therefore, the noble-savage delusion can do enormous harm. This noble savage would have been a cretin at best. Young people who wish to cancel out everything and start over had best realize that this means going back before the Stone Age to Cro-Magnon beings. Traditional languages take thousands of years to evolve. Language can be lost in a few generations. In our own day it is already becoming impoverished, and, as a result, so is the faculty for logical expression. In a periods like ours, when concepts become emptied of being, there is an understandable tendency to throw out conceptual thinking. However, there is no authentic experience without a concept, and there is no vital concept without experience. The concept gives form to the experience; but the experience has to be present to give content and vitality to the concept. Written in haunting verse, the Old Testament story of Job tells of an analogous quest for solace in an unconsoling Universe. Job’s answer to this sorrowful lot is to renew his dialogue with God. However, it is not Job’s humility alone that makes this drama substantive from an existential view, it is the way in which he becomes humble; for instance, through deliberation, struggle, choice. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

Job’s peers, on the other hand, reveal themselves to be either prideful toward or blindly accepting of God’s demands. One of the most valuable philosophical character qualities is balance. Therefore the student should not be willing to submit oneself to complete authoritarianism and thus sacrifice one’s capacity for independent thinking, nor on the other hand should one be willing to throw away all the fruits of other being’s thought and experience and dispense with the service of a guide altogether. One should hold a wise balance between these two extremes. I will humbly bow before the revelation of a superior truth and submissively study one’s teachings, but I will not regard that as sufficient reason to abandon the free, full, and autonomous growth which I am making. For only if such growth remains as natural as a flower’s and is not artificially shaped by another being, can I fulfill the true law of my being. The young want and ought to have gurus and doctrines. The adult should learn to discriminate for themselves, collect their own doctrines from a wide field, and become their own teachers. However, in this matter of understanding life, one does not become adult and acquire a sense of responsibility precisely at twenty-one. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

Authority and individuality need not content with one another in a being’s mind. What happens to the worker? In industry the person becomes an economic atom that dances to the tune of atomistic management. Your place is just here, you will sit in this fashion, your arms will move x inches in a course of y radius and the time of movement will be .000 minutes. Work is becoming more repetitive and thoughtless as the planners, the micromotionists, and the scientific managers further strip the worker of one’s right to think and move freely. Life is being denied; need to control, creativeness, curiosity, and independent thought are being baulked, and the rest, the inevitable result, is flight or fight on the part of the worker, apathy or destructiveness, psychic regression. The of the manager is also one of alienation. It is true, one manages the whole and not a part, but one too is alienated from one’s product as something concrete and useful. One’s aim is to employ profitably the capital invested by others, although in comparison with the older types of owner-manager, modern management is much less interested in the amount of profit to be paid out as dividend to the stockholder than it is in the efficient operation and expansion of the enterprise. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

Characteristically, within management those in charge of labor relations and of sales—that is, of human manipulation—gain, relatively speaking, an increasing importance in comparison with those in charge of the technical aspects of production. The manager, like the workers, like everybody, deals with impersonal giants: with the giant competitive enterprise; with the giant national and World market; with the giant consumer, who has to be coaxed and manipulated; with the giant unions, and the government. All of these giants have their own lives, as it were. They determine the activity of the manager and they direct the activity of the worker and clerk. The problem of the manager opens up one of the most significant phenomena in an alienated culture, that of bureaucratization. Both big business and government administrations are conducted by a bureaucracy. Bureaucrats are specialists in the administration of things and of beings. Due to the bigness of the apparatus to be administered, and the resulting abstractification, the bureaucrats’ relationship to the people is one of complete alienation. They, the people to be administered, are objects whom the bureaucrats consider neither with love nor with hate, but completely impersonally; the manager-bureaucrat must not feel, as far as one’s professional activity is concerned; one must manipulate people as through they were figures, or things. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

Since the vastness of the organization and the extreme division of labor prevents any single individual from seeing the whole, since there is no organic, spontaneous co-operation between the various individuals or groups within the industry, the managing bureaucrats are necessary; without them the enterprise would collapse in a short time, since nobody would know the secret which makes it function. Bureaucrats are as indispensable as the tons of paper consumed under their leadership. Just because everybody senses, with a feeling of powerlessness, the vital role of the bureaucrats, they are given an almost godlike respect. If it were not for the bureaucrats, people feel, everything would go to pieces, and we would starve. Whereas, in the medieval World, the leaders were considered representatives of a God-intended order, in modern capitalism the role of the bureaucrat is hardly less sacred—since one is necessary for the survival of the whole. The bureaucrat related oneself to the World as a mere object of one’s activity. It is interesting to note that the spirit of bureaucracy has entered not only business and government administration, but also trade unions and great democratic socialist parties in England, Germany, and France. In Russia, too, the bureaucratic managers and their alienated spirit have conquered the country. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

Russia could perhaps exist without terror—if certain conditions were given—but it could not exist without the system of total bureaucratization—that is alienation. What is the attitude of the owner of the enterprise, the capitalist? The small business person seems to be in the same position as one’s predecessor a hundred years ago. One owns and directs one’s small enterprise, one is in touch with the whole commercial or industrial activity, and in personal contact with one’s employers and workers. However, living in an alienated World in all other economic and social aspects, and furthermore being more under the constant pressure of bigger competitors, one is by no means as free as one’s grandparents were in the same business. However, what matters more and more in contemporary economy is big business, the large corporation. And the attitude of the owner of the big corporation to one’s property is one of almost complete alienation. One’s ownership consists in a piece of paper, representing a certain fluctuating amount of money; one has no responsibility for the enterprise and no concrete relationship to it in anyway. Every era stages its own unique dramatization of the struggle to be free. What happens when one discovers that one is not all that one wished or hoped to be, when one discovers one’s limits, destiny, or mortality? #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

When dreams fail to come true for some, they wonder around like a befuddled alcoholic. All about them their life is breaking down (the plague), any in many cases they have not a clue as to why or how. Many people have to be induced to face their (offensive) impulses, come to terms with them, and reappropriate them into something salutary in their lives, something redemptive. This is considered the last stage of therapy, and it is usually the time when people understand their sense of guilt is overblown, and that one has the ability to respond to rather than merely react against this sense of guilt, and that the guilt and their reactions to it open up new possibilities for one—to understand passion, for example or the meaning of love. The only issue that needs to be addressed is if one is willing to recognize and admit what they have done. The tragic issue is that of seeking truth about oneself; it is the tragic drama of a person’s passionate relation to truth. In many cases, the tragic flaw some beings have is their wrath against their own reality. When individuals can come to terms with reality, thereupon proceeds a gripping and powerful unfolding step by step in the process of unveiling self-knowledge, which is an unfolding often replete with rage at the truth and those who are its bearers, and all the others aspects of our struggle against recognition of our own reality. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

Mental blindness symbolizes the fact that one can more insightfully grasp inner reality about beings—gain insight if one is not distracted by the impingement of external details. The whole gamut of reactions like resistance and projection are usually displayed by people who are coming to terms with mistakes they have made, and generally they tend to fight more violently against the truth the closer they get to it. One, however, must still adhere to their resolve to face the truth, wherever it may lead, whatever it may lead. This can lead to a lot of anxiety, because many people fear if they admit they made or mistake, have to come to terms with their guilt that they will face ostracism, the terrible fate of being exiled by one’s group. Many people symbolically castrate themselves or permit themselves to be castrated because of the fear of being exiled is one does not. They renounce their power and conform under the great threat and peril of ostracism. It would be wise to pause to contemplate one’s problems and find some meaning in these horrible experiences one has endured. Usually there is very little action in this drama, but it is recommended that people pray about their tragic suffering and what they have learned from it. By viewing the struggle, the truth about oneself, we learn we must indeed go on and reconcile the ultimate meaning in our lives. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

