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A Teacher—When Will God Send Me One with Truth and of Boundless Benevolence?
When I turned around, Marius was gone. The sack was gone. However, Nicki’s violin and my valise of belongings lay on a stone table in the middle of the room. We know in psychotherapy that often despair is essential to the discovery on the part of the client of his or her hidden capacities and basic assets. The function of despair is to wipe away our superficial ideas, our delusionary hopes, our simplistic mortality. There are some misguided therapists who feel that they must reassure the patient at ever point of despair. However, if the client never feels despair, it is doubtful whether one ever will feel any profound emotion. Apropos of considering Voltaire’s remark “Despair has often gained battles,” a friend wrote this limerick: There once was a man named Voltaire who found his best hope in despair. If that sounds perverse, it could have been worse. Voltaire could declare, “I do not care.” There is surely value in the client’s experience that one has nothing more to lose anyway so one may as well take whatever leap life requires to make of one. I suggest that this is what is meant by that sentence in folklore “Despair and confidence both banish fear.” #RandolphHarris 1 of
Since there are a number of signs that we in America may be on the threshold a period as a nation when we shall no longer be able to camouflage or repress our despair, it is important to remind ourselves of the points that despair and confidence both banish fear. Those who can feel healthy despair are often those who also can at the same time experience the most intense pleasure and joy. Sartre was talking about a life-enhancing despair when in his play The Flies, after Zeus has pointed out al the despair Orestes will face, Orestes asserts against Zeus, “Human life begins on the far side of despair!” He could as well have said that human freedom and human joy also begin on the far side of despair. This is why we believe more firmly in the dignity and the nobility of being human after seeing a performance of tragedy rather than comedy: the character and the tragic downfall of Hamlet, Macbeth, Lear, or even Harry in The Iceman Cometh give us a conviction of the significance of life. As we leave the theater, we are not only relieved, we are inspired. The despair we have felt in the drama highlights its opposite, the nobility of life. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Despair is a desperate refusal to be oneself. There different levels of despair at not willing to be one’s self, or still lower, despair at not willing to be a self’ or lowest of all, despair at willing to be another then one’s true self. Despair is a failure of spirit, a spiritlessness. When mortals are characterized as a spirit-less has become a talking-machine, and there is nothing to prevent one from learning a philosophical rigmarole just as easily as a confession of faith and a political recitative repeated by rote. Again: Despair is a qualification of spirit, it is related to the eternal in mortals. In unconsciousness of being in despair a mortal is furthest from being conscious of oneself as spirit. This thing of despairing is inherent in mortals; but if one were not a synthesis of finite and infinite, and this is what makes despair possible. One also emphasizez that the worst condition of all is to boast about never having been in despair, for that means that the person has never been authentically conscious of oneself. This leads us to another characteristic of seeing, the most significant of all. We never see only what we see; we always see something else with it and through it! Seeing creates, seeing unites, and above all seeing goes beyond itself. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
If we look at a stone we see directly only the colors and forms of the side which is turned toward us. However, with and through this limited surface we are aware of the roundness, of the extension and mass of the structure of the whole thing. We see beyond what we see. If we look at an animal we see directly the colors and forms of its skin. However, with it and through it we are aware of the tension and power of its muscles, of its inner strivings which are covered as well as revealed by the skin. We see not color sports, but a living being. If we look at a human face, we see lines and shades, but with it and through it we see a unique, incomparable personality whose expressions are visible in one’s face, whose character and destiny has left traces which we understand and in which we can even read something of one’s future. With and through colors and forms and movements we see friendliness and coldness, hostility and devotion, anger and love, sadness and joy. We see infinitely more than we see when we look into a new depth. Again the language gives us a help when it speaks of con- templation. Con- templation means going into the temple, into the sphere of the holy, into deep roots of things, into their creative ground. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
We see the mysterious powers which we call beauty and truth and goodness. We cannot see them as such, we can see them only in things and events. We see them with and through the shape of a rose and the movements of the stars and the image of a friend. We can see them, but it is not necessary that we see them. We can close our eyes, we can become blind. Some are blind to any beauty which is more than a pleasant feeling, some are blind to any truth which is more than correct observation and calculation, some are bind to any goodness which is more than usefulness. And some are blind to any ground which is the unity of these powers and which we call holy. It is the ultimate, the last which we can see with and through all things; and therefore it is the end of all seeing. It is the light itself and therefore it is darkness for our eyes. Only with and through can we see it, through things and mortals, through events and images. This seeing and not seeing at the same time is what we call faith. Nobody can see God; but we can see him with and through. Here the conflict ends between seeing and hearing. He word tells us where to see and when we have seen we pronounce what we have seen and heard. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
In the state which we call faith, sound and vision are united and perhaps this is the reason why the holy likes to be expressed in music more than in any other medium. Music gives wings to both, word and image, and goes beyond both of them. However, for a second time we are called down from the flight above to the lowliness of our human situation. Our Gospel calls us blind, all of us. And Jesus says that we are blind because we believe we see and do not know that we are blind; and Christ then threatens that we shall be thrown into more blindness if we insist that we are seeing. The question is: Where of all places can and shall we see into the ground of all Being? Who can lead our contemplation into the temple, into the holy itself? Seeing gives us a World, the order and unity of the many. However, we see within this order, disorder; within the unity, conflict threatening to explode the World itself and to being back the old darkness of the chaos. And order and chaos are so mixed with each other that we often feel dizzy, without ground and meaning, desiring to keep our eyes closed. Seeing unites us with what we see. However, we see so many things and beings with which we do not want to be untied, towards which we are indifferent or hostile, which are indifferent or hostile to us, which are repulsive and which we hate to see just because every seeing unites, even if it is through hate. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
And it may be even our own self that we do not want to see because we are repelled by our image and because we hate it if we see it. Not in love but in hate are we untied with ourselves, and perhaps we want to deprive ourselves of our eyes like Lestat in The Queen of the Damned, of our eyes which first did not see what they ought to see and now cannot stand to see what they must see. And is not that which we love to see and that which we hate to see so mixed that we often praise the poverty of not seeing? Seeing is seeing with and through beings into their depth, into the good and the true and into their holy ground. However, which are the beings and images that shall lead us to this temple? Those whom Jesus called blind believed they knew the way to the temple, to the holy and the holiest. Innumerable temples all over the World contain things and images with and through which we can see God. However, what we see are idols, fascinating, horrible, overwhelming in seductive beauty or destructive power, demanding what cannot be fulfilled, promising what cannot be given, giving what elevates and lowers at the same time. And this is so because they hold us fast to themselves and do not lead us beyond. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
Our eyes are bound by them, often bound by the demonic fascination they exercise and with which they take possession of us. We contemplate them, we go into their temples, we unite with them in self-surrender, and we leave them emptied, despairing, destroyed. This is the great temptation of seeing. This is the reason why hearing was put against seeing. It is the reason why images were destroyed again and again and every image forbidden, why the temples were burned and God was called the Infinite Void. However, this cannot be the last word. Emptiness can be both light and darkness; and we want light, the lights which is life and vision. Jesus also could have become an idol, a national and religious hero, fascinating and destructive. This is what the disciples and the masses wanted Christ to be. They saw him the good and the true, the holy itself. However, the succumbed to the temptation of seeing. They kept to that which must be sacrificed if God shall be seen with and through any mortal being. And when Christ sacrificed himself, they looked away in despair like those who image and idol is destroyed. However, he was too strong; he drew their eyes back to him, but now to Christ crucified. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
However, of hum it is true. Certainly Christ is not the only one to look at intuition and contemplation. We are not asked to stare at Christ, as some do. We are not asked to look away from everything for his sake, as some do. We are not asked to give up the abundance of his creation as some do. We are not asked to refuse union with what we see as some do. However, we are asked to see wit and through everything into the which Christ shows the way. We shall see into it unimpeded by that which tries to keep us, away from the last dept. And when we are tired of seeing the abundance of the World with all its disorder, its hate and separation, its demonic destruction, and if we are also unable to look into the blinding light of the divine ground, then let us close our eyes. And then it might happen that we see the picture of someone who looks at us with eyes of infinite human depth and therefore of divine power and love. And those eyes say to us “Come and see.” Human’s religious situation, existence in the presence, is marked by its essential and indissoluble antinomies. That is these antinomies are indissoluble constitutes their very essence. Whoever affirms the thesis and repudiates the antithesis violates the sense of the situation. Whoever tires to think a synthesis destroys the sense of the situation. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Whoever would settle the conflict between antinomies by some means short of one’s own life transgresses against the sense of the situation. It is the sense of the situation that it is to be lived in all its antinomies—only lived—and lived ever again, ever anew, unpredictably, without any possibility of anticipation or prescription. A comparison of the religious and the philosophical antinomy will make this clearer. We can relativize the philosophical conflict of freedom and necessity by relegating the latter to the World of appearance and the former to that of being, so that the two positions no longer really oppose one another but rather get along with one another as well as do the two World in which each is valid. However, when I mean freedom and necessity not in Worlds that are thought of but in the actuality in which I stand before God; when I know, I have been surrendered and know at the same time, it depends on me, then I may not try to escapes from the paradox I have to live by relegating the irreconcilable propositions to two separate realms; neither may I seek the assistance of some theological artifice to attain some conceptual reconciliation: I must take it upon myself to live both in one, and lived both are one. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
We regard Ralph Waldo Emerson as the perfect example of spiritual independence. He seems beholden to no mortal and draws all one’s light from within. How did he arrive at this condition? For in his early thirties, he wrote to his Aunt Mary, “A teacher–when will God send me one full of truth and boundless benevolence?” This question was written soon after he came to Europe. There were four literary heroes across the Atlantic among whom he hoped to find his teacher. They were Carlyle, Landor, Coleridge, and Wordsworth. However, when he met them in the flesh, Landor severely disappointed him. The Coleridge visit was “of no use beyond the satisfaction of my curiosity.” Emerson’s interview with Wordsworth was more successful but still so fruitless that he was glad to end it. The first glance at Carlyle made him believe that his search for a teacher was over, that there was his man. The actuality was the he found a lifelong friend, even a fellow-pilgrim and seeker. However, he did not become a pupil. He had gone in search of a master. He failed to find one. Indeed he tells his aunt as much, that he seeks a man who is wise and true but that he never gets used to men. “They always awaken expectations in me which they always disappoint.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Ralph Waldo Emerson left Europe, writing in his journal in his journal on shipboard the melancholy after-reflection, “I shall judge more justly, less timidly, of wise men forevermore.” And it was there, in his little cabin, that he received the illumination which he could not find in Europe. He need look outside himself no more. Out of his illumination, whilst still afloat on the ocean he wrote down such sentences as these: “A man contains all that is needful within himself.” “Nothing can be given to him or take away from him but always there is a compensation.” “The purpose of life seems to be to acquaint a man with himself.” One’s attraction toward this or that teacher may weaken and die but one’s attraction toward the Inspirer of all teachers, God, will keep on growing stronger in one. One alone must answer this question, and one can best answer it by listening for and obeying that deep inner feeling which is called intuition. The rarity of competent teachers in the World, and especially in the Western World, forces seekers to practice self-reliance and cultivate independence, unless they are willing to accept substitutes for competence or join organizations making unsubstantiated claims. God will not neglect determined seekers and through circumstances, events, books, or otherwise gives them the particular guidance or instruction needed at a particular time. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
The aspirant of today who is thoroughly discriminating will generally fail to find the support of a competent teacher. Usually one will have to depend on the inner Self alone. If one will listen to the voice of the Silence and accept its invisible leadership, one need not accept any human leadership. What one learns from outside one’s self, from teacher or tradition, will never lead to one’s true fulfilment until one joins it with what one learns in the stillness from inside oneself. People tie themselves to some one mortal, living or dead, and worthy of one. Yet one is outside themselves, and the divine is within, themselves. They contemplate one’s form, surrender to one’s personality, refuse to look within. As long as they do this, so long does the Consciousness elude them. When a mortal recognizes that all one really needs come to one from the higher self, and not from other mortals, and in the measure that one uses one’s own efforts to complete one’s development and so come closer in consciousness to that self, in that measure will one gain what one needs. Books however sacred, ceremonies however impressive, lecture however learned, even Masters however wise are still only outer helps and as such must in the end be discarded. “The Lord liveth, and as we live, we will not go down unto our father in the wilderness until we have accomplished the things which the Lord have commanded us,” reports 1 Nephi 3.15. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
My God—What Have We Done?