However, best take life easily. Guilt is the difficult problem of the relation of ethical responsibility to self-consciousness. Is a being guilty if the act was unpremeditated, done unknowingly? Well, in probing these old debates, we come to recognize what is important is responsibility, not guilt. Before the law—before God—we must accept and bear our responsibility. However, the delicate and subtle interplay or conscious and unconscious factors make legalistic or pharisaic imputation of guilt inaccurate and wrong. The problem of guilt is not within the act but within the heart. “And I did cry unto this people, but it was in vain; and they did not realize that it was the Lord that had spared them, and granted unto them a chance for repentance. And behold they did harden their hearts against the Lord their God,” reports Mormon 3.3. Therefore, we must act thoroughly in accord with a mortal order which in our own experience will enable us to understand that if we do not repent that we will be punished, condemning ourselves to the merciless justice which is soon to descend. Modern existential psychotherapist emphasize that because of this interplay of conscious and unconscious factors in guilt and the impossibility of legalistic blame, we are forced into an acceptance of the universal human situation. We then recognize the participation of every one of us in being’s inhumanity to other living beings. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

Another theme in our lives is the power to impart grace—now that we have suffered through our terrible experiences and come to terms with them, showing that we are endowed with grace is an advantage of your race. This will make people realize that your presence, as you say, is a great blessing. This capacity to impart grace is connected with the maturity and other emotional spiritual qualities which result from one’s courageous confronting of one’s experiences. One soul, I think, can often make atonement for any others, if it be devoted. And one word frees us of al the weight and pain of life: That is love. This does not mean at all love as the absence of aggression or the strong affects of anger. Love only those you choose to love. Compassion limits even the power of God. The love you show to others, and the love they show to you during your hardships, and blind wanderings is the kind of love God chooses to bless. However, maturity is not a renouncing of passion to come to terms with society, not a learning to live in accord with the reality of civilization. It is our reconciliation with ourselves, with the special people we love, and the with transcendent meaning of our lives. “And my heart did sorrow because of this the great calamity of my people, because of their wickedness and their abominations,” reports Mormon 2.27. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

It would be sheer arrogance were it not mere ignorance to believe that because we can go beyond the limited ego, therefore we can go beyond the divine soul and encompass the World-Mind itself in all its entirety. No mortal may penetrate the mystery of the ultimate mind in its own nature—which means in this static inactive being. The Godhead is not only beyond human conception but also beyond mystic perception. However, Mind in its active dynamic state, that is, the World-Mind, and rather its ray in us called the Overself, is within range of human perception, communion, and even union. It is this that the mystic really finds when one believes that one has found God. This condition is commonly said to be nothing less than union with God. What is really attained is the higher self, the ray of the divine Sun reflected in beings, the immortal soul in fact—God himself being forever utterly beyond being’s finite capacity to comprehend. However, the mystical experience is an authentic one and the conflict between interpretations does not dissolve its authenticity. This brings into awareness the repressed, unconscious, archaic urges, longings, dreads, and other psychic content, and reveals new goals, new ethical insights and possibilities. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

The World-Mind is a breaking through of greater meaning which was not present before. It presents a way of working out problems on a higher level of integration and is a progressive function. When we access our soul, we are then able to project harmony into ethical and other forms of meaning in the outside World. The soul acts as a means of discovery, it is a procreative revealing of structure in our relation to nature and to our own existence. The soul is educative. By drawing out inner reality, it allows us to experience greater reality in the outside World. The soul also discovers for us a new reality as well. The soul is a road to universals beyond one’s concrete experience. It is only on the basis of such a faith that the individual can genuinely accept and overcome earlier infantile deprivations without continuing to harbor resentment all through one’s life. In this sense, the soul helps us accept our past, and we then find it opens before us our future. There are infinite subtleties in this casting out of remorse. Every individual, certainly every patient, needs to make the journey in his and her own unique way. An accompanying process all along the way will be the transforming of one’s neurotic guilt into normal, existential guilt. And both forms of anxiety can be used constructively as a broadening consciousness and sensitivity. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

This journey is made through the understanding and confronting of who we are, which is also linked with archaic, regressive stereotypes, but also connected to an integrative, normative, and progressive aspect as well. We exist always in utter dependence on the Universal Mind. Beings and God may meet and mingle in one’s periods of supreme exaltation, one may feel the sacred presence within oneself to the utmost degree, but one does not thereby abolish all the distinction between them absolutely. For one arrives at the knowledge of the timeless spaceless divine infinitude after a process of graded personal effort, whereas the World-Mind’s knowledge of itself has forever been what it was is and shall be, above all process and beyond all efforts. God, the World-Mind, knows all things is an eternal present at once. No mystic has ever claimed, no mystic has ever dared to claim, such total knowledge. Most mystics have, however, claimed union with God. If this be true, then quite clearly that have had only a fragmentary, not full union. Philosophy, being more precise in its statements, avers that they have really achieved union not with God, but with something Godlike—the soul. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

Could I have Used My Tongue I Would Not Have Struck Him—I Could Say it Only with a Blow!

July 5, 2019 1:44 am

This was something I did not wish to hear in particular. Babette had died young, insane, restrained finally from wandering towards the ruins of Pointe du Lac, insisting she had seen the devil there and must find him; I had heard of it in wisps of gossip. And then came the funeral notices. I had thought occasionally of going to here, of trying some way to rectify what I had done; and other time I thought it would all heal itself; and in my new life, I had grown far from the attachment I had felt for her or for any mortal. And I watched the tragedy finally as one might from a theater balcony, moved from time to time, but never sufficiently to jump the railing and join the players on the stage. Isolation from nature is not just a matter of living in cities; even more important it involves a momentous change in a being’s outlook on the World. People do not simply coexist with nature; they search for meaning in it. For this they long depend on myth and religion. Anthropologists teach us that while there is extreme variation in a person’s religious experiences, primitive myths and the great ethical religions of the East and West are alike in their integrative functions; that is, they explain and, in their rituals, support a basic solidarity of person and person, and of being and nature. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

It matters not whether the religionist’s view of nature and society is sympathetic or unsympathetic, comforting or frightening, or whether one’s faith is emotional or rational. All religious beliefs known to beings help create and sustain bonds between one and the external World of other beings and of nature. However, if faith weakens or is destroyed in the onslaught of science and secularism, beings are truly alone. The problem with beings today is the opposite to that of beings in the comparatively stable periods of those great co-ordinating mythologies which now are known as lies. Then all meaning was in the group, in the great anonymous forms, none in the self-expressive individual; today on meaning is in the group—none in the World; all is in the individual. However, one does not know toward what one moves. One does not know by what one is propelled. Not the animal World, not the plant World, not the miracle of the spheres, but being one’s self is now the crucial mystery. Beings are that alien presence with whom the forces of egoism must come to terms, through whom the ego is to be crucified and resurrected, and in whose image society is to be reformed. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

However, if the decline of the mythologically instructed community has furthered the alienation of modern beings, a liberating process has also taken place; and spiritual isolation is part of the price paid for many new-found knowledge and power. The loss of religion may mean less psychological security but it has also meant—since it accompanied—a great social and economic revolution. The Protestantism, in its attack against the power, strict and rigid doctrines, and the ritual of the universal church, helped to free beings from Worldly activities; and provided moral support for rising capitalism. Great works resulted. However, since Protestantism made beings face God alone, without the community of the medieval church, and stressed the fundamental evil and powerlessness of beings, a great price was paid for that freedom. That price is brilliantly described as a new and terrible isolation which was accentuated by capitalism. For what Protestantism had started to do in freeing beings spiritually, capitalism continued to do in other spheres. However, as the same time it made the individual even more alone and isolated and intensified one’s feelings of insignificance. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Today we live in an increasingly secularized society and religious faith is less than ever before a motivating force and an explanation of the World around us. Our culture is perhaps the first completely secularized culture in human history. We have shoved away awareness of and concern with the fundamental problems of human existence. We are not concerned with the meaning of life. What then of claims, particularly in the United States, that we are witnessing a revival of religious faith? Is this at best a spurious revival, in which churches of all denominations resemble social clubs, and religion itself is secularized? It is only too evident that the religiousness characteristic of American today is very often a religiousness without religion, a religiousness with almost any kind of content or none, a way of sociability or belonging rather than a way of reorienting life to God. It is thus frequently a religious without serious commitment, without real inner conviction, without genuine existential decision. What should reach down to the core of existence, shattering and renewing, merely skims the surface of life, and yet succeeds in generating the sincere feeling of being religious. Religion thus becomes a kind of protection the self throws up against the radical demand of faith. If so, is the weakening of traditional faith and the apparent search for a social rather than a spiritual community in the church simply another measure of alienation? #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

We now have a view of beings divorced from nature, bereft of their religion, isolated in their community, chained to monotonous work. It is appropriate at this point to consider our evolving mass society, its culture, and its politics. One view of alienation that has gained wide currency in our time, particularly among critics of popular democracy, is a picture of beings crushed by mass society. First voiced more than one hundred and seventy years ago by such gloomy prophets of democracy’s leveling effect as Kierkegaard and Tocqueville, both of whom saw serious threats to individualism in the tyranny of the multitude, it now finds expression in the conservative view that the mass crushed beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Many people as members of a mass are no longer one’s isolated self. The individual has merged in the mass, to become something other than one is when one stands alone. On the other hand in the mass the individual becomes an isolated atom whose individual craving to exist has been sacrificed, since the fiction of a general equality prevails. At the outset, it is important to distinguish between mass society and mass culture: while closely related, they should not be confused. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

A mass society is one in which great numbers of people are recruited and organized for political purposes, or, particularly in the United States, for common exposure to far-reaching techniques of communication and exposure to far-reaching techniques of communication and for artificially stimulated patterns of consumption. The mass culture is the communications system that has developed during the past century (another technological revolution) for transmitting orders, messages, appeals, entertainment, information from the leaders to the led. When we talk about mass society, therefore, we do not simply mean the communications media, although they have played a vital part in the rise of that society. The media may not be neutral instruments, but what is alienating about them is the functions they perform. Historically, the mass society resulted from the rapid increase in the size of the electorate in Western Europe and America after the turn of the century. Extension of suffrage to the working class who had fought for it, led in turn to the rise of mass political parties (chiefly in Europe) and also to new techniques of communication: mass circulation newspapers, film, radio, and television. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

With all these various forms of media at hand, mass propaganda became a powerful weapon by the end of World War I. Since then dictatorships and advertisers have developed mass persuasion into art and their new favorite medium is the news, for it is supposed to report the truth and facts, but is full of myths, lies, and evil. It is no coincidence that the Nazis acknowledged their debt to American advertising techniques, for in the United States the various media have been exploited chiefly by advertisers (on an unprecedented scale) and by commercial entertainment interests. It is these interests which have built the mass culture as we know it; and it is they who have provided that culture with its core values; it is they who administer what Veblen called “laughing gas” to an unsuspecting audience. The results of these developments are well known. In politics, the sheer numbers of people involved tend to engulf the individual, whether one dissents from majority opinion and taste, or whether one merely conforms helplessly with the overwhelming majority. It was the weight of numbers crushing the individual that disturbed early critics of mass democracy, such as Tocqueville and Bryce. However, the fatalism of the multitude or mass apathy stems not just from numbers; it comes also from the individual citizen’s feeling of powerlessness in an increasingly complex World. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

Individuals in the mass societies of the twenty first century are to an ever increasing extent involved in public affairs; it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore them. However, ordinary individuals have ever less the feeling that they can understand or influence the very events upon which their life and happiness [are] known to depend. Many public issues are highly complex; to exercise citizenship intelligently, men and women and others must have an inkling of where their interests are possessed. If they find politics incomprehensible, they will be encouraged to depend on experts and leaders and the fake new media (also known as the propaganda department) to interpret and decide for them. However, as a poet, there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one’s language from corruption. And that is particularly serious now. It is being so quickly corrupted. When it is corrupted, people lose faith in what they hear, and this leads to violence. When an age is in the throes of profound transition, the first thing to disintegrate is the language. This leads directly to the upsurge of violence. Billy Budd, at his trial after he had killed the master-at-arms with his fist, exclaims: “Could I have used my tongue I would not have struck him. I could say it only with a blow.” Not being able to find his tongue (because of his severe stuttering), he could only speak by means of the physical expression of his passion. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

Violence and communication are mutually exclusive. Put simply, you cannot talk with someone as long as one is your enemy, and if you can talk with one that individual ceases to be your enemy. The process is reciprocal. When a person feels violent toward another—in a surge of rage, say, or a hurt pride that demands immediate revenge—the capacity to talk is automatically blocked by neurological mechanisms that release adrenalin and shift the energy to the muscles in primitive preparation for fighting. If the person is of the middle class, one may rapidly pace back and forth until one can control one’s violence enough to put it into words; if one is of the proletariat or ultra-rich, one may simply strike out. Speaking of the origin of power, in infants, the infant has as one’s mightiest tool the cry and smile. The cry is a performance of the oral apparatus, the lips, mouth, throat, cheeks, vocal cords, intercostal muscle and diaphragm. From this cry is evolved a great collection of most powerful tools which beings use in the development of their security with one’s fellow beings. And the smile is a tool to let you know they are happy, safe and enjoying life. I refer to language behavior, operations including words. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

When we consider what makes language possible, we can see the reasons for these phenomena. Language arises from an underlying web of potentiality for understanding, an empathetic bond between people, a shared structure, a capacity to identify with another. This potentiality for understanding is much more than mere words: it implies a state of we-ness, a bond that potentially untied people, the prototype for which are the facts of gestation in the mother’s womb and then the process of birth. If there had been no womb in which we first grew as embryos, language would not be possible; and if there had been no birth, language would not be necessary. From this dialectical bond with others, into and out of which we can move, there has evolved in profound and complex ways over the centuries the capacity for language. The individual is both bound to others and independent from them at the same time. Out of this double nature beings are born the symbols and myths which are the basis of language and serve as a bride over that chasm between human beings to establish the bond again. The bridging function of the symbol can be seen more clearly when we recall that symbol comes from two Greek words which mean “with,” and “to throw.” It translates literally “to draw together.” It pulls together different aspects of experience, such as consciousness and unconsciousness, individual and social, historical past and immediate present. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

The antonym of symbolic is diabolic, “to tear apart.” The devilish functions are thus separating, alienating, breaking relationships, in contrast to bringing together, connecting, uniting. Ancient peoples knew as well as modern ones do of the dangers in the corruption of language. The misuse of language is not only distasteful in itself, but actually harmful to the soul. A strong society depends on common language and concepts, and it is clear to us that many communities in America no longer speak the same language or share the same understanding of what is happening. Since symbols carry a confluence of meanings, they also release great energy. The long hair and hipster-type clothes of the younger generation, for example, are symbols of its opposition to the whole competitive, acquisitive economy of America. Hence Trump and Pelosi, and some other people in this country react with such fury to this form of hair and bluejeans. The hair and the jeans are harmless enough in themselves, but as symbols of the reaction of youth against the values which the president and speaker of the house identify with America, they are powerful indeed. When the bond between human beings is destroyed—for instance, when the possibilities for communication break down—agression and violence occur, as we have seen in many recent demonstrations. Thus distrust of language on one side and aggression and violence on the other arise out of the same situation. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

The timelessness of existential psychology cannot be overstated today; for today so many are perplexed. The blows to traditional Worldviews (first religion, then science, in marriage and the family and gender roles, and politics and economics) in our century have been mind-boggling and have exceeded the human capacity to adapt. After 2001, it is no longer possible in many quarters to expect salvation, purity, or truth from any of our traditional Worldviews, and many of us are debilitated as a result. Our maladies divide into two basic camps: those which are characterized by retreat from these bewildering realities (as in depressive and obsessive syndromes), and those which are typified by exploitation of them (as in sociopathic and narcissistic profiles). Existential psychology, on the other hand, may be in a unique position to address these disquieting syndromes—because it evolved during the crises that precipitated them. The belief is that in the World a being’s activities are usually, and mostly devoted to the benefit of oneself and the sustenance of one’s family. The World-Mind cannot be separated from any point of the World. It is present in every point, every creature, now, at this very moment. There is no need for anyone to think oneself cut off or apart or remote from this divine source of one’s being. This is just as true in one’s sorrowful hours as in one’s joyful ones. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