Torches blazed ahead, and over a chorus of mourful wails, there came other cries, distant but filled with pain. Yet something beyond these puzzling cries had caught my attention. Amid all the foulness, I sensed a mortal was near. It was Nicolas and he was alive and I could hear him, the warm, vulnerable current of his thoughts mingled with his scent. And something was terribly wrong with his thoughts. They were chaos. Also, when I exercised my freedom and vice versa the anxiety engulfed me like a tidal wave. The anxiety came in the person of this figure whom I identified as my enemy-friend, a kind of figurative devil. It is the anxiety that comes, in varying intensity, whenever one leaps into the field of new possibilities, whenever one moves into the area of new idea or new compositions in music or a new style in art. It comes after such subconscious thoughts as “Ah, there is a new vision—nobody ever painted a scene like this before.” Then there comes the feeling “Do I want to venture out so far?” And I remind myself of all the dangers in venturing into that no man’s land. In such situations the person finds oneself adjuring oneself to calm down, not to get too excited, when getting excited in the sense of becoming inspired is exactly what, on the deepest level, one wants. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Freedom and anxiety are two sides of the coin—there is never one without the other. The anxiety is part and parcel of the vision or an idea that, in the particular form it comes to us, no one has ever thought of before. This anxiety—or dread, if we wish to translate angst that way—is a function of the freedom of imagination we must exercise in order to get any idea of significance. The dread comes with the new possibility and the risk that this leap requires. We might, like the scientists who split the atom, break through into a new land, where the usual mooring places by which we have oriented ourselves no longer even exist. Hence, the sense of alienation and bewilderment—and even the experience of intense human aloneness—that such a breakthrough brings in its train. I am told that when the scientists stood behind their glass barrier near Los Alamos and saw the first atomic explosion, the faces of a number of them turned white. One cried aloud, “My God, what have we done?” There is a rational explanation for this anxiety. We must keep in mind that the anxiety comes not from the possibility that the new idea or discovery might be wrong and useless (then it can simply be discarded), but from the possibility that it might be true, as it was, for example, with atomic fission or with Armin van Buuren’s new idea about musical harmonies. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Then one’s colleagues, the professors at one’s university, will be jolted, will be required to change their lecture notes because the possibility that there are new truths has been proven to be correct. This causes upset, which was very great indeed with the splitting of the atom. Or if one is a Nicolas Copernicus with new theory that the Earth moves around the Sun, or a Karl Marx with a radically new approach to the economic life of humankind, the uproar that accompanies the shaking of the foundations will be that much more catastrophic. Although the examples above are of great mortals, we are illustrating something that we all experience, though to a lesser degree. When he or she exercises the freedom to move out into the real World of possibility, every human being experiences this anxiety. Only by not venturing—that is, by surrendering our freedom, we can escape the anxiety. I am convinced that many people never become aware of their most creative ideas since their inspirations are blocked off by this anxiety before the ideas even reach the level of consciousness. A pressure toward conformism infuses every society. One function of any group or social system is to preserve homeostasis, to keep people in their usual positions. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The danger of freedom to the group is possessed exactly at that point: that the nonconformist will upset the homeostasis, will use one’s freedom to destroy the tired and true ways. Sokratis was condemned to drink hemlock because, so the good citizens of Athens believed, he taught false daimones (moral philosophy that defines right action as that which lead to the well-being of the individual, thus holding good behavior as an essential value) to the youth of Athens. Jesus was crucified because he upset the accepted religion of his day. Joan of Arc heard voices and was burned at the stake. Aaliyah choose the material and images she liked best and perished in a mysterious plane crash. These extreme examples are of person whose idea later become the cornerstones of our civilization. However, the fact only confirms my point. The persons whose insights are too disturbing, who bring too much of the anxiety that accompanies freedom, are put to death by their own generation, which suffers the threat caused by the Earthquake of the news ideas. However, when their ideas are crystallized into the strict and rigid doctrines of the new age and there is no chance of the dead figures rising from their silent graves to disturb the peace a new, they are worshipped by subsequent generations. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
The prototype of the person who produces something new is found in Prometheus, who created fire—or, as the myth presents it, stole it from the gods—and gave it to humankind as the beginning of human civilization. No one envies his punishment in being chained to a mountainside, where an eagle would eat away at his liver all day. At night, the liver would grow back, and the same grisly process would begin all over again the next day. This accompanies his great act of defiance, which was one aspect of Prometheus’ personal freedom. The denying of the dizziness of freedom is shown in the phrase pure spontaneity. For no one can seek that without succumbing to the dreadful implications of freedom. Even John Lilly, in his experiencing pure spontaneity in one’s stimulus-free tank, describes the great dangers therein, and one’s own great anxiety in one’s experience hovering on the edge of nonbeing, death. One may envy one’s colleagues who claim to exist in pure spontaneity and who seem to be on a perpetual high. Yes, we may envy them, but we do not love them for that. We love them for their vulnerability—which means their accepting and owning the dizziness of their freedom, their destiny which always stalks their freedom. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The legend of Icarus presents a picture of a young man refusing to accept the dizziness, or the anxiety, of freedom. Icarus that day must have felt a sense of great adventure—to be the first person who could sail high and taste the ecstasy, the sheer freedom from the bonds of the Earth, with no limits at all. For this one afternoon he was completely subject, not limited even by the distant reaches of the sky. One could order one’s Universe as one wished, could live out one’s whim and desire born in one’s own imagination. Here, indeed, was pure spontaneity. No longer part of the World, no longer subject to the laws of Earth or its destiny or the requirements of community. What exhilaration there must have been in the young man’s heart! A great dream comes true, an experience of complete freedom, pure spontaneity at last. One needs only the self-preoccupation, the refusal to consider compromise. He is like humanists of previous decades who insisted that there was no evil they need bother to consider. Human kind had done such great things in the past; why could we not overcome any and all difficulties in the future? Icarus remained as spontaneous as a child and burst into the sea to drown not as a young man, but as a child. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
When they hear these truths concerning the inward life and Universal laws, how sad, how foolish that so many people turn their heads away in indifference, in apathy, and in inertia! They believe that, even if there were any truth in them, these ideas are only for a handful of dreamers, for an esoteric cult with nothing better to do with its times and thought than to entertain them. There does not seem to be any point of contact between these ideas and their own lives, no applicability to their personal selves, and hence, no importance in them at all. How gross this error, how great this blindness! The mystic’s knowledge is full of significance for every other mortal. The mystic’s discoveries are full of value for one. Mortal’s hope for a happier existence and need of faith in Universal meaning has led one to try so many wrong turnings which brought one only father from them, that it is understandable why cynicism or indifferentism should claim so many votaries. However, this is not yet the end result. The few who today have found both hope and need adequately satisfied are presages of what must happen to the others. Even those mortals who do not believe in God are unknowingly seeking to find him or waiting for him. Every mortal has within one this divine possibility. However, if one refuses to believe it, or puts one’s faith in a hard materialism, or fails to seek for it, it will remain only latent. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
It is the thought of attaining happiness in some way which induces mortals to commit most crimes, just as it is the thought of attaining truth which induces them to hold the most materialistic beliefs. Although they see both happiness and truth from a wrong angle and so are given this deceptive result, still the essential motivation of their lives is the same as that of the questers. The segregation in thought of a spiritual elite as being the only seekers is valid only for a practical view, not for an ultimate one. Like people who are visually impaired, they seek the unseen. Like mystics they want the unknow centre of their being, but the conscious mind does not yet share in this desire. Everything else they try must in the end fail them, since life itself fails them at death. Those who do not choose to tread the path of mysticism need not therefore tread the path of mysticism need not therefore tread the path of misunderstanding it. This wisdom is latent in the bad as well as the good mortal. Any moral condition will suffice as a starting point. Jesus spoke to sinners as freely as to those of better character. One’s words were not wasted as the sequence showed. Even to those who had committed great crimes, as they as they repent and understand what repentance entails, Jesus promised salvation. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Was it for the sake of a small withdrawn spiritual elite that Jesus walked in Galilees, that Buddha wandered afoot across India, that Sokratis frequented the Agora in Athens? There is hope for all, benediction for the poor and the rich, the good and the bad, for every mortal may come into this great light. However—some mortals may come more easily, more quickly, while others may drag their way. “If anyone among you thinks that one is wise in this age, let one become a fool that one may become wise. For the wisdom of this World is folly with God,” reports 1 Corinthians 3.18-19. When a speaker in a morning chapel service used this as his text, I got a written question in class: “What do you think about this morning’s sermon?” And this was the implication: How can philosophy stand in view of Paul’s deprecating words? I want to answer by trying to interpret what I believe Paul means, not only in the passage above but in the whole context. At the end of his discussion he gives the key by saying: Let no one boast of mortals. For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the World or life or death or the present of the future, all are yours; and you are Christ’s and Christ is God’s. (I Corinthians 3.21-23.) #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Paul has asked, “Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the World?” And now he exclaims, “World and life and Apollos are yours.” This means that the wisdom of the World is ours also. How could it be otherwise? We could not even read Paul’s words without the wisdom of the World which enables us to understand ancient texts, which gives us the technical tool to spread the Christian message all over the Earth, which produces and sustains the political and educational and artistic institutions which serve and protect the Church. All this is ours. And even the different theologies are ours: the more dialectical one of Paul, the more ritualistic one of Peter, the more apologetic one of Apollos. There is only one type of theology which Paul dislikes—that which wants to monopolize the Christ and call itself the party of Christ. For each of these theologies wisdom of the World is needed; scribes are needed, debaters are needed, philosophers are needed, a language is needed to which everybody contributes. It is impossible to deny all this. However, it is possible to discredit through loose talk what one cannot avoid using at the same time. There is a deep dishonesty in the accusation against the use of historical research and philosophical thought in theology. In daily life one calls somebody dishonest who bring defamation upon those whom one uses. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
We should not commit this dishonesty in our theological work. And we cannot escape using the wisdom of this World. If we say “let us use a little of it, but not much in order to escape the dangers implied in it, this is no escape. This is certainly not what Paul means. The whole World is yours, he says, the whole life, present and future, not parts of it. These important words speak of scientific knowledge and its passion, artistic beauty and its excitement, politics and their use of power, eating and drinking and their joy, pleasures of the flesh and its ecstasy, family life and its warmth and friendship with its intimacy, justice with its charity, nature with its might and restfulness, the mortal-made World above nature, the technical World and its fascination, philosophy with its humility—daring only to call itself love of wisdom—and its profundity—daring to ask ultimate questions. In all of these things is wisdom of this World and power of this World and all these things are ours. They belong to us and we belong to them; we create them and they fulfill us. However, and this “but” of Paul’s is not one of those prepositions in which everything is taken back that was given before. The great preposition to the World which is ours gives both the foundation and the limit of the World that is ours: “And you are Christ’s,” namely, that Christ whose Cross is foolishness and weakness to the wisdom of the World. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
The wisdom of this World in all its forms cannot know God, and the power of this World with all its means cannot reach God. If they try it, they produce idolatry and are revealed in their foolishness which is the foolishness of idolatry. No finite being can attain the infinite without being broken as one who represented the World, and its wisdom and its power, was on the Cross. This is the foolishness and the weakness of the Cross which is ultimate wisdom and which is the reason that Christ is not another bearer of wisdom and power of this World but that he is God’s. The Cross makes him God’s. And out of this foolishness we win the wisdom to use what is our, the wisdom of the World, even philosophy. If it be unbroken, it controls us. If it be broken, it is ours. “Broken” does not mean reduced or emaciated or controlled, but it means undercut in its idolatic claim. Paul’s courage in affirming everything given, one’s openness towards the World, his sovereignty towards life should put to shame each of us as well as all our Churches. We are afraid to accept what is given to us: we are compulsive self-seclusion towards our World, we try to escape life instead of controlling it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
We do not behave as if everything were ours. And the Churches do so even less. The reason for this is that we and out Churches do not know as Paul did what it means to be Christ’s and because of beings Christ’s, to be God’s. Those who feel no call to develop themselves spiritually, no obligation to follow the quest, are nevertheless unwittingly doing both. Only, they are doing so at so sow and imperceptible a pace that they do not recognize the activity and the moment. All the experience of life are in the end intended to induce us to seek wholeheartedly for God. That is, to lead us to the very portal of the Quest. The vision of the tree of life shows us how the effects of casualness can lead us away from the covenant path. Consider that the rod of iron and the strait and narrow path, or the covenant path, led directly to the tree of lie, where all the blessings provided by our Savior and his Atonement are available to the faithful. If we are not careful in living our covenants with exactness, our casual efforts may eventually lead us into forbidden paths or to join with those who have already entered the great and spacious building. If not careful, we may even drown in the depths of a filthy river. “The Spirit of Christ is given to every mortal, that one may know good from evil and is sent forth by the power and gift of Christ; wherefore ye may know with a perfect know it is of God,” reports Moroni 7.16. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Human Beings are Given More than One Chance to Redeem themselves for Such is the Mercy of the Higher Power!
If you follow your conscience, you do what you want. However, it was simpler than that. I wanted you to have the wealth I gave you. I wanted you…to be happy. I lighted the torch on the wall, and went out for a moment to breathe the fresh air. Then leaving gates and doors unlocked behind me, and went up stairs to watch the twilight melt from the sky. An hour must have passed. The azure light faded, the stars rose. A friend responded to my question as to how he was with these words: “I have got a cold, I did not sleep much last night, everything is going wrong.” My friend went on: “The people who argue that the psyche and the ego are identical are wrong. My ego is in bad shape; my psyche is fine.” All through history human beings have wrestled with the fact that each of us experiences two aspects of selfhood which are never fully separated from each other. One of these aspects is the ego-self. This has the functions Dr. Freud rightly assigned to it: beleaguered monarch thought it is, it keeps, as best it can, some harmony in the different sections of its kingdom. It judges the demands of reality, balances preconscious ideas, and sifts out unacceptable unconscious impulses so that the person can live with some unity. The ego-self is related to the instincts and bodily well-being. A number (though not all) of the concerns about wounded prestige, suffering slights, I would assign to this ego-self. The ego-self’s question is some form of “Do I get what I want?” Hence, its associated with the term egocentricity. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
The other aspect is the psyche-self, which seeks to see life steadily and its it whole. The psyche-self is concerned with the context of freedom. The heightened consciousness of which we speak from time to time is a function of the psyche-self. It is the aspect that scans the various possibilities of the self; it is the locus of what we call essential freedom. When Christopher Burney, during the five years in solitary confinement in Germany in World War II, set himself to review everything he had been taught in school in order to keep from going psychotic, he was using not the ego-self, but the source of purpose that transcends the ego, which is the psyche-self. The ego-self is correlated with freedom of doing, the psyche-self with freedom of being. When it is pointed out again and again that freedom depends on how the self relates itself to itself at every moment, one is speaking of the psyche-self in relation to the ego. The self relating to itself was the aspect of selfhood that Dr. Freud never understood. About his therapeutic practice we find Dr. Freud writing, “analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible but to give the patient’s ego freedom to choose one way or the other.” This refers to freedom, but it omits the function most concerned with this freedom—namely, the self relating to itself. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
There is a curious phenomenon in human selfhood that I have noticed in my clients and in myself that I call the automatic pilot. The automatic pilot is the device on passenger planes to which the pilot can shift the directing of the plane when, on a long flight, he or she needs to rest. A client, for example, will be intensely anxious about a confrontation one must have with some other person or about a difficult phone call one mast make. Finally, one gets one’s courage up and goes ahead to do these anxiety-laden acts. One is surprised to discover that they turn out much better than one anticipated. There seems to be some unexpected assistance, some power that one did not know one possessed. From a Freudian point of view, it would be asserted that the help of which one was not aware comes from the client’s preconscious; and in Jungianism, it would probably be interpreted as a voice from the unconscious. I call such assistance a function of the psyche-self. The implication is that we, whether we are patients in therapy or not, can rightfully trust ourselves on those deeper dimensions which I have called the psyche-self. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
In the welter of self-distrust in which we generally find ourselves these days (covered up as it is by neonarcisscism, techniques of assertiveness, and advice to stand up for yourself), we can bank on more power, more capacity than mist of us give ourselves credit for. This upsurging of strength and energy which we did not know we has is an example of the working of destiny through the psyche-self. However, it is required at the same time that we confront our despair and our anxiety rather than suppressing them; otherwise the despair and anxiety will take over in the moment when we need their opposites. The automatic pilot is partially an influence from Eastern mysticism, particularly Zen Buddhism and its offshorts. It is the phenomena of letting go and letting be. The awareness of the duality of selfhood enables us to correct a radical misunderstanding of Zen Buddhism and other Eastern psychoreligions with regard to transcending the self. There is a passion among some groups in America to lose oneself, to escape from oneself, to get free of oneself. It is significant that this passion came along with, or followed closely, the age of narcissism and the preoccupation with self-sentiments. The “me” decade followed hard upon the Zen decade. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
These two phases, me decade and Zen decade, sound contradictory—and they are on paper. However, their proximity shows that they had in common the same longing to escape from oneself. People in search of a drug would ask a friend, “Do you have any uppers?” or if the answer was no, “Do you have any downers?” It did not matter whether the result one got was elation or depression. At least one got free of oneself. The rushing after Zen and the narcissism was thus often to be found in the same person. There was no distinction between the constructive self-concern of a person and the self-concern of one who leaps after one gimmick one weekend and after another gimmick the next weekend. This leaping often leads not only to temporary elation, but to eventual confusion and despair. The loss of the self, I believe is a misnomer. The misunderstanding of the Zen Buddhist goal of freedom from the self actually leads to a more subtle kind of narcissism. One’s own pushiness, one’s demands, one’s egocentricity may still be present; only the person now rationalizes them in terms of nonselfullness. We cannot help noting the exemplars of Zen Buddhism and Transcendental Meditation and other forms of psychoreligion are not without any self; the idea is abused. They are relieved of one phase of the self—namely, what I have called the ego-self. However, they seek to discover in the psyche-self a new clarity, a freshness, a sense of immediacy and of eternity. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The self we transcend in Zen Buddhism and meditation is the ego-self. The ecstasy we experience is the freedom from the concerns of the ego-self, a process of dumping rubbish of the self, followed by the pre-eminent presence, however temporary, of the psyche-self. One gains power over an incubus by addressing it by its real name. Similarly, the It-World that but now seemed to dwarf mortal’s small strength with its uncanny power has to yield to anyone who recognizes its true nature: the particularization and alienation of that out of whose abundance, welling up close by, every Earthly You emerges to confront us—that which appeared to us at times as great and terrible as the mother goodness, but nevertheless always motherly. However, how can we muster the strength to address the incubus by one’s right name as long as a ghost lurks inside us—that I that has been robbed of its actuality? How can the buried power to relate be resurrected in a being in which a vigorous ghost appears hourly to stamp down the debris under which this power lies? How is a being to collect itself as long as the mania of one’s detached I-hood chases it ceaselessly around an empty circle? If caprice is one’s dwelling place, how is anyone to behold one’s freedom? #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Even as freedom and fate belong together, caprice belongs with doom. However, freedom and fate are promised to each other and embrace each other to constitute meaning; caprice and doom, the spook of the soul and the nightmare of the World, get along with each other, living next door and avoiding each other, without connection and friction, at home in meaninglessness—until in one instant eye meets eye, madly, and the confession erupts from both that they are unredeemed. How much intellectual eloquence and artistry is used today to prevent or at least conceal this occurrence! Free is the mortal that wills without caprice. One believes in the actual, which is to say: one believes in the real association of the real duality, I and You. One believes in destiny and also that is needs one. It does not lead one, it waits for one. One must proceed toward it without knowing where it waits for one. One must go forth with one’s whole being: that one knows. It will not turn out the way one’s resolve intended it; but what wants to come will come only if one resolves to do that which one can will. One must sacrifice one’s little will, which is unfree and ruled by things and drives, to one’s great will that moves away from being determined to find destiny. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
Now one no longer interferes, nor does one merely allow things to happen. One listens to that which grows, to the way of Being in the World, not in order to be carried along by it but rather in order to actualize it in the manner in which it, needing one, wants to actualize it in the manner in which it, needing one, wants to be actualized by one—with human spirit and human deed, with human life and human death. One believes, I said; but this implies: he encounters. The capricious mortal does not believe and encounter. One does not know association; one only knows the feverish World out there and one’s feverish desire to use it. We only have to give use an ancient, classical name, and it walks among the gods. When you say You, he means: You, my ability to use! And what one calls one’s destiny is merely an embellishment of and a sanction for one’s ability to use. In truth one has no destiny but is merely determined by things and drives, feels autocratic, and is capricious. One has no great will and tires to pass off caprice in its place. For sacrifice one lacks all capacity, however much one may talk of it, and you may recognize it by noting that one never becomes concrete. One constantly interferes, in order “to let it happen.” How, one says to you, could one fail to assist destiny? How could one not employ all feasible means required for such an end? That is how one see those who are free; one cannot seem them differently. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
However, the free mortal does not have an end here and then fetch the means from there; one has only one thing: always only one’s resolve to proceed toward one’s destiny. Having made this resolve, one will renew it at every fork in the road; and one would sooner believe that one was not really alive than one would believe that the resolve of the great will was insufficient and required the support of means. One believes; one encounters. However, the unbelieving marrow of the capricious mortal cannot perceive anything but unbelief and caprice, positing ends and devising means. One’s World is devoid of sacrifice and grace, encounter and present, but shot through with ends and means: it could not be different and its name is doom. For all one’s autocratic bearing, one is inextricably entangled in unreality; and one becomes aware of this whenever one recollects one’s own condition. Therefore one takes pains to use the best parts of one’s mind to prevent or at least obscure such recollection of one’s falling off, of the deactualized and the actual I, were permitted to reach down to the roots that mortals calls despair and from which self-destruction and rebirth grow, this would be the beginning of the return. “Jesus Christ was not Yes and No; but in him it is always Yes. For all the promises of God find their Yes in him,” reports II Corinthians 1.19,20. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
A change in his traveling plans and the angry reaction of the Corinthian Christians to this change is used by Paul for profound and far-reaching assertions about Jesus “the Christ”: “In hi it is always Yes, he is not Yes and No.” This reminds us by contrast of the words of a great Protestant mystic who has said that in Yes and No all things consist, and of philosophers and theologians who are convinced that truth can only be expressed through No and Yes, and above all of Paul’s own central doctrines that God justifies the sinner, that he says “yes” to one whom he says a radical ‘”no” at the same time. And does not Paul in this second letter to Corinthians formulate the Yes and No in a most paradoxical way: “Unknown and yet well known, dying and behold we live, having nothing yet possessing every.” This certainly is Yes and No. However, in the Christ, he says, there is not Yes and No. Really not? Do we not come from Good Friday to Easter, which point to the deepest No and the highest Yes—that of the death and life of Christ? Yes and No: This certainly is the law of all life, but not Yes alone and not No alone. Yes alone is the advice of a self-deceiving confidence which soon will be shaken by the No of the three gray figures: emptiness, guilt, death. No alone is the advice of a self-deceiving despair whose hidden Yes to itself is manifest in its self-seclusion and its resistance against the Yes of love and communion. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
And further, Yes and No is the law of truth. Not Yes alone and not No alone! Yes alone is the arrogance which claims that its limited truth is the ultimate truth, but which reveals by its fanatical self-affirmation how many hidden No’s are present in its ground. No alone is the resignation which denies any ultimate truth but which shows by its self-complacent irony against the biting power of every word of truth how strong the Yes to itself is that underlies its ever-repeated No. Truth as well as life unite Yes and No, and only the courage which accepts the infinite tension between Yes and No can have abundant life and ultimate truth. How is such a courage possible? It is possible because there is a Yes above the Yes and No of life and of truth. However, it is a Yes which is not ours. If it were ours, even our greatest, our most universal and most courageous Yes, it would be contrasted by another No. This is the reason why no theology and no philosophy, not even a theology or philosophy of “Yes and No” is ultimate truth. In the moment in which it is expressed, it is contradicted by another philosophy and another theology. Not even the message of Yes and No, be it said by Kierkegaard or by Luther or by Paul, can escape its No. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
There is only one reality where there is not Yes and No but only Yes: Jesus as the Christ. First he also stands under the No, as completely as a being can stand; this is the meaning of the Cross. Everything of Christ which is only the expression of a finite life or a finite truth stands with all life and all truth under the No. Therefore, we are not asked to accept Christ as the unquestionable teacher or as the always fitting example, but we are told that in Christ all promises of God have become real, and that in Christ a life and truth which is beyond Yes and No has become manifest. This is the meaning of Resurrection. The No of death is conquered and the Yes of life is transcended by that which has appeared in Christ. A life which is not balanced by death, a truth which is not balanced by error is visible in Christ’s being. Christ shows the final Yes without another No. This is the Easter message; this is the Christian message altogether. And this is the ground of a courage which can stand the infinite tension between Yes and No in everything finite, even in everything religious and in everything Christian. Paul points to the fact that Christian say Amen through Christ. One cannot say Amen to anything expect the reality which is the Christ. Amen is the formula of confirmation, the expression of ultimate certitude. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
There is no ultimate certitude expect the life which has conquered its death and the truth which as conquered its death and the truth which has conquered its error, the Yes which is beyond Yes and No. Paul points to that which gives us such a certainty: It is not an historical report, but it is the participation in Christ, in whom we are established, as he says who has given us the guarantee of his Spirit in our hearts. We can stand the Yes and No of life and truth because we participate in the Yes beyond Yes and No, because we are in it, as it is in us. We are participants of Christ’s resurrection; therefore, we can say the ultimate Yes, the Amen beyond our Yes and our No. How many people thing and say that when their material fortunes improve, or their family problems are solved, or their living place is changed they will be able to give time and effort to the spiritual quest, but until then they must wait! However, in actual fact this seldom happens. For when the improvement, solution, or change does take place, new matters call for their attention or new attachments are formed for the ego, and so the spiritual effort gets postponed again. Those who believe that it is better to wait for more propitious circumstances before they begin the Quest, deceive themselves into an unavailing and lugubrious pessimism. Neither tomorrow nor the next year will be any better. Procrastination my be perilous. Later may be too late. Beware of being drawn into that vast cemetery wherein mortals bury their half-born aspiration and paralysed hopes. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Blessed are the Eyes Which See the things that We See–We Can Exercise Our Freedom Even Against Destiny!