It is because of the World-Mind supports beings, gives one consciousness and energy, that one is a sharer in immortal, eternal, and divine existence. If there were any part of the Universe, or any thing in the Universe, or any creature in the Universe, without God in its essence, then the Universe could not have been manifested by God. The essential self of beings must be divine. How—people ask—can the eternal You be at the same time exclusive and inclusive? How is it possible for being’s You-relationship to God, which requires our unconditional turning toward God, without any distraction, nevertheless to embrace all the other I-You relations of this being and to bring them, as it were, to God? Note that the question is not about God but only about our relationship to him. And yet in order to be able to answer, I have to speak of him. For our relationship to him is as supra-contradictory as it is because he is as supra-contradictory as he is. Of course, we shall speak only of what God is in his relationship to human being. And even that can be said only in a paradox; or more precisely, by using a concept paradoxically; or still more precisely, by means of a paradoxical combination of a nominal concept of the concept. The insistence on this contradiction must give way to the insight of that thus, and only thus, the indispensable designation of this object by this concept can be justified. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

The content of the concept undergoes a revolutionary transformation and expansion, but that is true of every concept that, impelled by the actuality of faith, we take from the realm of immanence and apply to transcendence. The designation of God as a person is indispensable for all who, like myself, do not mean a principle when they say “God,” although many occasionally “Being” with God, and who, like myself, do not mean an idea when they say “God,” although philosophers like Plato could at times take him for one—all who, like myself, mean by “God” him that, whatever else he may be in addition, enters into a direct relationship to us human beings (human gods) through creative, revelatory, and redemptive acts, and thus makes it possible for us to enter into a direct relationship to him. This ground and meaning of our existence establishes each time a mutuality of the kind that can obtain only between persons. The concept of personhood is, of course, utterly incapable of describing the nature of God; but it is permitted and necessary to say that God is also a person. If for once I were to translate what I mean into the language of a philosopher, I should have to say that God’s infinitely many attributes we human beings know not two, but three: in addition to spiritlikeness—the source of what we call spirit—and naturelikeness, exemplified by what we know as nature, also thirdly the attribute of personlikeness. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

From this last attribute of personlikeness, I should then derive my own and all being’s spirit and being nature. And only this this third attribute, personlikeness, could then be said to be known directly in its quality as an attribute. However, now the contradiction appears, appealing to the familiar content of the conception of a person. A person, it says, is by definition an independent individual and yet also relativized by the plurality of other independent individuals; and this, of course, could not be said of God. This contradiction is met by the paradoxical designation of God as the absolute person, that is one that cannot be relativized. It is as the absolute person that God enters into the direct relationship to us. The contradiction must give way to this higher insight. Now we may say that God carries his absoluteness into his relationship with all beings. Hence the being who turns toward God need not turn one’s back on any other I-You relationship: quite legitimately one brings them all to God and allows the to become transfigured in the countenance of God. One should beware altogether of understanding the conversation with God—the conversation of which I had to speak of in this essay—as something that occurs merely apart from or above the everyday. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

God’s address to individuals penetrated the events in all our lives and all the events in the World around us, everything biographical and everything historical, and turns it into instruction, into demands for you and me. Event upon event, situation upon situation is enabled and empowered by this personal language to call upon the human person to endure and decide. Often we think that there is noting to be heard as if we had not long ago plugged wax into our own ears. The existence of mutuality between God and mortals cannot be proved any more than the existence of God. Anyone who dares nevertheless to speak of it bears witness and invokes the witness of those whom one addresses—present or future witness. When a business man spoke to me about timing he thought of what he had done and what he would do. He betrayed the pride of a being who knows the right hour for one’s actions, who was successful in one’s timing, who felt as the master of one’s destiny, as the creator of new things, as the conqueror of situations. This certainty is not the same mood of the Preacher. Even if the Preacher points to the need of right timing he does not give up his great “All is vanity.” You must do it, you must grasp the right moment, but ultimately it does not matter. The end is the same for the wise and the fool, for one who toils and for one who enjoys oneself, the end is even the same for human beings and animals. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

The Preacher is first of all conscious that he is timed; and he points to our timing as a secondary matter. The modern business man is first of all conscious that he has to time, and only vaguely realizes that he is timed. Of course, he is also aware that he had not produced the right time, that he is dependent on it, that he may miss it in his calculation and actions. He knows that there is a limit to his timing, that there are economic forces stronger than he, that he also is subject to a final destiny which ends all his planning. He is aware of it, but he disregards it when he plans and acts. Quite different is the Preacher. He starts his enumeration of things that are timed with birth and death. They are beyond human timing. They are the signposts which cannot be trespassed. We cannot time them and all out timing is limited by them. This is the reason why in the beginning of our modern era death and sin and hell were removed from the public consciousness. While in the Middle Ages every room, every street, and, more important every heart and every mind were filled with symbols of the end, of death, it has been today a matter of bad taste even to mention death. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

The modern being feels that the awareness of the end disturbs and weakens their power of timing. They have, instead of the threatening symbol of death, the clock in every room, on every street, and, more important, in one’s mind and in one’s nerves. There is something mysterious about the clock. It determines or daily timing. Without it we could not plan for the next hour, we could not time any of our activities. However, the clock also reminds us that that fact that we are timed. It indicates the rush of our time towards it. The voice of the clock has reminded many people of the fact that they are timed. And this timing encourages people to live righteously, especially as they age, and before they meet the creator who will judge them, but as we have removed from society and consciousness the thought of sin, death, and hell, many evil people no longer feel they need to repent or answer to God because they believe they are god. In an old German night-watchman’s street song every hour is announced with a special reminder. Of midnight it says: “Twelve—that is the goal of time, give us, O God, eternity.” Time is very important. “And they all cried with one voice, saying: Yea, we believe all the words which thou hast spoken unto us; and also, we know of their surety and truth, because of the Spirit of the Lord Omnipotent, which has wrought a mighty change in us, or in our hearts, that we have no more disposition to do evil, but to do good continually,” reports Mosiah 5.2. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

A Passionate Eagerness to Find God is a Necessary Basis for all the Other Qualifications in its Purist

June 30, 2019 1:28 am

We moved slowly across the dark court, my distress almost unbearable. People entering the labor market today not only face the prospect of disorderly work careers, but also of work for no significant reason beyond consumption. Most people no longer produce useful things; they do make wasted and wasteful commodities and services. (In the Untied States today there are actually more people employed in providing services than in the production of goods.) The impact of these conditions on rising generations is that economically and vocationally, a very large proportion of the young people are in a more drastic plight than anything so far mentioned. In our society as it is, there are not enough worthy jobs. However, is our society, being as it is, were run more efficiently and soberly, for a majority there would soon not be any jobs at all. There is at present nearly full employment and there may be for some years, yet a vast number of young people are rationally unemployable, useless. Useless because as crafts and craftsmanship have declined, the job opportunities open to them have increasingly become variations on the theme of boondoggling—whether they become organized people or, more likely, semi-skilled retail operatives. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

In any case, the work available to them in unlikely to ennoble them or their society. It is hard to grow up when there is not enough work to sustain a household. Will it be any easier to grow up in the future? As the age of automation is underway, promising untold wealth and leisure, the forces separating humans from the means and end of work will inevitably grow stronger. Indeed, as far as conditions of work are concerned, the submission of workers to machines will be complete. Today, a person can stop a machine or wreck it: one has the remnants of power over it. However, with automation that power will be lost for good, expect perhaps for a small elite of engineers who will be busy designing and tending the machines of the future. Modern mortals have already depersonalized themselves so effectively that they are no longer human enough to stand up to their machines. Looking ahead, by the perfection of the automaton mortal will become completely alienated from their World and reduced to nullity—the kingdom and the power and the glory now belong to the machine. Everyone expects to witness scientific advance made in these modern times, but only a few have the mental courage to expect spiritual advances let alone seek it. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

Fantasy? Already the uncanny power of machines has entered into the delusions that mark psychotic disturbances. In time past, delusions took either human or superhuman forms; but today what is so new in the hopes and fears of the machine age are that the savior and destroyer are no longer clothed in the image of mortals; no longer are the figure that we imagine can save and destroy us direct projections of our human experiences. What we not hope will save us, and what in our delusions we fear will destroy us, is something that no longer has human qualities. That device or projection is the machine, and not surprisingly psychoanalysts refer to a characteristic delusion, the influencing machine, a device which some insane persons believe exerts an extraordinary and evil power over them against their will. The psychotic person ends up feeling controlled by mechanical devices that no longer resemble anything human or even animal-like. Thus modern mortals, when one is haunted, whether sane or profoundly disturbed, is no longer haunted by other mortals or grandiose projections of mortals, but by machines like Alexa smart home devices, robots replacing TV News anchors, self-check out in the supermarket, and driverless cars. This, while at the same time relying for one’s protection or salvation on machines. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

If we have placed such great stress on our machine age an on the conditions and purposes of work, it is not because we accept the metaphysical view that mortal’s self is most crucially expressed in work-activity. Rather, it is because of the fundamental break in our society between work and other activities. This break has had enormous consequences. Mortals are dehumanized not only by the work situation but also by the ends for which our society uses work, chiefly consumption of its own sake. As capitalism began to accumulate greater surpluses of wealth (especially for those on top) the unproductive acquisition and accumulation of goods became the primary means of achieving social status in the community. Ownership has grown into a human institution on grounds unrelated to the subsistence minimum. The dominant incentive was from the outset the invidious distinction attaching to wealth, and, save temporarily and by exception, no other motive has usurped the primacy at any later stage of the development. Under the regime of individual ownership the most available means of visibly achieving a purpose is that afforded by the acquisition and accumulation of goods; and as the self-regarding antithesis between mortal and mortal reaches fuller consciousness, the prosperity for achievement—the instinct of workmanship—tend more and more to shape itself into a straining to excel other in pecuniary achievement. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

If consumption then becomes conspicuous it was become in an increasingly heterogeneous and differentiated society there is no other ready means of achieving status expect by spending money and acquiring goods. However, such consumption is essentially wasteful and in conflict with what is considered a universal trait in mortals, the instinct of workmanship. The industrial revolution replaced all workmanship with labor and the result has been that the things of the modern World have becomes labor products whose natural fate is to be consumed, instead of work products which are there to be used. The process of consumption, reaching its highest form in the United State, is alienating in still another way. We are surrounded by things whose nature and origin we know nothing. We consume, as we produce, without any concrete relatedness to the objects with which we deal. Moreover, the volume of consumption is determined to a large extent by the artificial stimulants of a giant advertising industry; and if consumers learn to manipulate things, they in turn manipulated by the propagandist of commerce. The strategy of planned obsolescence—by which things are made to wear out quickly and then be replaced—may stimulate the economy, but it can hardly be said to serve human needs. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

Working chiefly to consume, consuming to achieve status, accumulating things that have no meaning, wasting on a gigantic scale—these are the conditions in which we live. The result is a wasteland of junk and of human aspirations. However, what other important forces shape the architecture of our lives? We have to be prepared with rational plans and sensible blueprints to guide progressions of seemingly orderly experiences in the direction of wise decisions. We must look at the very structure of human existence for keys to unlock the resources human beings need to confront the recurring cries in our lives. Those keys are fabricated in the mold of phenomenology. Understanding comes through sharing the perspective of the experiencing person, entering into the life space of the tenant, so to speak, rather than identifying with the authoritative analysis of the landlord. Phenomenology created a subjective, descriptive context for beginning to make sense of the vicissitudes of being and becoming. Its tower of understanding stands alongside the traditional social scientists’ tower of objectivity and quantifiability, deemed essential for erecting a science of prediction and control. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

As psychological science advances models drawn from physics and biology, the phenomenological rush of existentialism is more toward humanities, philosophy, and the arts. The former probes human nature vertically, the latter explores its horizontal connections to illuminate the breadth of humanity. Existential-humanist psychology refuses either to reduce the complexity of human beings to ever more refined variable or to glorify them as masters of their destiny. This approach recognizes that we are all vulnerable to powerful yet subtle situational forces that can bend—and sometimes break—the will of the best and the brightest of us. Interestingly, this view is echoed by social psychologists who contend that social psychology’s major take-home message is that situation exert more powerful influences on our thoughts, feelings, vales, and actions than we acknowledge or dare to recognize. This view does not make us pawns of environmental forces or autumn leaves at the mercy of existential winds. Humans are negotiating continually between realities and illusions, old paths and new destinations, given clouds, constraints and freedoms, calibrations and creations. How are human experiences challenged and charged by the perils and the prizes of every day existence? #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

Obviously, no sweeping answer can be given to this question. Instead of considering nature as a single whole, as we usually do, we must consider its different realms separately. Mortals once tamed animals, and they are still capable o bringing off this strange feat. One draws animal into one’s own sphere and moves them to accept them, a stranger, in an elementary manner and to accede to one’s ways. One obtains from them an often astonishing active response to one’s approach, to one’s address—and on the whole this response is the stronger and more direct, the more one’s relation amounts to a genuine You-saying. Not infrequently animals, like children, see through feigned tenderness. However, outside the tamed circles, too, we occasionally encounter a similar contact between mortals and animals: some mortals have deep down in their being a potential partnership with animals—most often persons who are by no means animalic by nature but rather spiritual. Animals are not twofold, like mortals: the twofoldness of the basic words I-You and I-It is alien to them although they can both turn toward another being and contemplate objects. We may say that in them twofoldness is latent. In the perspective of our You-saying to animas, we may call this sphere the threshold of mutuality. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

It is altogether different with those realms of nature which lack the spontaneity that we share with animals. It is part of our concept of the plant that it cannot react to our actions upon it, that it cannot reply. Yet this does not mean that we meet with no reciprocity at all in this sphere. We find here not the deed of posture of an individual being but a reciprocity of being itself—a reciprocity that has nothing expect being. The living wholeness and unity of a tree that denies itself to the eye, not matter how keen, of anyone who merely investigates, while it manifest to those who say You, is present when they are present: they grant the tree the opportunity to manifest it, and now the tree that had being manifest it. Our habits of thought make it difficult for us to see that in such cases something is awakened by our attitude and flashes toward us from which has being. What matters in this sphere is that we should do justice with an open mind to the actuality that opens up before us. This huge sphere that reaches from the stones to the stars I should like to designate as the prethreshold, meaning the step that comes before the threshold. #RandolpHarris 9 of 18

The notion that one who marries, has children, lives across the same road, and catches the commuter’s train is unfit to receive the grace of God, whereas a mortal who wear a priest’s dress or a monk’s robe is alone fit, is one of those idea sedulously fostered by priests and monks themselves. The fact is that grace is no respecter of clothes, status, or social activities, that is happens to alight on those whose hearts and minds seek it most, and in the right way; that today Christ is militant, is working inside mortals wherever one may be and whatever garments one wears and however one easily distinguishable by any outer labels, but are easily measurable by their own conscience, in their degree of consciousness. They are not professional exhibitionists eager to display their spirituality, to talk about it and impress other with it. They may be passive in a monastery or in an office—that is not the point. What is going on inside them? There is no special superiority in either of the two conditions of life—the monastic or the householding. Whoever praises the monk’s state as being the highest open to human beings, errs. Whoever praises the householder’s as being the best, also errs. What can right be said is that for certain persons at certain times and under certain circumstances, one or the other state is better. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