I was too anxious and miserable to play with them! I was too dazed. I shouted the old questions, “Who are you, speak to me!” The glass panes rattled in the nearby windows. Mortals stirred in their little chambers. There was no cemetery here. “Answer me, you pack of cowards. Speak if you have a voice or once and for all get away from me!” And then I knew, though how I knew, I cannot tell you, that they could hear me and they could answer me, if they chose. And I knew that what I had always heard was the irrepressible evidence of their proximity and their intensity, which they could not disguise. However, their thoughts they could cloak and they had. I mean, they had intellect, and they had words. I let out a long low breath. I was stung by their silence, but I was stung a thousand times more by what had just happened, and as I had done so many times in the past, I turned my back on them. The length of time of the pause is, in principle, irrelevant. When we look at what actually happens in people’s experience, we note that some pauses can be infinitesimally small. When I am giving a lecture, for example, I select one word rather than another in a pause that lasts for only a millisecond. In this pause a number of possible terms flash before my mind’s eye. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
If I want to say the noise of loud, I may consider in this fraction of a second such words as deafening, startling, or overwhelming. Out of these I select one. All this happens so rapidly—strictly speaking, on the preconscious level—that I am aware of it only when I stop to think about it afterward. Note in this last sentence I say “stop to think.: This habitual phrase is another proof of the importance of pause. There is a necessity of stopping to think—in other words, pausing is essential to the process of reflection. However, something else, even more interesting, occurs in those small, multitudinous pauses as one speaks. This is the time when I “listen” to the audience, when the audience influences me, when I “hear” its reaction and ask silently, What connotations are they taking from my words? For any experienced lecturer the blank spaces that constitute the pauses between the words and sentences is the time of openness to the audience. At such times I find myself noting: There someone seems puzzled; here someone listens by tipping his head to one side so as not to miss any word; there in the back row—what every speaker dreads to see—is someone nodding in sleep. Every experienced speaker than I know is greatly helped by the cultivation of one’s awareness of facial expressions and other subtle aspects of unspoken communication from the audience. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Walt Whitman once remarked that “the audience writes the poetry,” and in an even clearer sense the audience gives the lecture. Hence, a lecture delivered from the same notes, sat once to a social club and then again to graduate students at a large university, will often seem to be two entirely different speeches. The pause for milliseconds while one speaks is the locus of the speaker’s freedom. The speaker may mold one’s speech this way or that, one may tell a joke to relax the audience, or—in a thrilling moment of which there cannot be too many in a lecturer’s career—one may even be aware of a brand-new idea coming to one from Heaven knows where in the audience. Cassandra, we are told in Aeschylus’ drama, foretold the doom of Mycenae. A prophetess, she was sensitive to communications on many different levels of which the average person is unaware. This sensitivity caused her much pain, and if she could have, she would gladly have given up her role. She was doomed, or destined to listen on these different levels; she could not escape hearing the messages coming in her pauses. Quite apart from the roles of prophetess or mystic—which we see also in Tiresias and Jeremiah and Isaiah—it would seem that multitudes of us have such capacities, but we train ourselves (a process abetted by much contemporary education) to suppress this sensitivity to the pauses. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
And we may suppress the sensitivity to the pause in the hope of avoiding the pain. The difference between the charlatan and the genuine prophet may well be the sense of pain the latter experiences in one’s prophecies. The pause may be longer, for instance, wen one is answering questions after a lecture. In response to a question, I may silently hem and haw for a moment while different possible answers flash through my mind. At that time I do not usually think of Soren Kiekegaard’s proclamation “Freedom is possibility,” but that is what I am living out in those moments of pause. The thrilling thing is that at such a time a new answer that I have never thought of may suddenly emerge. It is often said that intellectually creative people—like John Dewey, for example—are a strain to listen to and are not good public speakers, because the time they pause to consider different possibilities requires a capacity to wait that most people find tedious. One’s freedom may involve still larger pauses. When one is making important decisions like buying a house, “Let me sleep on it” is a not infrequent remark. These are the situation in which a longer interval between stimuli is desired; there may be many different houses available, or one can decide not to buy at all. The decision then requires complex consideration, pondering, setting up the possibilities for choice, and playing “as if” games with oneself to assess various factors like view and design and so on. Freedom consists of these possibilities. The pauses are the exercise of one’s freedom to choose among them. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
We recall that Jesus Christ, following his own inner guidance, went off into his separate wilderness to engage in his quest. If the records are to be believed, he paused for forty days. These were assumedly times of intense concentration, times of considering possibilities, of listening to whatever voices were available on deeper levels within themselves, voices from nature, voices from what we now term archetypal experiences, voices from what Jesus called God, and I would call Being. These assumedly were periods in which they experienced their visions and integrated themselves around their message. However, students tell me that they have professors who pause permanently. These teachers make a career our of pausing. The pause is then not a preparation for action but an excuse for never acting at all. It has been remarked that the academic profession is the only one in which you can make your living by questioning things. How much it is still true in academia that persons substitute talking for decision or rationalize lack of commitment by calling it “judicious pausing” I do not know. Nevertheless this is a tendency that confronts us all: to use pausing as a substitute for committed action. In our action-oriented life in America this misuse of pausing is a not infrequently found neurotic reaction. However, this dilemma is not overcome by acting blindly, without consciousness and without reason. When it is necessary to act if one’s freedom is to be actualized at all, to be free obviously requires the courage to act. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
A person may ponder for months and years or all life long, never finding satisfactory answers. This occurs particularly with the question of death. When he stated his concerns with what might happen beyond death, Hamlet spoke for many of us. “When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, it must give us pause.” However, in our personal freedom can be actualized regardless of whether we find satisfactory answers or not, or even if there are no answers at all. We can exercise our freedom even against destiny. Indeed, in the long run to “know that he dies,” as Blaise Pascal said, is the most essential and triumphant experience of freedom possible for a human being. In the It-World causality holds unlimited sway. Every event that is either perceivable by the senses and physical or discovered or found in introspection and psychological is considered to be of necessity caused and a cause. Those events which may be regarded as purposive form no exception insofar as they also belong in the continuum of the It-World: this continuum tolerates a teleology, but only as a reversal that is worked into one part of causality without diminishing its complete continuity. The unlimited sway of causality in the It-World, which is of fundamental importance for the scientific ordering of nature, is not felt to be oppressive by the mortal who is not confined to the It-World but free to step out of it again and again into the World of relation. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Here I and You confront each other freely in a reciprocity that is not involved in or tainted by any causality; here mortals finds guaranteed the freedom of one’s being and of being. Only those who know relation and who know of the presence of the You have the capacity for decision. Whoever makes a decision is free because one has stepped before the countenance. The fiery matter of all my capacity to will surging intractably, everything possible for me revolving primevally, intertwined and seemingly inseparable, the alluring glances of potentialities flaring up from every corner, the Universe as a temptation, and I, born in an instant, both hands into the fire, deep into it, where the one that intends me is hidden, my deed, seized: now! And immediately the menace of the abyss is subdued: no longer a coreless multiplicity at ply in the iridescent equality of its claims; but only two are left alongside each other, the other and the one, delusion and task. However, now the actualization commences within me. Having decided cannot mean that the one is done while the other remains lying there, an extinguished mass, filling my soul, layer upon layer, with its dross. Only one that funnels all the force of the other into the doing of the one, absorbing into the actualization of what was chosen the undermined passion of what was not chosen, only one that serves God with the evil impulse, decides—and decides what happens. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
Once one has understood this, one also knows that precisely this deserves to be called righteous: that which is set right, toward which a mortal directs oneself and for which one decides; and if there were a devil he would not be the one who decided against God but one that in all eternity did not decide. The mortal to whom freedom is guaranteed does not feel oppressed by causality. One knows that one’s mortal life is by its very nature an oscillation between You and It, and one senses the meaning of this. It suffices one that again and again one may set foot on the threshold of the sanctuary in which one could never tarry. Indeed, having to leave it again and again is for on an intimate part of the meaning and destiny of this life. There, on the threshold, the response, the spirit is kindled in one again and again; here, in the unholy and indigent land the spark has to prove itself. What is here called necessity cannot frighten it; for there one recognized true necessity: fate. Fate and freedom are promised to each other. Fate is encountered only by one that actualizes freedom. That I discovered the deed that intends me, that, this movement of my freedom, reveals the mystery to me. However, this, too, that I cannot accomplish it the way I intended it, this resistance also reveals that mystery to me. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
One that forgets all being caused as one decides from the depths, one that puts aside possessions and cloak and steps bare before the countenance—this free human being encounters fate as the counter-image of one’s freedom. It is not one’s limit but one completion; freedom and fate embrace each other to form meaning; and given meaning, fate—with its eyes, hitherto severe, suddenly full of light—looks like grace itself. No, the mortal who returns into the It-World, carrying the spark, does not feel oppressed by causal necessity. And in healthy ages, confidence flows to all the people from the mortals of the spirit; to all of them, even the most obtuse, the encounter, the presence has happened somehow, if only in the dimension of nature, impulse, and twilight; all them have somewhere felt the You; and now the spirit interprets this guarantee to them. However, in sick ages it happens that the It-World, no longer irrigated and fertilized by living currents of the You-World, severed and stagnant, becomes a gigantic swamp phantom and overpowers mortals. As one accommodates oneself to a World of objects that no longer achieve any presence for one, one succumbs to it. Then common causality grows into an oppressive and crushing doom. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
The freezing temperature of those snowy peaks of thought frightens away some who might otherwise venture on the Quest. It is the ego which is so frightened, knowing that its own end would come with the end of the journey into this elevated region. A mortal may stay at one’s present level or try to rise in character to a better one than one was born with. It ideals and values do not stir one, if one is ruled by undisciplined animal appetites, these truths will not appeal to one. Even if one is qualified to receive truth one may not be in the mood to do so, that is, one is not ready and willing to meet the cost. One’s interest or one’s desire or one’s emotions at that particular time as elsewhere possessed. When they learn the price—disciplining and reducing the fattened ego—that will have to be paid for this higher consciousness, they are more hesitant to embark on the Quest. Mortals who are uninterested in affairs other than their own personal ones, in matters other than their own work and pleasure, position and fortune, mortals who are preoccupied with the trivial round of external, selfish activities only, will naturally regard the study of philosophy as a waste of time, the practice of meditation as a form of indolence, and the endeavour after self-improvement as a needless trouble. No higher yearings enter their hearts, no reverent feelings touch them. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Because of their unwillingness either to look within or to think more deeply for any higher purpose or obligation that they might have, people live largely in delusion and deception, especially self-deception. “Why am I here on Earth?” is a question for which they can only find one answer: to satisfy their own material desires. This question is as old as the Christian message itself and the answer is equally old, as our text indicate. Jesus takes his disciples aside and speaks privately to them when he praises them because they see what they are seeing. The presence of the Messiah is a mystery; it cannot be said to everybody, and it cannot be seen by everybody, but only by those like Simeon who are driven by the Spirit. There is something surprising, unexpected about the appearance of salvation, something which contradicts pious opinions and intellectual demands. The mystery of salvation is the mystery of a child. So it was anticipated by Isaiah, by the ecstatic vision of the sibyl and by the poetic vision of Virgil, by the doctrines of mysteries and the rites of those who celebrated the birth of a child. A child is real and not yet real, it is in history and not yet historical. Its nature is visible and invisible, it is here and not yet here. And just this is the character of salvation. Salvation has the nature of a child. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
As Christendom remembers every year, in the most impressive of its festivals, the child Jesus, so salvation, however visible it may be, remains always also invisible. One who wants a salvation which is only visible cannot see the divine child in the Manger as one cannot see the divinity of the Man on the Cross and the paradoxical ways of all divine acting. Salvation is a child and when it grows up it is crucified. Only one who can see power under weakness, the whole under the fragment, victory under defeat, glory under suffering, innocence under guilt, sanctity under sin, life under death can say: Mine eyes have seen thy salvation. It is hard to say this in our days. However, it always has been hard and always will be hard. It was and is and will be a mystery, the mystery of a child. And however deep the World might fall, even into utter self-destruction, as long as there are mortal they will experience this mystery and say: “Blessed are the eyes which see the things that we see.” Not everyone is prepared by temperament, or past history, to seek the higher truth, much less has the time and will for it. Not everyone among the seekers is ready to make the sacrifices that a conscientious re-adjustment of character and behavior wants from one. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
I believe in a high power behind the Universe. I call it God. I believe this same higher power is behind mortals. Call it the soul, if you like to. Such beliefs do not appeal to the cocktail-soaked cynics and sophisticates of our era. Such teachings are ignored or rejected as being of interest only to dreamers, idlers, or misfits. There is some truth in this criticism, some basis for this attitude. Plain normal people who have to make a living, who are body with the World’s work, politics, and economics, who have personal and family problems most of the time, find all this to be unrealistic out of touch with things as they are, humanity as it is and has been. So long as the objects of their existence remain small and circumscribed, selfish and materialistic, so long will the meaning of their existence be denied them. It is not that they are contemptuous of truth but that they are indifferent to it. The opinions of most people about mysticism are either totally or partially worthless. This is because they are not informed either by accurate or by sufficient knowledge of the subject. They know next to nothing of its true history, nature, and results. Lack of concern for higher values reveals mortal’s frailty or malice. To the diseased mentality, mysticism is an attempt to cripple progress by weakening intellect and inhibiting needed action. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
The Purest Form of Love, the Warmest, the Most Exciting Love is Not Mine for Another, But Mine for Me!