For the same person at different times and in different circumstances either may be worse. So it is the setting up of universality, the claiming that one alone is the most spiritual or the mot satisfactory ideal, which is wrong. Each must find the way uniquely ordained for one, and not passively, imitatively, accept the way ordained for another mortal. Although it is true that some have realized the goal while living a normal life in the World, married and active, others have been able to do so only while freed from the World’s ways. It I therefore essential for one to be oneself, an individual, and let one’s own inner voice guide one to the particular path suited on one’s destiny. The common explanation of the contemporary unrest as due to a failure to preserve law and order, the favorite rallying cry of politicians. It illustrates our innocence in two ways. One, that each act of violence or aggression can be dealt with by the tried-and-true method, following the nineteenth-century myth in America, of throwing in more hardware and personnel in the form of police, national guard, and soldiers. The naivete of this is shown by our experience in the Middle East, to continual shock to our own narcissism. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

The second and more important expression of innocence is possessed in the bland identification of law with the particular order that happens to exist at the moment in the society. My order becomes, therefore, right; it is as eternal as the law with which it is coupled; it is God’s will. Law can also be used, when coupled with injustice, as a creative set of principles unfolding continuously toward greater public good. However, law coupled with order, in the shibboleth law and order, becomes regularly a justification to the status quo. And in a transitional age such as ours, the one thing that must, at all costs, be avoided is rigid adherence to the status quo; for that is just what has to be changed and reformed by the transition. The only way to live out a transitional period is with flexibility to adapt to change—and, unfortunately, that is what most people, in their anxiety at the dizzy speed of change, feel they do not have. Emphasis on law and order can be destructive to a person’s self-esteem and self-respect. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

When President proposed a greater effort to get crime off the streets by building a wall along the board of Mexico to halt illegal immigration, he received the largest and loudest ovation of any time in the whole speech; which means that law and order, which is the meaning of Trump’s phrase, appeals tremendously to congressional members of both houses. However, the emphasis on law and order can itself contribute to violence and can be one of the things that makes an ultimate revolution more bloody. Human pride and esteem are offended by a show of force. One of the things that can abet a riot is precisely the lining up of a hundred law enforcement officers on a street. It offends both those who are being protected and those who are protected against; for it makes u all faceless Others.” The bitterness that goes into the phrase law and order often has as one of its sources a reaction formation to one’s own guilt. For example, some may have acquired their money by questionable quasi-legal means, and now they come out as a staunch citizen for law and order to prevent others from taking it away from them. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

In its best sense and by itself, order ought to mean the forms and conventions by which we live and work together; order ideally is freedom from disturbing interruption of peace, physical safety which in turn gives the psychological security for the pursuit of intellectual, emotional and spiritual aims. However, when coupled with law, it implies a rigid clinging to old forms of acting, a prevention of the very changes made necessary by our transitional age. It is primarily the older generation that adheres to law and order so innocently. However, innocence is obviously used by the new generation as well as a way to avoid facing its powerlessness. There are so many absurd aspect of the so-called battle between the generations—youth’s continuous confession of the sins of teachers and parents, the endless blaming of others, the over thirty shibboleth—that one is in danger of overlooking the deeper meaning of the conflict. Now that the younger generation has not plenty of reason for accusing its elders. People inherited from their parents’ generation the experience of a massive intrusion of criminal violence into politics—they learned in high school and in college about concentration and extermination camps, about genocide and torture, about the wholesale slaughter of civilians in war. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

However, does it not confuse the whole picture to make this conflict of youth versus age? What would they have done in their father’s place, given the historical situation in which their fathers were born and working with what they had to use? It is an anti-historical viewpoint to insist that the mere fact of having been born a generation later guarantees any rightness in itself. Furthermore, it is a taking over, in masqueraded form, of one of the least noble of our culture’s myths—the adulation of youth, the falsehood of believing that everything is better in earlier years. However, all our concerns eventually come to an end; they are all finite. The span of our lives many of them have already disappeared and new ones have emerged which also will disappear. Many great concerns of the past have vanished and more will come to an end, sooner or later. The melancholy law of transitoriness governs even our most passionate concerns. The anxiety of the end dwells in the happiness they give. Both the things about which we are concerned and we ourselves come to an end. There will be a moment—and perhaps it is not far away—when we shall no longer be concerned about any of these concerns, when their finitude—of our own end. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

However, we maintain our preliminary concerns as if the were ultimate. And if we try to free ourselves from them, they keep us in their grasp. When young people are pressed for a statement of their values, and one asks what they would make the center of a new World, one is often left with picayune or self-revolving items like never stepping on insects or never throwing away anything made of plastic. This is a blatant use of innocence. We look—often in vain—for a serious, responsible confrontation with the real problems: power, organization in national groups, fidelity in personal life. One feels that the younger generation gets particular gratification out of simply attacking the establishment as such. Is it a reaction-formation to their own unease at the affluence of their parents and to their own guilt at their dependency on their parents for sustenance? However, if for no other reason than that the establishment is dying anyway, this is an uneasy battle. The present college generation was born in an era when practically all mooring post—for instance, in pleasures of the flesh, in marriage, in religion—are threatened or already lost. We have a new morality, most obviously in the areas of pleasures of the flesh, marriage, and the role of woman. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

Every concern is tyrannical and wants our whole heart and our whole mind and our whole strength. Every concern tries to become our ultimate concern, our god. The concern about our work often succeeds in becoming our god, as does the concern about another human being, or about pleasure. The concern about science has succeeded in becoming the god of the whole era in history, the concern about money has become an ever more important god of all. However, these concerns are finite, they conflict with each other, they burden our consciences because we cannot do justice to all of them. We may try to dismiss all concerns and to maintain a cynical unconcern. We determine that nothing shall concern us any more, expect perhaps casually, but certainly not seriously. We try to be unconcerned about ourselves and others, about our work and our pleasures, about necessities and luxuries, about social and political matter, about knowledge and beauty. We may even feel that this unconcern has something heroic about it. And one thing is true: It is the only alternative to having an ultimate concern, Unconcern or ultimate concern—those are the only alternatives. The cynic is concerned, passionately concerned, about one thing, namely, one’s unconcern. This is the inner contradiction of all unconcern. Therefore, there is only one alternative, which is ultimate concern. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

Here we get what cannot fail to be recognized as firsthand, insider’s account of that goal which makes sense of spiritual aspiration and inspires continued rational effort, day by day, toward stable and honest self-realization. Here we see a wisdom nourished, rather than challenged, by facts; a serenity comprehending, rather than at odds with, efficient practicality. Here, one can feel a need to complete enlightenment by a vivid updating, from modern mentalities, of what a mind continually attuned to God is like and offers its society, a convincing testimony that much of what the highest attainment means when it is working inside the human being. Power is not our own and is not human and is using us as its human instrument. We see plenty of evidence that the Universe is not mindless, and therefore there is a Universal Mind related to it—that is to say, related to us, who are parts of the whole. It might well be said that I am connected with God on the one hand, with the World on the other hand, but both connections are highly ingenious inventions. God is literally in me. His “I” makes my “I” possible. My own sense of being is immersed in God’s archetypal thought. The individual mind not only exists within the World-Mind, it is born of the World-Mind. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18 D8zFSZBV4AAWYRj

In Spite of Myself and My General Contempt for His Belief in Reincarnation—Woe Unto the Possessed Who Fancy that they Possess God!