I climbed to my feet. I felt myself light and powerful, and strangely numbed, and I went to the dead fire, and walked through the burnt timers. It was time now to examine the inner room. Most of us remember the myth of Narcissus as the story of a beautiful youth who fell in love with his own image in a pool and pined away because he never could possess it. However, the actual myth is a great deal richer. It begins with Tiresias, the aged prophet, predicting to the river nymph who was Narcissus’ mother, provided he never knows himself, her son would live to a ripe old age. This catches us up short. What is the meaning of not knowing oneself? True, the dynamics of narcissism always have as their fulcrum the problem of self-knowledge. However, could Tiresias be saying if Narcissus avoids the absorption of self-love, the very thing we later call narcissism, that he will live long? Or can he be referring to the literal translation of know thyself, from the Greek know that you are only a man, accept your human limits, which Narcissus obviously refused to do? The second character in the myth, also forgotten by most of us, is Echo, a lovely mountain nymph who falls hopelessly in love with Narcissus and follows him over hill and dale as he hunts for stage. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Intending to call his hunting companions, Narcissus cries, “Let us come together here!” Echo responds in the same words and rushes out to embrace Narcissus. However, he shakes her off roughly and runs away crying out, “I will die before you ever lie with me!” Echo then pines away, leaving behind only her melodious voice. Disdaining her supine resignation, the gods condemn her to wander forever in the mountain glens and valleys, where we hear her voice today. However, in her need for revenge, she calls upon the gods to punish Narcissus by making him also the victim of unrequited love. It is only then that he falls in love with his own reflection. At first he tried to embrace and kiss the beautiful young man who confronted him, but presently he recognized himself, and lay gazing enraptured into the pool, hour after hour. How could he endure both to possess and yet not to possess? Grief was destroying him, yet he rejoiced in his torments; knowing at least that his other self would remain true to him, whatever happened. Echo, although she has not forgiven Narcissus, grieved with him; she sympathetically echoed ‘Alas! Alas!’ as he plunged a dagger in his chest, and also the final ‘Ah, youth, beloved in vain, farewell!” as he expired. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Narcissus’ tragic flaw, in the eyes of the gods, is that he could never love anyone else, never love in the sense of giving himself in union with another person. There is no fertility in Narcissus’ love, and none in narcissism—no genuine coupling, no cross-fertilization, no interpersonal relationship. This threatens to be a tragic flaw in our present-day “I am me” effort to escape the paradox: we cannot love without committing ourselves to another person. In grasping for freedom from entanglement with other persons, we come to grief over our failure of compassion and commitment—indeed, the failure to love authentically. However, there is another important insight in this story that will help us understand present-day neo-narcissism and that, to my knowledge, has not yet been mentioned in the literature. It is that narcissism has its origin in revenge and retaliation. Echo’s plea, answered by Aphrodite, is a gesture of revenge. And this is also true in our contemporary neo-narcissism: there is in it a strong motive of anger and revenge. This is shown in the above series of verses. “I have no right, no wrongs” can be translated into the cry “The culture has let us down.” What we learned as children turns out to be phony; our parents seemed unable by dint of their confusion to show us any alternative moral guideposts or teach us wisdom; and what we were taught often turns out to be undesirable anyway and promotes conterrebellion. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
It is out of revenge upon those in the culture who betrayed her that the writers of the verses withdraws into herself and comforts herself with a lonely self-love: “The purest form of love, the warmest, the most exciting love is not mine for another, but mine for me.” In our society we have called this self-love. The phrase self love came into general currency after Erich Fromm’s essay “Selfishness and Self-Love.” Dr. Fromm condemned the fist and elevated the second. He did not see the important differences between self-love and love of another. There is a tragic flaw in this self-love, a seductive error that carries over into the masses of self-help books and spreads the havoc that arises from neo-narcissism. What is called love for others and self-love are two different things. Love for another person is the urge toward the uniting of two separate entities who invigorate each other, revivify each other, and contribute their differences to each other, and combine their different genes in a new and unique being—toward which the pleasures of the flesh is a powerful motivation. The essence, then, is the combining of two different beings. Nature’s obvious purpose in this, in contrast to incest, is the increase of possibilities. The insemination, the combination of two different sets of genes, result in the creation of new forms and original patterns. All of this Narcissus could not or would not do. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
The well-worn, strict doctrine that if you hate yourself, you cannot love others is true. However, the converse of that—that is you love yourself, you will automatically love others—is not true. Narcissus, in his rejection of Echo, dramatically demonstrates this. Many persons use self-love, then, ought really to be termed self-caring, which includes self-esteem, self-respect, and self-affirmation. This would save from the confusion of self-caring and love for others, as it is shown so vividly in the myth of Narcissus. To be free to love other persons requires self-affirmation and, paradoxically, the assertion of oneself. At the same time it requires tenderness, affirmation of the other, relaxing of competition as must as possible, self-abnegation at times in the interests of the loved one, and the age-old virtues of mercy and forgiveness toward each other. Destiny is the other person in the act of loving. The dialectical poles of self-caring and love for the other fructify and strengthen each other. Fortunately, this paradox can neither be escaped nor solved, but must be lived with. There are others, however, who are not satisfied with such ignorance and such indifference, who want certain and assured knowledge of the spirit, by penetrating the secrets of their own being. And it is the promise of the satisfaction of this want which attracts them to the quest for God’s truth. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Was the baptism of John from Heaven or from mortals? Many cannot answer this. If one says that it was from mortals, they would have hurt the popular feelings and perhaps even a feeling within themselves, that John was a prophet. However, if they had said that he was from God, they would have established an authority beyond the threefold authority which they could claim for themselves. And this they did not want. They, who were called authorities, demanded that all authority be vested in them. Therefore, they did not accept John as a prophet, nor Jesus as the Christ. Do not minimize the seriousness of this conflict. It was not simply a conflict between good and evil, between faith and unbelief. The conflict was much more profound and much more tragic than this! Let us imagine that we ourselves were in the place of those who asked Jesus about the source of his authority. Let us imagine ourselves as the guardians of a great religious tradition, or as the unquestionable experts in a sphere of decisive importance for human existence, or as people who have learned through a long experience to deal with matters of highest value. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
And let us also assume that we had no function as legally established authorities and that somebody came and spoke about the same things in quite a different language and acted in the field of our authority in quite a radical way; how would be react? And if the people who saw and heard this man said of him what they said about Jesus, that he teaches as one who has authority and not as we the established authorities, how would we react? Would we not think: He confuses the masses, he spreads dangerous doctrines, he undermines well-proved laws and institutions, he introduces strange modes of life and thought, he disrupts sacred ties, he destroys traditions from which generations of mortals have received discipline and strength and hope? It is our duty to resist him and if possible to remove him! For the sake of our people we must defend our consecrated and tested authority against this mortal who cannot show the source of the authority he claims. Could we be blamed for such a reaction? And if not, can we blame the authorities in Jerusalem for their reaction to Jesus? We think of the Reformation. This was a moment in the history of the Church in which the question of authority was once more in the center of events. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
Luther, and consequently the whole Protestant World, broke away from the Roman Church and from 1500 years of Christian tradition when no agreement about the authority of the pope and the councils could be reached. Here, again, someone had arisen who spoke and acted with an authority of the pope and the councils could be reached. Here, again, someone has arisen who spoke and acted with an authority the sources of which could not be determined by legal means. And here also we must ask, “Are the Catholic authorities who rejected him in the name of their established authority to be blamed for it?” However, if we do not blame them, we can ask them, “Why do you blame the Jewish authorities who did exactly the same as you did when the people said of the Reformers that they spoke with authority and not like the priests and monks?” Is the same thing so different if it is done by the Jewish high priest and if it is done by the Roman high priest? And one may ask the present-day Protestant authorities in Europe and in this country, “Are you certain that the insistence on your authority, on your tradition, and your experience does not suppress the kind of authority which Jesus has in mind?” #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
And now we ask, “What does authority mean?” What does it mean for a mortal as a mortal? What does it mean for our period and for each of us?” First of all, it means that we are finite and in need of what the word “authority” really says: to be started and increased. It means that we are born, that we were infants and children, that we were completely dependent on those who gave us life and home and guidance and contents for soul and mind. We were not able to decide for ourselves for many years, and that made us dependent on authority and made authority a benefit for us. We accepted this authority without resistance, even if we rebelled on special occasions. And this authority became the basis for all other authorities. It gave strength to the authority of the older brother or sister, of the more mature friend or teacher, of the official, of the ruler, of the minister. And through them we have been introduced into the institutions and traditions in society, state and Church. Authority permeates, guides, shapes our lives. The acceptance of authority is the acceptance of what is given by those who have more than we. And our subjection to them and to what they stand for enables us to live in history, as our subjection to the laws of nature enables us to live in nature. And from the authority of the law is derived the authority of those who represent and administer it and who, for this reason, are called the authorities. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Our daily life would be impossible without traditions of behavior and customs and the authority of those who have received them and surrendered them to us. Mortal’s control of nature would be impossible without the tradition of knowledge and skill into which every new generation is introduced and which gives authority to those who are able to introduce us. Mortal’s intellectual life—the language one uses, the songs one sings, the music one plays, the houses one builds, the pictures one paints, the symbols one creates—one has received through the authority of those who have participated in it before one. Mortal’s religious life—the faith one hold, the cult one loves, the stories and legends one has heard, the commandments one tried to obey, the texts one knows by heart—all this is not created by one; one takes it from those who represent to one religious authority. And if one revolts against the authorities which have shaped one, one does it with the tools one has received from them. The language of the revolutionary is formed by those against whom one revolts. The protest of the reformer uses the tradition against which one protests. There, no absolute revolution is possible. If it is attempted, it fails immediately; and is a revolution succeeds, its leaders soon have to use forms and ideas created by the authorities of the past. This is true of the rebellion of the adolescent against the family authority as well as of the rebellion of new social groups against the authority of the established power. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
When we speak of human finitude, we usually think of mortal’s transitorines in time, of birth and death, of the vicissitudes which threaten one in every moment. However, we are not only finite in that we are temporal, we are also finite in that we are historical and that means subject to authority, even if we rebel against it. We are thrown into existence, not only bodily, but also mentally. In no respect are we by ourselves, in no moment can we be by ourselves. One who tries to be without authority tries to be like God, who alone is by himself. And like everyone who tries to be like God, one is thrown down to self-destruction, be it a single human being, be it a nation, be it a period of history like our own. Art, to: as one beholds what confronts one, the form discloses itself to the artist. One conjures it into an image. The image does not stand in a World of gods but in this great World of mortals. Of course, it is there even when no human eye afflicts it; but it sleeps. The Chinese poet relates that mortals do not want to hear the song that one was playing on one’s flute of jade; then one played it to the gods, and they inclined their ears; and ever since mortals, too, have listened to the song—and thus one went from the gods to those with whom the image cannot dispense. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
As in a dream it looks for the encounter with mortal in order that one may undo the spell and embrace the form for a timeless moment. And there one comes and experiences what there is to be experienced: that is how it is made, or this is what is expresses, or its qualities are such and such, and on top of all that perhaps also it might rate. Not that scientific and aesthetic understand is not necessary—but it should do its work faithfully and immerse itself and disappear in that truth of the relation which surpasses understanding and embraces what is understandable. And also: that which towers above the spirit of knowledge and the spirit of art because here evanescent, corporeal mortals need not banish oneself into the enduring matter but outlasts it and rises, oneself an image, on the starry sky of the spirit, as the music of one’s living speech roars around one—pure action, the act that is not arbitrary. Here the Independent World appeared to mortals out of a deeper mystery, addressed one out of the dark, and one responded with one’s life. Here the word has become life, and this life, whether it fulfilled the law or broke the law—both are required on occasion lest the spirit die on Earth—is teaching. Thus it stands before posterity in order to teach it, not what is and not what ought to be, but how one lives in the spirit, in the countenance of the Independent World. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
And that means: it stands ready to become an Independent World at any time, opening up to the spirit of God; no, it does not stand ready, it always comes toward them and touches them. However they, having become uneager and inept for such living intercourse that opens up a World, are well informed; they have imprisoned the person in history, and one’s speech in a library; they have codified the fulfillment of the breach, it does not matter which; nor are they stingy with reverence and even adoration, adequately mixed with some psychology, as is only proper for modern mortals. O lonely countenance, starlike in the dark; O living finger upon an insensitive forehead; O steps whose each is fading away! It is a tradition in spiritual circles of God that anyone who has ever felt the truth power or beauty of the Gospel, however briefly, will not be able to escape being drawn to its practical consequence, the Quest, one day, however long deferred it may be. A mind which is no longer satisfied with shallow consolations will naturally turn to mystical experience or metaphysical study for deeper ones. All that has happened before one’s entry upon the quest has really been converging toward it. It is as inevitable that some mortals should come to the Quest because of their sorrows and difficulties as that other mortal should abandon it temporarily for the same reasons. God offers the surest path to the mind’s peace and the heart’s satisfaction. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
How Can Mortals Accuse the Gods! For they Say Evils Come from Us—However, they themselves, by Reason of their Sins, Have Sufferings Beyond those Destined for them!