June 18, 2019 9:34 pm

I looked through the bars to the stars overhead, and it seemed to me I was dying in the most absurd and foolish way, among people I did not admire and customs I would have abolished. And yet the seeming sanctity of it all infected me. It caused me to dramatize and to dream and to give in, to see myself at the center of something that possessed its own exalted beauty. Carefully, they shaved all the hair from my chin and upper lip. They trimmed my finger nails. They brushed my hair and put on me the same white robes. And then shielding me on all sides with white veils they passed me out of the house and into a white canopied wagon. As a young man, I held innocence in high esteem. I disliked power, both in theory and practice, and abhorred violence. I came down with tuberculosis in my early thirties, a times when there was still no medication for the disease. For a year and a half I did not know whether I would live or die. As best I could, I tried to do what my doctors instructed me to do. This meant, as I then interpreted it, accepting the program of rest and giving my healing over to others. I could only lie in bed, tracing with my eye patterns of light on the ceiling of my room, waiting for the monthly X-ray which would tell whether the cavity in my lung had enlarged or decreased. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

However, I found, to my moral and intellectual dismay, that the bacilli were taking advantage of my very innocence. This innocence had transformed my helplessness into passivity, which constituted an open invitation to the bacilli to do violence to my body. I saw, too, that the reason I had contracted tuberculosis in the first place was my hopelessness and sense of defeatism. My then present lack of self-affirmation and self-assertion, conveniently rationalized by the innocence, could only lead in one direction. I could see in the apparently innocent patients around me in the sanatorium that passively accepting their powerlessness in face of the disease meant dying. I was becoming ever more desperate. I should have done anything to escape. However, some twenty Druids surrounded the cart and beyond them was a legion of warriors. And the crowd itself went so far back into the trees that I could see no end to it. Darkness was falling quickly, and everywhere torches were being lighted. I could feel the roar of excited voices. The screamed of the condemned grew every more piercing and beseeching. I sat still and tried to deliver my mind from panic. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

If I could not escape, then I would meet these strange ceremonies with some degree of calm, and when it came clear what a sham they were, I would with dignity and righteousness pronounce my judgments loud enough for others to hear them. That would be my last act—the act of the god—and it must be done with authority, or else it would do nothing in the scheme of things. Not until I developed some fight, some sense of personal responsibility for the fact that it was I who had the tuberculous, an assertion of my own will to live, did I make lasting progress. I learned to listen to my body with an inner concentration like prayer, to get guidance as to when to exercise and when to rest. I learned that healing and cure are active processes in which I myself needed to participate. This truth, though experiences by me in my getting well, was not very useful since I could never formulate it. I was later forced to think about it at length, however, when I found my patients in psychoanalysis describing similar experiences. Practically all of them had come for help because they felt they were powerless. They had no effective bridge to the significant people in their lives; they could only remain passive while others (like t.b. bacilli in my analogy did violence to them). #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

This bridge to significant others was never directly confronted by Dr. Freud. Sullivan pointed to it, but had never elaborated on the nature of this bridge. It is, in fact, power. However, it is power analogous to the healing power by which one overcomes tuberculosis, not analogous to the military power of a general on the battlefield or the economic power of the head of a corporation. It was as if my soul would be locked in my body forever. Like it had no chance in natural death to pass into another body or another lifetime. I had, then, to confront my own relationship to power. No longer could I conceal behind my own innocence my envy of those who had power. This, I found, only follows the general procedure in our culture: power is widely coveted and rarely admitted. Generally, those who have power repress their awareness of this fact. And it is the dispossessed in our society, represented by such movements as women’s power and black power, who, wen they are able, force a direct confrontation with the issue. When we join this confrontation, as we obviously must, we find ourselves immediately up against the issue of violence. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

Can violence also have something to do with innocence—or, as I ask, does innocence invite its own murder? This leads us to difficult, if fascinating, questions. We can only agree that Jacob Bronowski’s words (in The Face of Violence) are true: Violence is here, in the World of the sane, and violence is a symptom. I hear it in the headlong weeping of men who have failed. I see it in the terrible dreams of boys whose adolescence repeats all history. As these weeping men and dreaming adolescents, however, become able to actualize their power, they are able, to some extent, to turn their violence to constructive use and their dreams and visions to the social and their own good. I hope to suggest ways not around the problems of power and violence, but through them. To understand power and the sources of violence, we must ask more profound questions than are customary. We must probe the problem of what it means to be a human being. Modern mortals, alienated from nature, from their gods, and from society, in an increasingly mechanized, atomized and depersonalized World, too often are unable to achieve an identity and a relatedness to others. What are the circumstances that have led to this predicament and what are the chances for alleviating it? #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

Ours is a self-conscious age. Perhaps never before in history have mortals been so much a problem themselves. Rocketing through space and on the point of conquering the Heavens, one is fast losing touch with one’s own World. Growing numbers of writers describe people in various ways as “alienated.” What forces have made them so? The past few hundred years have seen major scientific and technological revolutions in half the World, while the other half still plows the Earth with dull sticks. Unparalleled economic growth has occurred side by side with the profoundest human misery; and struggles for freedom and enlightenment side by side with continuing social injustice. Our own age allegedly produced Nazi concentration camps, media cults who are hell bent on confusing people and lying and dividing they nation as they try to take over the government, two catastrophic World wars, and a dream of one World; a nuclear arms race that may put an end to civilization as we know it, and the promise of atoms for peace. There is an independence which gives a mortal special strength for it allows one to possess complete purity of motive. It does not come easily for one has to stay clear of all attempts to organize the truth, of all orthodoxies, groups, factions, parties, and sects which claimed to be united with it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

One may align oneself with no groups. Therefore, one can take up no defined position, no particular program. Is one then a neutral? No and yes. Is one an individualist? Yes and no. Confronted with such mighty opposites—with apocalyptic visions of mass annihilation on the one hand, and on the other with dreams of progress and a vastly better life for increasing numbers of people—no wonder Western mortals feel deeply troubled as they face the immense gulf between one’s finest achievements of hand and brain, and one’s own sorry ineptitude at coping with them; between one’s truly awe-inspiring accomplishments and the utter failure of one’s imagination to accomplishment and the utter failure of one’s imagination to encompass them and give them meaning. Powerless in the face of modern mechanical and social forces, we have reached a point in history where knowledge and tools intended originally to serve mortal now threaten to destroy them. What kind of society is it that loses control over its own tools and creations? Is it one in which the sense of community has become seriously, if not fatally, weakened? The development of nuclear weapons required the splitting of the atom. Is the society that uses such weapons itself split and its members atomized? #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

If so, this splitting process did not take place suddenly, and not just a series of wars and upheavals have brought on the crisis. Indeed, ever since the great technological and political revolutions of the late eighteenth century, with their shattering impact on a rigid social order and their promise of individual freedom, one of the most disturbing phenomena of Western culture has been mortal’s sense of estrangement from the World one one’s self had made or inherited—in a word, mortal’s alienation from oneself and from others. Our present age of pessimism, despair and uncertainty succeeds a quite different earlier period of optimism, hope and certainty—a period when mortals believed in oneself and the work of one’s hands, had faith in the powers of reason and science, trusted their gods, and conceived one’s own capacity for growth as endless and one’s widening horizons limitless. Bold in one’s desires for freedom, equality, social justice and fraternity, one imaged that ignorance alone stood in the way of these desires. However, tumult and violence have unseated these traditional beliefs and values. Knowledge has spread, but it had not abolished war, or fear; nor has it made all mortals family. Instead, mortals find themselves more isolated, anxious and uneasy than ever. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

Only this total independence of all cults, creeds, groups, and organizations can enable one to find the facts as they are, rather than imaginary pictures of the facts. It is to be found in the privacy of your own mind: no cult, group, or church will provide it. Philosophy stresses the need of development’s being individual. Students of other teachings may grow in groups, but not students of philosophy. It is not an essential part of the outer conditions of one’s life that one should subscribe to any particular institution or organization, but if one is led to do so that will be acceptable also if it is an honourable one. Mind in its ultimate condition is free and infinite. We, as humans, are at the very beginning of its discovery. Let us not set up false steps to our journey or ignorantly put up fences to block our view. Let us avoid the illinformed littleness of sectarianism, the common eagerness to huddle under a label. For several reasons one is not a joiner. Most sects have only partial and limited views, most mix some error with their truth, and develop ugly strict and rigid tyrannies. Furthermore, their adherents, believing that they alone possess the truth, generally exclude all others from the warmer temperatures of their goodwill—if they do not only dislike them. However, fined; one wants to express this freedom. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