That was permission, was it not? Or cosmic indifference, I am not sure which. I would have said nothing about the book to anyone; I had only brooded on it in those long painful hours when I could not really think, except in terms of chapters: an ordering; a road map through the mystery; a chronicle of seduction and pain. They are still asking me those questions now. Even Gabrielle, who in the main never bothers with questions, never says much of anything. They want to know when I am going to recover, when I am going to talk about what happened, when I am going to stop writing through the night. As for the Great Family, well, it was not likely that any of them would think it more than a fiction, with a touch here and there of truth; that is, if they ever happened to pick up the book. Are we responsible for our destiny? If we dare to answer that by saying “Partly so,” we then face another question just as difficult. That is: If destiny is a given, a vital design that gives us talents and limits and that we cannot revoke, how can responsibility have any meaning? The ancient Greeks faced this problem, together with the moral implications of destiny, when the ethical consciousness of the Greek civilization was being formed. During this period, around 1000 B.C., Homer relates the following fascinating incident from the Trojan War. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
The combined Greek forces were encamped around the walls for Troy. Agamemnon, the general in chief of the Greek armies, had stolen Achilles’ mistress from the Achilles’ tent. When Achilles returned and discovered this, his rage knew no bounds. He was not only a man of fiery temper, but also the best fighter in the Greek army. There hung in the balance the portentous question: Would the whole Greek expedition be destroyed by the enmity between these two men? As these two heroes confront each other, Agamemnon says: “Not I…was the cause of this act, but Zeus and the furies who walk in darkness: they it was who…put wild ate [madness] in my understanding, on that day when I arbitrarily took Achilles’ prize from him. So what could I do? Deity will always have its way.” In other words destiny—Zeus and his wild ate—will brook no denial. Is Agamemnon saying, “I was brainwashed; not I but my unconscious did it”? It may seem so, but he is not. He is preparing the way to assume his own responsibility. He then goes on: “But since I was blinded by ate, and Zeus took away my understanding, I am willing to make peace and give abundant compensation.” Ah! Since destiny did these things to me, I will give compensation. Cooling down, Achilles answers: “Let the son of Atreus [Agamemnon] go his way…For Zeus the counselor took away his understanding.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
The Greeks are saying here that a person is responsible even though the gods work inwardly, even though they take away one’s understanding. That is, one is destined, but one is responsible for what this destiny makes one do. Although Agamemnon is driven by destiny, which work through powers in his unconscious mind, he is nevertheless responsible. And responsibility is inseparable from freedom. Freedom and responsibility on one side, and ate and destiny on the other—these operate simultaneously in this dialectical and intimately human paradox. Julian Jaynes reminds us of another incident from Homer and the Trojan War. Hector finds himself confronting Achilles in the heat of battle Hector does not want to fight Achilles at that moment, so he backs away. His withdrawing is not determined by cowardice, for instance, he is not forced by Achilles’ sword to back up. Instead, the goddess puts her shield around Hector in the form of a could under which he could back out of the battle without any loss of self-esteem. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
The furies who walk in darkness and the goddess surrounding Hector with a could are superb synonyms for destiny. Indeed, the gods and goddesses were personifications of destiny; they set the ultimate limits on human actions opened up possibilities for human beings. Anyone who opposed them outright was brought to ruin by such means as a bolt of lightning—what we moderns call an act of God, carrying of this ancient belief—from the hand of Zeus. This sense of responsibility is partly the impingement of culture upon us. If we are to live with any harmony in community, we have to have responsibility. Those who pursue this quest do so because they too want to be happy. Do not imagine that only the Wordly pleasure-seekers, the hard money-hunters, the romantic love-dreamers, or the ambitious fame-followers are in this respect, in a different category. It is only their method and result that are different. All without exception want the feeling of undisturbed happiness, but only the questers know that it can be found only in the experience of spiritual self-fulfillment. Fame, fortune, love, or pleasure may contribute towards the outer setting of a happy person’s life but what of that person oneself? Who has not heard or known of mortals sitting in misery amid all their riches or power, of death forcing a well-mated could to bid each other farewell? When we see it, we must love the highest. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
Culture can help us mitigate or meliorate destiny: through culture we can learn to build architectural marvels as well are Cresleigh Homes to keep out the snow and the Winter cold and other elements. Through culture we barter our services for food so that we do not starve. However, culture cannot overturn destiny, cannot erase it. We can collectively cover our eyes to the results of our actions, blind ourselves to the full import of our cruelty and our responsibility for that cruelty as the Mayor of Sacramento does to housing crisis. However, this requires a numbing our of sensitivity and will sooner or later take its toll in neurotic symptoms. What lures a person to this quest? It may be that the ideas by which, and with which, one has lived for a long time have proved insufficient, false, or feeble. It may be that bereavement, calamity, or suffering have brought one to cherish peace. It may be nothing else than the simple need for higher quality of living. It may even be that one comes to this quest, as some undoubtedly do, because one seeks a special benefit—healing, relief, amendment of fortune, perhaps. However, in that case one must remain on it because one seeks God, alone. Lastly let it be noted that if for some reason the first step on this quest is the final step down a long road of increasing desperation, for most it ought to be the first step up a garden path of increasing joy. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
For Homer the acknowledging of destiny was by no means a wallowing in guilt, but an acceptance of personal responsibility. Homer has the gods proclaim in the Odyssey: “O alas, how now do mortals accuse the gods! For they say evils comes from us [the gods]. However, they themselves, by reason of their sins, have sufferings beyond those destined for them.” Some come to the quest for spirituality through the joy enkindled by great music, inspired writing, or majestic landscape, or through response to beauty; but others—and they are more—come through being wrecked or crushed, threatened with destruction, left hopeless, forlorn, and helpless. They reach the end of their strength, or discover the falseness and futility of their wisdom. One may come to the need or, as well as the illumination by, the God through two very different paths: through joy and sweetness or through suffering and sadness. In these Homeric tales the early Greeks were learning—an arduous task in civilization requiring hundreds and hundreds of years—that freedom and destiny require each other, that they are in dialectical relation with each other. Agamemnon knows that he must assume his responsibility by compensating Achilles for what he believes the god– for instance, destiny—made him do. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
In the Old World it is the general belief that a mortal turns toward this spiritual quest to fulfill their destiny for either two reasons. If one is young, it is because one has an inborn genius for it. If one is somewhat older, it is because one is dissatisfied with life, disappointed in it, or bereaved by its calamities. However, the philosophical view, while including these reasons, goes father and wider. For it sees that some, notably those who are aesthetically sensitive and those who are martially fulfilled, are indeed satisfied with their existing form of life. Only, they sense the greater possibilities open to a human being and wish to expand it to realize them more completely. The Greeks found, furthermore, that their belief in destiny, expressed in the gods and goddesses, energized and strengthened them individually. The typical Greek citizens, as anyone who reads Herodotus or Thucydides knows, were amazingly self-reliant and autonomous. We look at their activities and realize that it is not true that belief in destiny tends to make one passive and inert. The opposite is true—namely, that belief in unlimited freedom, as the flower children demonstrated, tends to paralyze one. For unlimited freedom is like a river with no banks; the water is not controlled in its follow and hence spills out in every direction and is lost in the sands. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Hence the seeming paradox that the deterministic movements, like Calvinism with its predestination, and Marxism with its economic determinism of history, have such great power. One would think that since people are the result of their predestination or their economic status, not much change is possible. However, the Marxists and Calvinists work energetically to change people and often with great success. In other words, their belief in their particular form of destiny give them power. Therefore, it would be too wide-sweeping a generalization to assert that all entrants on the quest come out of disgust with the Worldly life. This may be true for some, for several reasons, but it is not so true for Westerners. For among the latter there are those whose approach to life is through art—through sensitivity to beauty and joy—or through science—through the pursuit of truth about the Universe. Such persons are not unhappy, not alienated from Earthy affairs, but they know that a deeper basis to their present satisfaction is required. It is not only those who have exhausted all their limited means of attaining happiness who turn away and come to this quest: there are others whose capacity for enjoyment still remains, but having had the experience of a single glimpse or understood the pointers given by inspired are, they are attracted toward living on a higher plane. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
However, where some turn away from the World for negative reasons because of their misery and disappointment, others come to the quest for beneficial reasons; they have sensed or suspected, felt, or been told of, a higher plane of existence: they respond to a divine call. One is not sacrificing so much that is dear to the World for the sake of an empty abstraction, nor trampling on inborn egotism for the sake of a cold intellectual conception. One is doing this for somethings that has become a warm living presence in this life—for the God. After going through innumerable smaller decisions, once in a while a person arrives at a point where one’s freedom and destiny seems united. This was true of Martin Luther, wo, when he nailed his ninety-nine theses on the door of the cathedral at Wittenberg, declared, “Here I stand, I can do no other.” Such acts are the fruition of years of minor decisions culminating in the crucial decision in which one’s freedom and destiny merge. Deeper than all other desires is this need to gain consciousness of the God. Only it is unable to express itself directly at first, so it expresses itself in the only ways we permit it to—first the physical, then the emotional and intellectual quest of happiness. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
By encountering destiny directly, the Greeks had their own ways also of mitigating it. The clever individual, like Ulysses, could know which gods to set against other gods in his sacrifices. The Greeks could guarantee an auspicious wind with which to sail from Aulis to Troy by sacrificing Iphigenia, daughter of Agamemnon. This cruel act, incidentally, clinched Agamemnon’s destiny—one would later be murdered by his wife for his part in the bloody heritage of Mycenae. Therefore, the impulse which puts a person’s feet on the spiritual path, is not always an explicable one. It is sometimes hard to say why one obeys it, wen it will hinger the ego’s natural cravings at the very start and lead to an unnatural self-effacement at the very end. All one knows is that something him one bids one begin the journey and keeps one on it despite its hurts to one’s pride, one’s passion, and one’s ego. Disenchanted with celebrities and disillusioned with the World, the will be more inclined to turn in the end towards the divinity within themselves, to trust its first faint leadings on Jesus’ assurance that “the Kingdom of Heaven is within you!” Such independence is outwardly a lonely path, but with patience it will prove not less satisfying. Why should anyone be willing to put oneself aside, one’s inclinations and desires, unless one is bidden to do so by a power stronger than one’s own will? #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
In Aeschylus’ drama, when Agamemnon came back from Troy, he marched in as the proud conqueror, one who could scarcely restrain one’s boasting that one had accomplished the laying low of Troy. The chorus hastens to warn one not to commit hubris, the sin of overweening pride, which makes the gods jealous and incites their revenge. It is parallel to our modern, weaker form of the same wisdom “Pride goeth before a fall.” However, Agamemnon, with one’s bluster, does commit hubris, and this leads directly to his death. Hubris is the refusal to accept one’s destiny. It is the person’s belief that one performed great acts all by oneself. It is the tendency to usurp the power of the gods. It is also the denial of how much one is always dependent upon one’s fellow mortals and one’s society. Destiny itself is the course of our talents and assists the victors in these great projects like Trojan War, and when we lose sight of this—as we do when we commit hubris—evil consequences ensure. Others are attracted to these spiritual teachings through an impulse of feeling unsupported by the understanding of reason. It is safe to say that such persons are being led by their souls into this attraction. Does not the possibility or the power to do something about the situation at and confer on one some responsibility to do it? I choose to answer yes. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
Responsibility is no longer simply tied to past causes—for instance, what one did. It must be geared also to present freedom—for example, what I can do. The freedom to act confers on me the responsibility to act. In tis sense freedom and responsibility are united. Responsibility is more than a moral teaching, more than another rule of the ethical life. It is part of the underlying ontological structure of life. This means, obviously, that there is a host of things that we are responsible for that we will never be able to discharge. However, it is better to carry unfulfilled responsibility than to act on some pretense of pure conscience. Such is the interdependence of people in the collective nature of the human community that we need to assume responsibility for a multitude of things. Obviously, I am not saying that we develop neurotic consciences—there may be many reasons for not doing the given thing. For example, my friend brings up his child wrongly, and I had better not act on my hunch that I know how and he does not. However, the freedom inherent in a friendship does confer on me the responsibility to be open to talk with him about it and to share whatever insights I have. Thus, I am not suggesting we be busybodies. I am suggesting we be sensitive, compassionate, and aware of the complex interdependence of our humanity community. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Those who conceive of this quest as escapism are neither right nor wrong. They are right when it is embarked upon because of a neurotic refusal to do for and to oneself with effort what is hoped God or gurus will be able to do without it. They are wrong when it is embarked upon because of an evaluation of life that is made above its distorting battle or out of a compulsive, involuntary, and inner attraction toward the Ideal. Only when thought and experience have run deep enough and wide enough are the ego’s emotional and fleshly hungers likely to yield to spiritual hunger. One can no more help being on the spiritual quest than one can help being on this Earth. The hunger to know the inner mysteries of life, and the aspirations to experience the Soul’s peace and love will not leave one alone. They are part of one, as hands or feet are parts of one. When ripened by experience, it is natural and inevitable that mortals should yearn to be untied with their divine Source. Through widely different kinds of external experience, the ego seeks but never finds enduring happiness. Discovering in the end that it is on a wrong road, it turns to internal experience. Then or melancholy lot took shape in primal history? Indeed, it developed—insofar as mortal’s conscious life developed in primal history. However, in conscious life cosmic being recurs as human becoming. Spirit appears in time as a product, even a byproduct, of nature, and yet it is spirit than envelops nature timelessly. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
The opposition of the two basic words as many names in the ages and Worlds; but in its names truth it inheres in the creation. Then you believe after all in some paradise in the primal age of humanity? Even if it was a hell—and the age to which we can go back in historical thought was certainly full of wrath and dread and torment and cruelty—unreal it was not. Primal mortal’s experiences of encounter were scarcely a matter of tame delight; but even violence against a being one really confronts is better than ghostly solicitude from faceless digits! From the former a path leads to God, from the latter only to nothingness. Let us close this enumeration with the pair of most threatening power—death and life. These two belong to each other. In every life death is always present; it works in body and soul from the moment of conception the moment of dissolution. It is present at the beginning of our lives just as much as at their end. At the moment of our birth we begin to die, and we continue to do so daily, throughout our lives. Growth is death, because it undermines the conditions of life even while it is increasing life. However, not to grow is immediate death. All of us stand between the fascination of life and the anxiety of death, and sometimes between the anxiety of life and the fascination of death. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
Death and life are the greatest, the all-embracing powers, which try to separate us from the love of God. Even if we could fully understand the life of the primitive, it would be no more than a metaphor for that of the truly primal mortal. Hence the primitive affords us only brief glimpses into the temporal sequence of the two basic words. More complete information we receive from the child. Here it becomes unmistakably clear ow the spiritual reality of the basic words emerges from a natural reality: that of the basic word I-You from a natural association, that of the basic word I-It from a natural discreteness. One’s own higher self will direct the properly equipped seeker’s steps towards philosophy. One may go reluctantly, fighting against its ideas secretly or openly for months and years. However, in the end one will have to yield to what will become quite plainly a divine leading. One’s intellect will have to obey this irresistible intuition. If a mortal is born with innate tendencies for this quest, nothing will keep one from it and one will surely come to it in the course of time. One may come because one is so satisfied with life that one believes in God’s goodness. One may come because one is so disappointed in life that one disbelieves in God’s goodness. However, by whatever the road, one will come to it because the urge will be irresistible. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
Justice Without Love is Always Injustice Because it Does Not Do Justice to the Other One, Nor to Oneself, Nor to the Situation in Which We Meet!