However, is not solitude, too, a portal? Does it not happen sometimes in the stillest lonesomeness that we unexpectedly behold? Cannot intercourse with oneself change mysteriously into intercourse with mystery? Indeed, is not only one that is no longer attached to any being worthy of confronting being? Come, lonesome one to the lonesome. God does what God has always done; he divides the evil from the good. God brings down blessings upon those who worship him. God draws the faithful into harmony with all the cycles of the Universe, with the cycles of the Moon, as I have told you. God fructifies the land. All things that are good proceeds from God. We belong to the tribes of Heaven. You do not understand. Our God was not defeated by your idols and those who tell their frivolous and lascivious stories. Our God is as beautiful as if the Moon itself has fashioned him with her light, and God speaks with a voice that is as pure as the light, and he guides us in that great oneness with all things that is the only cessation of despair and loneliness. However, God was stricken with terrible calamity, and all through certain parts of the World it seems faith in God has perished completely. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

To seek pleasure for the sake of pleasure is to avoid reality, the reality of other beings and the reality of ourselves. However, only the fulfillment of what we really are can give us joy. Joy is nothing else than the awareness of our being fulfilled in out true being, in our personal center. And only if we unite ourselves with what others really are is this fulfillment is possible. It is reality that gives joy, and reality alone. The Bible speaks so often of joy because it is the most realistic of all books. Rejoice! That means: Penetrate from what seems to be real to that which is really real. Mere pleasure, in yourselves and in all other beings, remains in the realm of illusion about reality. Joy is born out of union with reality itself. One of the roots of the desire for pleasure is the feeling of emptiness and the pain of boredom following from it. Emptiness is the lack of relatedness to things and persons and meanings; it is even the lack of being related to oneself. Therefore we try to escape from ourselves and the loneliness of ourselves, but we do not reach the others and their World in a genuine relation. There are two kinds of lonesomeness, depending on what it turns away from. If lonesomeness means detaching oneself from experiencing and using things, then this is always required to achieve any act of relation, not only the supreme one. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

However, if lonesomeness means the absence of relation: if other beings have forsaken us after we have spoken the true You to them, we will be accepted by God; but not if we ourselves have forsaken other beings. Only one that is full of covetousness to use them is attached to some of them; one that lives in the strength of the presence can only be associated with them. The latter, however—one alone is ready for God. For God alone counters God’s actuality with a human actuality. And again there are two kinds of lonesomeness, depending on what it turns to. If lonesomeness is the place of purification which even the associate needs before one enters the holy of holies, but which one also needs in the midst of one’s trials, between one’s unavoidable failures and one’s ascent to prove oneself—that is how we are constituted. However, if it is the castle of separation where mortals conduct a dialogue with oneself, not in order to test oneself and master oneself for what awaits one but in one’s enjoyment of the configuration of one’s own soul—that is the spirit’s lapse into mere spirituality. And this becomes truly abysmal when self-deception reaches the point where one thinks that one has God within and speaks to him. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

However, as surely as God embraces us and dwells in us, we never have him within. And we speak to him only when all spec has ceased within. The orthodox way of looking at these questions will no longer serve. A new way is needed. Only if we reorient our thinking and free it from the strict and rigid doctrines of established institutions will the right answers will be found. One is not a joiner because of several reasons: one of them is that joiners are too often too one-sided in approach, too limited in outlook, too exclusive to let truth in when it happens to appear in a sect different from one’s own. Another reason is that too frequently there is a tyranny from above, imitated by followers, which forbids any independent thought and does not tolerate any real search. Mortal’s search for truth cannot be properly carried on unless one has full freedom in it. Where is the religious or religio-mystical institution which is willing to grant that to one? Is there a single one which lets one start out without being hampered by authoritarian doctrines that are strict and rigid, taboos, limitations, and traditions which it would impose upon one? “And when he had said these words, behold, the Lord showed oneself unto one, and said: Because thou knowest these tings ye are redeemed from the fall; therefore ye are brought back into my presence; therefore I show myself unto you,” reports Ether 3.13. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

And for no apparent reason, I was possessed of a strange idea about life, a strange concern that amounted almost to a pleasant obsession. I remember that it came on me this night because it seemed somehow related to what happened after. However, it was not related. I had had the idea before. That it came to me in these last free ours as a Roman citizen was no more than coincidence. The idea was simply that there was somebody who knew everything, somebody who had seen everything. I did not mean by this that a Supreme Being existed, but rather there was on Earth a continual intelligence, a continual awareness. And I thought of it in practical terms that excited me and soothed me simultaneously. There was an awareness somewhere of all things I had seen in my travels, and awareness of what it had been like in Massilia six centuries ago when the first Greek trader came, an awareness of what it had been like in Egypt when Cheops built the pyramids. Somebody knew what the light had been like in the late afternoon in the day that Troy fell to the Greeks, and someone or something knew what the less affluent said to each other in their little farmhouse outside Athens right before the Spartans brought down the walls. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

My idea of who or what it was, was vague. However, I was comforted by the notion that nothing spiritual—and knowing it was spiritual—was lost to us. That there was this continuous knowing. A modern philosopher supposed that every mortal believes of necessity either in God or in idols—which is to say, some finite good, such as one’s nation, one’s art, power, knowledge, the acquisition of money, the ever repeated triumph with women—some good that has become an absolute value for one, taking its place between one and God; and if only one proves to a mortal the conditionality of this good, thus smashing the idol, then the diverted religious act would all by itself return to its proper object. This view presupposes that mortal’s relation to the finite good that one idolizes is essentially the same as one’s relationship to God, as if only the object were different: only in that case could the mere substitution of the proper object for the wrong one save the mortal who has gone wrong. However, a mortal’s relation to the particular something that arrogates the supreme throne of one’s life’s value, pushing eternity aside, is always directed toward the experience and use of an It, a thing, an object or enjoyment. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

There are a thousand dark wonders which I cannot commit to paper for only this kind of relation can bar the view to God, by interposing the impenetrable It-World; the relationship that says You always opens it up again. Whoever is dominated by the idol whom one wants to acquire, have, and hold, possessed by one’s desire to possess, can find a way to God only by returning, which involves a change not only of the goal but also the kind of movement. One can heal the possessed only by awakening and educating one to association, not by directing one’s possession toward God. If a mortal remains in the state of possession, what does it mean that one no longer invokes the name of a demon or of a being that is for one distorted demonically, but that of God? It means that one blasphemes. It is a blasphemy when a mortal whose idol has fallen down being the alter desires to offer to God the unholy sacrifice that is piled up on the desecrated alter. When a man loves a woman so that her life is present in one’s own, the You of her eyes allows one to gaze into a ray of the eternal You. However, if a mortal lusts after the ever repeated triumph—you want to dangle before one’s lust a phantom of the eternal? If one serves a people in a fire kindled by immeasurable fate—if one is willing to devote oneself to it, one means God. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

However, if the nation is for one an idol to which one desires to subjugate everything because in its image one extols one’s own—do you fancy that you only have to spoil the nation for one and one will then see the truth? And what is it supposed to mean that a mortal treats money, which is un-being incarnate, as if it were God? What does the voluptuous delight of rapacity and hoarding have in common with the joy over the presence of that which is present? Can mammon’s slave say You to money? And what could God be to one if one does not know how to say You? One cannot serve two masters—not even one after the other; one must first learn to serve differently. Whoever has been converted by substitution, now has a phantom that one calls God. God, however, the eternal presence, cannot be had. Woe unto the possessed who fancy that they possess God! Lectures, societies, and group-movements are of limited value: they can never replace nor achieve what is gained by one’s own individual efforts made in the right way. The seeker after the truth will not find one’s way easy to travel. One may find that an institution, an authority, or an organization is suffocating one mentally or oppressing one emotionally. This may be the hour when one must claim one’s freedom. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

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Randolph Harris II International Institute