I stood on the hilltop in the Moonlight and I tried not to see this paradise. I tried to picture those I loved. Were they gathered still together in that fairy-tale wood of beautiful trees? If only I could see their faces or hear their voices. I looked on these verdant green valley, now patched with beautiful contracted Cresleigh homes, a picture book World with flowers blooming in profusion, the red poinsettia as tall as trees. And the clouds, ever changing, borne like the tall sailing ships on brisk winds. What had the first Europeans thought when they looked upon this fecund land surrounded by the sparkling sea? That this was the Garden of God? Even the most uneducated people would not dare to affirm that compassion, gratitude, love of the beauty of the World, love of religious practices, and friendship belonged exclusively to those centuries and countries that recognize the Church. These forms of love are rarely found in their purity, but it would even be difficult to say that they were met with more frequently in those centuries and countries than in the others. To think that love in any of these forms can exist anywhere Christ is absent is to belittle him so grievously that it amounts to an outrage. It is impious and almost sacrilegious. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
These kinds of love are supernatural, and in a sense they are absurd. They are the height of folly. So long as the soul has not had direct contact with the very person of God, they cannot be supported by any knowledge based either on experience or reason. They cannot therefore rest upon any certainty, unless the word is used in a metaphorical sense to indicate the opposite of hesitation. In consequence it is better that they should not be associated with any belief. This is more honest intellectually, and it safeguards our love’s purity more effectively. On this account it is more fitting. In what concerns divine things, belief is not fitting. Only certainty will do. Anything less than certainty is unworthy of God. During the period of preparation, these indirect loves constitute an upward movement of the soul, a turning of the eyes, not without some effort, toward higher things. After God has come in person, not only to visit the soul as he does for a long time beforehand, but to possess it and to transport its center near to his very heart, it is otherwise. The chicken has cracked its shell; it is outside the egg of the World. These first loves continue; they are more intense than before, but they are different. One who has passed through this adventure has a deeper love than every for those who suffer affliction and for those who help one in one’s own, for one’s friends, for religious practices, and for the beauty of the World. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
However, one’s love in all these forms had become a movement of God himself, a ray merged in the light of God. That at least is what we may suppose. These indirect loves are only the attitude toward beings and things here below of the soul turned toward the Good. They themselves have not any particular good as an object. There is no final good here below. Thus strictly speaking we are no longer concerned with forms of love, but with attitudes inspire by love. In the period of preparation the soul loves in emptiness. It does not know whether anything real answers its love. It may believe that it knows, but to believe is not to know. Such a belief does not help. The soul knows for certain only that it is hungry. The important thing is that it announces its hunger by crying. If we suggest to a child that perhaps there is no bread, the child does not stop crying. It goes on crying just the same. The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry. It can only persuade itself of this by lying, for the reality of its hunger is not a belief, it is a certainty. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
We all know that there is no true good here below, that everything that appears to be good in this World is finite, limited, wears out, and once worn out, leaves necessity exposed in all its nakedness. Every human being has probably had some lucid moments in one’s life when one has definitely acknowledged to oneself that there is no final good here below. However, as soon as we have seen this truth we cover it up with lies. Many people even take pleasure in proclaiming it, seeking a morbid joy in their sadness, without ever having been able to bear facing it for a second. Mortals feel that there is a mortal danger in facing this truth squarely for any length of time. That is true. Such knowledge strikes more surely than a sword; it inflicts a death more frightening than that of the body. After a time it kills everything within us that constitutes our soul. In order to bear it we have to love the truth more than life itself. Those who do this turn away from the fleeting things of time with their souls. They do not turn toward God. When they are in total darkness, how could they do so? God himself sets their faces in the right direction. He does not, however, show himself to them for a long time. It is for them to remain motionless, without averting their eyes, listening ceaselessly, and waiting, they know not for what; deaf to entreaties and threats, unmoved by every shock, unshaken in the midst of every upheaval. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
If after a long period of waiting God allow them to have an indistinct intuition of his light or even reveals himself in person, it is only for an instant. Once more they have to remain still, attentive, inactive, calling out only when their desire cannot be contained. If God does not reveal this reality, it does not rest with the soul to believe in the reality of God. In trying to do so it either labels something else with the name of God, and that is idolatry, or its belief in God remains abstract and verbal. Such a belief prevails wherever religious doctrines are taken for granted, as is the cause with those centuries and countries in which it never enters anyone’s head to question it. The state of nonbelief is then what Saint John of the Cross calls a night. The belief is verbal and does not penetrate the soul. At a time like the present, if the unbeliever loves Go, if one is like the child who does not know whether there is bread anywhere, but cries out become one is hungry, incredulity may be equivalent to the dark night of Saint John of the Cross. When we are eating bread, and even when we have eaten it, we know that it is real. We can nevertheless raise doubts about the reality of bread. Philosophers raise doubts about the reality of the World of the senses. Such doubts are however purely verbal; they leave the certainty intact and actually serve only to make it more obvious to a well-balanced mind. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
In the same way one to whom God has revealed his reality can raise doubts about this reality without any harm. They are purely verbal doubts, a form of exercise to keep one’s intelligence in good health. What amounts to criminal treason, even before such a revelation and much more afterward, is to question the fact that God is the only thing worthy of love. That is a turning away of our eyes, for love is the soul’s looking. It means that we have stopped for an instant to wait and to listen. Queen Akasha did not seek Lestat, she waited for him. When she was convinced that he no longer existed, and that nowhere in the whole World was there anything that could be Lestat, she did not on that account return to her former associates. She drew back from them with greater aversion than ever. She preferred the absence of Lestat to the presence of anyone else. Lestat awakened her from her statue state, from her cold slumber. She no longer hoped for that. However, never for an instant did dream of employing another method which could obtain a luxurious and honored life for her—the method of reconciliation with her kith and kin. Akasha did not want wealth and consideration unless they came with Lestat. She did not even give a thought to such things. However, she wanted to turn Earth into a Heaven. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
At that moment Lestat could hold out no longer. He could not help declaring himself. He gave certain proof that he was Lestat. Akasha saw him, she heard him, she touched him. There would be no more question for her not as to whether her savior was in existence. One who has had the same adventure as Akasha, one whose soul has seen, heard, and touched for itself, one will recognize God as the reality inspiring all indirect loves, the reality of which they are as it were the reflections. God is pure beauty. This is incomprehensible, for beauty, by its very essence, has to do with the senses. To speak of an imperceptible beauty must seem a misuse of language to anyone who has any sense of exactitude: and with reason. Beauty is always a miracle. However, when the soul receives an impression of beauty which, while it is beyond all sense perception is no abstraction, but real and direct as the impression caused by a song at the moment it reached our ears, the miracle is raised to the second degree. Everything happens as though, by a miraculous favor, our very sense themselves had been made aware that silence is not the absence of sound, but something infinitely more real than sounds, and the center of a harmony more perfect than anything which a combination of sounds can produce. Furthermore there are degrees of silence. When compared with the silence of God, there is a silence in the beauty of the Universe which is like noise. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
God is, moreover, our real neighbor. The term of person can only be rightly applied to God, and this is also true of the term impersonal. God is one who bends over us, afflicted as we are, and reduced to the state of being nothing but a fragment of inert and bleeding flesh. Yet at the same time he is not some sort of victim of misfortune as well, the victim who appears to us as an inanimate body, incapable of thought, this nameless victim of whom nothing is known. The inanimate body is this created Universe. If we were able to attain it, the love we owe to God, this love that would be our crowning perfection is the divine model both of gratitude and compassion. God is also the perfect friend. So that there should be between him and us, bridging the infinite distance, something in the way of equality, he had chosen to place an absolute quality in his creatures, the absolute liberty of consent, which leaves us free to follow or swerve from the God-ward direction he has communicated to our souls. He has also extended our possibilities of error and falsehood so as to leave us the faculty of exercising a spurious rule in imagination, not only over the Universe and the human race, but also over God himself, in so far as we do not know how to use his name aright. He has given us this faculty of infinite illusion so that we should have the power to renounce it out of love. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
In fact, contact with God is the true sacrament. We can, however, be almost certain that those whose love of God has caused the disappearance of the pure loves belonging to our life here below are no true friends of God. After the soul has had direct contact with God, our neighbor, our friends, religious ceremonies, and the beauty of the World do not fall to the level of unrealities. On the contrary, it is only then that these things become real. Previously they were half dreams. Previously they had no reality. “In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of Heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all peoples, nations, and mortals of every language worshipped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed,” reports Daniel 7.11. Could God possibly forgive people without at least demanding their conversation and some ritual observances? People, at any time, can return and be accepted by God. God can at any time forgive those who repent. Many people say we live in a sick society—and the quality of life might be changed radically by the development of a new sense of community. If every person returns from one’s evil way and from the violence on one’s hands, who knows, God may return. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
Modern mortals are voracious readers who have never learned to read well. Part of the trouble is that one is taught to read drivel that is hardly worth reading well. (There was a time when children learned to read by reading the Bible.) One ends up by reading mainly newspapers and magazines—ephemeral, anonymous trash that one scans on its way to the garbage can. One has no wish to remember it for any length of time; it is written as if to make sure that one will not; and one reads it in a manner that makes doubly sure. There is no person behind what one reads; not even a committee. Somebody wrote it in the first place—if one can call that writing—and then various other people took turns changing it. For the final result no one is responsible; and it rarely merits a serious response. It cries out to be forgotten soon, like the books on which one is learned to read, in school. They were usually anonymous, too; or they should have been. In adolescence students are suddenly turned loose on books worth reading, but generally do not know how to read them. And if, untaught, some instinct prompts them to read well, chances are that they are asked completely tone-deaf questions as soon as they have finished their assignment—either making them feel that they read badly after all or spoiling something worthwhile for the rest of their lives. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
We must learn to feel addressed by a book, by the human being behind it, as if a person spoke directly to us. A good book or essay or poem is not primarily an object to be put to use, or an object of experience: it is the voice of You speaking to me, requiring a response. “So whatever you wish that mortals would do to you, do so to them; for this is the law and the prophets,” reports Matthew 7.12. Recently I have had to think about the relation of love to justice. And it occurred to me that among the words of Jesus there is a statement of what is called the “Golden Rule.” The Golden Rule was well known to Christians and Greeks, although mostly in a negative form: What you do not want that mortal should do to you, do not so to them. Certainly, the absolute for is richer in meaning and nearer to love, but it is not love. It is calculating justice. How, then, is it related to love? How does it fit the message of the kingdom of God and the justice of the kingdom as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount where the Golden Rule appears? Let us think of an ordinary day in our life and of occasions for the application of the Golden Rule. We meet each other in the morning, we expect a friendly face or word and we are ready to give it although our minds are full of anxious anticipation of the burdens. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
Somebody wants a part of our limited time, we give it, having asked somebody else to give us a part of one’s time. We need help and we give it if we are asked, although it includes sacrifice. We are frank with others, expecting that they will be frank with us even if it hurts. We are fair to those who fight against us expecting fairness from them. We participate in the sorrows of our neighbors, certain that they will participate in ours. All this can happen in one day. All this is Golden Rule. And if somebody has violated this rule, consciously or unconsciously, we are willing to forgive as we hope to be forgiven. It is not astonishing that for many people the Golden Rule is considered as the real content of Christianity. It is not surprising that in the name of the Golden Rule criticism is suppressed, independent action discouraged, serious problems avoided. It is even understandable that statesmen ask other nations to behave toward their own nations according to the Golden Rule. And does not Jesus himself say that the Golden Rule is the law and the prophets? However, we know that this is not the answer of the New Testament. The great commandment as Jesus repeats it and the descriptions of love in Paul and John’s tremendous assertion that God is love, infinitely transcend the Golden Rule. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
The Golden Rule must be transcended, for it does not tell us what we should wish that mortal would do to us. We wish to have freedom from heavy duties. We are ready to give the same freedom to others. However, someone who loves us refuses to give it to us, and one oneself refuses to ask us for it. And if one did, we should refuse to give it to one because it would reduce our growth and violate the law of love. We wish to receive a fortune which makes us secure and independent. We would be ready to give a fortune to a friend who asks us for it, if we had it. However, in both cases love would be violated. For the gift would ruin us and the other individual. We want to be forgiven and we are ready to do the same. However, perhaps it is in both cases an escape from the seriousness of a personal problem, and therefore against love. The measure of what we shall do to mortals cannot be our wishes about what they shall do to us. For our wishes express not only our right but also our wrong and our foolishness more than our wisdom. This is the limit of the Golden Rule. This is the limit of calculating justice. Only for one who knows what one should wish and who actually wishes it, is the Golden Rule ultimately valid. Only love can transform calculating justice into creative justice. Love makes justice just. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
Justice without love is always injustice because it does not do justice to the other one, nor to the oneself, nor to the situation in which we meet. For the other one and I and we together in this moment in this place are unique, unrepeatable occasion, calling for a unique unrepeatable act of uniting love. If this call is not heard by listening love, it is not obeyed by the creative genius of love, injustice is done. And this is true even of oneself. One who loves listens to the call of one’s own innermost center and obeys this call and does justice to one’s own being. For love does not remove, it establishes justice. It does not add something to what justice does but it shows justice what to do. It makes the Golden Rule possible. For we do not speak for a love which swallows justice. This would result in chaos and extinction. However, we speak for a love in which justice is the form and structure of love. We speak for a love which respects the claim of the other one to be acknowledged as what one is, and the claim of ourselves to be acknowledged as what we are, above all as persons. Only distorted love, which is a cover for hostility or self-disgust, denies that which united love. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
Love makes justice just. The divine love is justifying love accepting and fulfilling one who, according to calculating justice, must be rejected. This justification of one who is unjust is the fulfillment of God’s creative justice, and of God’s reuniting love. Knowing that the ultimate meaning of freedom will elude us, let us still endeavor to define the term as best we can. The first definition is on the psychological level, the domain of everyday actions: Freedom is the capacity to pause in the face of stimuli from many directions at once and, in this pause, to throw one’s weight toward this response rather than that one. This is the freedom we experience in a store when we pause over the purchase of a necktie or a shirt. We summon up in our imaginations the image of how we will look in this or that tie, what so-and-so will say about it, or how the color will fit such and such a suit. And then we buy the tie or we move on to something else. This is freedom of doing, or existential freedom. This freedom is shown most interestingly in the supermarket, when we push our carts through the aisles between the tumultuous variety of packages and cans of food on the shelves, each one silently shouting through its bright-colored label “Buy me!” We see the shoppers with expressions of hesitancy, vacuity, wonder, pausing for some inspiration as to which of all these foods will be good for dinner tonight. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
The shopper seems hypnotized, charmed, preoccupied. Like patients on a ward in a mental hospital, they do not see me as I walk directly across their line of vision. The expressions of wonder and hesitancy are a readiness, an invitation, an openness to some stimulus on the shelves to persuade them to throw the balance this way of that in making their choice. This first freedom is experienced by each of us hundreds of times every day. It is decked up in respectable terms like decision/choice when we discuss freedom in psychology classes—if we ever discuss freedom in psychology classes at all. The most profound illustration of this kind of freedom is our ability to ask questions. Take, for example, my asking a question after listening to a lecture. The very fact that the question comes up in my mind at all implied that there is more than one answer. Otherwise there would be no point in asking the question in the first place. This is freedom; it implies that there is some possibility, some freedom of selection in what I ask. The speaker then pauses for a few seconds after I have asked it, turning over in his or her mind the possible answers. We sense that there is, in asking and answering questions, a good deal more going on, and it is of a richer nature, than the mere responding to various stimuli and selecting a response. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Each person who lights this candle within one’s own mind will soon begin to attract other mortals like moths to a flame burning by a fire—not all mortal nor many mortals but only those who are groping for a way out of their darkness. Can a scrupulously impartial search through World-thought and experience lead to discovery of truth? “Wilt thou be made whole?” asked Jesus. Questioning implies some value judgment, some investment of the person’s life, some invitation to share, to make contact, some challenge to consider a new idea. Regrettably, in recent decades our very idea of freedom has been diminished and grown shallow in comparisons with previous ages; it has been relegated almost exclusively to freedom from outside pressure, to freedom from state coercion—to freedom understood on the juridical level, and no higher. Only when this search for a higher life has becomes an absolute necessity to a mortal, has one found even the first qualification needed for the Quest. “And the Lord God doth work by means to bring about his great and eternal purposes; and by very small means the Lord doth confound the wise and bringeth about the salvation of many souls,” reports Alma 37.7. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
Beauty Will Save the World is Not a Slip of the Tongue but a Prophecy as Beauty Has the Inspiration to Take Us to New Worlds
Know thy self and you will win a hundred battles. The major difficulty of our effort to live selfless lives is that we become more or less successful at it! As we try to lease those around us, we become more and more fuzzy as individuals. Chameleonlike, we seem to become like those in whose presence we are at the moment. This is a basic problem of those whose lives are centered in giving of themselves. If this is their primary motive in life, they soon have very little self to give. The theologian Paul Tillich once declared, “It is time to end the bad theological usage of jumping with moral indignation on every word in which the syllable ‘self’ appears.” Love of one’s self is not antagonistic to having satisfying relationships. On the contrary, we are free to love others only as we become free to love ourselves. From the standpoint of the emotional factors involved in interpersonal relationships it would be legitimate to rephrase Jesus’ statement, “You shall love your neighbor as yourself,” to read, “You cannot love your neighbor until you love yourself.” For hate of one’s self constantly interferes with the whole gamut of our relationships from casual acquaintances to those with whom we desire to be intimate. #RandolphHarris 1 of 12
For one thing, when we are intolerant of ourselves, we tend to be intolerant of others. An often it is the same trait with which we have difficulty within ourselves that we cannot tolerate others. Jealousy often involves this kind of reaction. One man, Martin, had a brief encounter with another woman near the end of his second year of marriage. He and the other woman engaged in pleasures of the flesh on only one very unsatisfying occasion. He felt very guilty about this experience. During the succeeding years of his marriage Martin was ridden with fear that he might repeat the experience. Whenever he became aware of feelings of wanting to have pleasures of the flesh with another woman other than his wife, Pandora, who was a vivacious, sometimes almost flirtatious, woman. He could not tolerate in her what he found intolerable in himself; and he built a virtual prison for her, and incidentally for himself as well. He became very upset when Pandora showed any warmth or interest in their male friends and alienated a number of other couples with whom they began to associate. He became very suspicious of her, frequently checking up on her activities. He insisted that she spend every moment possible with him. For Pandora, that trapped feeling in marriage was no figure of speech as long as she was willing to tolerate the unreasonable demand brought on by his own self-hate and self-mistrust. #RandolphHarris 2 of 12
Another way that self-hate interferes with our enjoyment of our associations with others is that it frequently leads to our being overly sensitive and too easily hurt. When we are self-condemning we tend to read condemnation into other people’s words and actions. We may become so touchy that the simplest comments by others seem to have sinister condemning undertones. On the way home from a party, a wife may say in passing, “Gee, the Buber’s have a beautiful home.” And the husband may feel she is condemning him for not being man enough to have sufficient earnings to own such a home. Or he may say, Chelsea Buber sure looked great tonight, did she not?” And her reply, “Yeah, great!” may be loaded with sarcasm because she feels he is really saying, “You look pretty unattractive and sloppy compared to that Chelsea Buber!” This touchiness also often causes us to generalize another’s critical remark in a very limited area and make it into a wholesale condemnation of ourselves. Many a wife has reacted this way to a comment from her husband at the dinner table, such as, “This coq au vin tastes a little flat. I wish you had put more red Burgundy and garlic in it.” Wife at this point may burst into tears, jump up from the table, and shout, “Nothing I do it ever good enough for you. You really have me, right?!” Assuming the husband does not constantly criticize her, it can safely be said that she has read a great deal of self-condemnation into his remark. #RandolphHarris 3 of 12
The human creature is the most fortunate of all living creatures, because one alone has the potential capacity and opportunity to become spiritually aware. Every life in the fleshly body represents and opportunity to obtain spiritual realization because mortals can only discover one’s divinity to the fullest whilst in the waking state. The refusal to reach up towards the higher truth and power leaves problems basically unsolved and questions really unanswered, for the cosmic urge within must assert and reassert itself. When a mortal comes to his or her real senses, one will recognize that one has only one problem: “How can I come into awareness of, and oneness with, my true being?” For it is to lead one to this final question that other questions and problems have staged the road of one’s whole life. This answered, the way to answer all the other ones which beset one, be they physical or financial, intellectual or familiar, will open up. Hence Jesus’ statements: “Seek ye first the kingdom of Heaven and all these things shall be added unto you,” and “To one that hath [enlightenment] shall be given [what one personally needs].” Because we have lost our way, these truths are once again as fresh and significant and important as if they had never been known to humanity. Beauty will save the World. What does this mean? For a long time I thought it merely a phrase. Was such a thing possible? When in our bloodthirsty history did beauty ever save anyone from anything? Ennobled, elevated, yes: but whom has it saved? #RandolphHarris 4 of 12
Nothing else seems able to save us. For no one would be foolish enough to think that the present policies of the two super-nations will do any more than produce a stand-off, each with a revolver as the other’s head. We build more nuclear warheads and the Russians do the same, they even have spy planes looking at military bases in California, and we invent more means of destruction and they do the same, each go around only repeating the stand-off on a more dangerous scale. Will we still be at the mercy of chance: an accidental release of some missile, or an extremist group setting off an atom bomb in New York, and the holocaust will be upon us? Power, not beauty, seems to govern nations. What the World can no longer endure in the nuclear age is its separation into many different nations, each with its own power needs; and the fact that the United States seems to be the most powerful is due largely to the fact that destiny gave us a particularly lush portion of this globe. However, or powerful position should not numb our realization that we will not be in this position forever. As Athens, at the height of its power and its great, unrivaled culture, as when Aeschylus and Sophocles were still alive, when Pericles was its leader, when Phidias had just finished the Parthenon, when Plato was young and Socrates gathered around him this unequaled group of young philosophers eternalized in Plato’s Dialogues—at its time of glory and power, Athens committed suicide by fighting the Peloponnesian War. #RandolphHarris 5 of 12
Sparta and the other city-states joined in this useless and wanton suicide. They were all so exhausted by the year 400 B.C. that the days of the city-state were numbered. We in our twenty-first century World face almost exactly the same challenge. Can we transcend that nation-state? Can we extend our love for country to other countries and the World? Destiny clearly cries out with the challenge to us to extend our imaginations, our economy and our way of thinking, to relate us to the whole planet rather than our own one piece of it. So long as we view our freedom as dependent upon our remaining the most powerful and richest nation on Earth, we shall have placed ourselves again under the sword of Damocles. We shall not be freed from this threat until we confirm a freedom for humanity. Power brings with it responsibility. Our power in America has brought more responsibility in the remarks that we are the special children of God, we carry his banners, God blesses America, he has a destiny for us different from that for other nations. God we thank thee the we are not as other people. Beauty and power. Were there every two such strange antagonists They have almost always been set in opposition to each other, such as Beauty and the Beast. How can we change this? #RandolphHarris 6 of 12
In mythology Beauty is pictured as the radiant but weak maiden, requiring the knight to rescue her from the dark and unattractive Power, often pictured as a dragon. How can we be saved by beauty—this gentle but timeless quality, this eternal but ephemeral experience? I recall as a young boy when at the Villa Floridiana Porza, Ticino, 6948 Switzerland in Winter a snowflake lighted on my black mitten, and just as I was overwhelmed with winder at its marvelously intricate design, it melted away and left only a wet spot as a token that it was there an instant ago. How can we talk of such a gentle quality saving the World? Art and the beauty as expressed, are on a different level from the mundane characteristics of our World. There is, however, something special in the essence of beauty, a special quality in art: the conviction carried by a genuine work of art is absolute and subdues even a resistant heart. A work of art contains its verification in itself. Works which draw on truth and present it to us in live and concentrated form grip us, compellingly involve us, and no one ever, not even ages hence, will come forth to refute them. Perhaps then the old trinity of Truth, Goodness, and Beauty is not simply the dressed-up, worn-out formula we thought it in our presumptuous, materialistic youth? #RandolphHarris 7 of 12
If the crowns of these three trees meet, as scholars have asserted, and if the too obvious, too straight sprouts of Truth and Goodness have been knocked down, cut off, not let grow, perhaps the whimsical, unpredictable, unexpected branches of Beauty will work their way through, rise up to that very place, and this complete the work of all three? Beauty will save the World—is not a slip of the tongue but a prophecy. One thing is certain: a World that does not have a concern for beauty will not be worth saving. Not life is to be valued, but the good life. The noble life is first of all the beautiful life. This is the fundamental importance of beauty and of the art that springs from the love of beauty. The humanities, such as art and music and poetry, exist for one purpose alone: to enhance the quality of human existence. There are riches that are posses at hand in any library, waiting to make life fuller, to make us more vital, to disclose to us the presence of joys in life which have been there all the time but we were blind to them. There is no library worth the name which does not have the mental inspiration to take us, like Columbus, to new Worlds. In poetry, in art, in literature, in music, there is not only the power to tame the savage breast, but to give us the sense of joy and serenity we sorely need. There is music that brings us this with no need for economic riches. #RandolphHarris 8 of 12
If our lives our boring, do we need to be awakened to adventure and the sense of passion? Homer brings us this, as does the poetry in many songs of Aaliyah Haughton and the Beatles. Taste is a particular approach, but it still can have its value; there is no need to insist that every person experience one’s soul enlivened by the same things. The earlier the age at which a person begins these studies and practices the better for one. To be born into a family where they already prevail, is to have an exceedingly good destiny. But however late in life anyone comes to them, it is never too late. One will have to content with set ways and fixed habits that will need changing, it is true. The mature and the elderly should take to spiritual studies as a duty. They have come to a period of life when they can evaluate its experiences better than the youthful. It is not too late at any period of life, even in one’s golden years, to obtain a firm footing upon the spiritual path and gain its satisfying rewards. In the end we all must turn to the inner Source of all our best human sources, to the Guru of all gurus, to the Overself. Then why not now? Now is the right moment to practice philosophy, to crush the ego, and to think optimistically. The quest, with its ideas and goals, is essential to the awakened mortal. One could not live without it without feeling half-dead, empty and futile. #RandolphHarris 9 of 12
Let us have done with the fake serenity that comes from the avoidance of tragedy. We do not need to cite the grandeur of classics like Hamlet, but the tragedies which are set in squalor, like O’Neill’s The Ice Man Cometh, also show us the nobility of the human being. We need not insist that every garden be as beautiful as the Keukenhof, Lisse, Netherlands with its 32 hectares and 7 million flowering plants; a meadow of weeds can also be beautiful. There is death as there is life, and let us open ourselves to both. We are all under sentence of death but with a sort of indefinite reprieve; we have an internal, and then our place knows us no more. We affirm life as we affirm death; the two always go together, just as we listen to the discords which play their crucial part in Beethoven’s symphonies. We never have denied that darkness goes with light, or that pain goes with pleasure, and if the truth were known, makes possible the pleasures. We have never denied the ugliness that makes beauty possible and necessary, for it is in juxtaposition with ugliness that we are able to recognize beauty. We can note with pleasure that museums and galleries are becoming increasingly attended these day, and particularly that young people attend more and more exhibitions of art. More people go to galleries than attend football games; and such statistics, absurd on one level, on another tell us that the acquaintanceship with art seems at least to be growing. #RandolphHarris 10 of 12
The galleries and museums give us the presence of adventure and solace, which we, citizens of a technological age, sorely need. Or we can carry with us in memory one picture to give us cheer and purpose, says Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. Here the faces of Venus and the cherubic spirits of springtime seem woven together by the gossamer breeze, and we are carried away to an Olympus where the gods are not mocked but for once are humble and recognize one of their own. We are made in the very image of God. It is by virtue of something in us which attaches to the fact of being a person but which is not the fact itself. It is the power of renouncing our own personality. It is obedience. Every time that a mortal rises to a degree of excellence, which by participation makes one a divine being, we are aware of something impersonal and anonymous about one. One’s voice is enveloped in silence. This is evident in all great works of art or thoughts, in the great deeds of saints and in their words. It is then in a sense that we must conceive of God as impersonal, in the sense that one is the divine model of a person who passes beyond the self by renunciation.Lord. Lord, whoever I am, whatever I am, whatever I am meant to be, I am part of this, this World, that is all of a flowing wonder–like this music. And you are with us. You are here. You have pitched your tent here, among us. This music is your song. This is your house. #RandolphHarris 11 of 12
To conceive of him as an all-powerful person, or under the name of Christ as a human person, is to exclude oneself from the true love of God. That is why we have to adore the perfection of the Heavenly Father in his even diffusion of the light of the Sun. The divine and absolute model of that renunciation which is obedience in us—such is the creative and ruling principle of the Universe—such is the fulness of being. It is because the renunciation of the personality makes mortals a reflection of God that it is so frightful to reduce mortals to the condition of inert matter by plunging them into affliction. When the quality of human personality is taken from them, the possibility of renouncing it is also taken away, except in the case of those who are sufficiently prepared. As God has crated our independence so that we should have the possibility of renouncing it out of love, we should for the same reason wish to preserve the independence of our fellows. One who is perfectly obedient sets an infinite price upon the faculty of free choice in all mortals. In the same way there is no contradiction between the love of the beauty of the World and compassion. Such love does not prevent us from suffering on our own account when we are in affliction. Neither does it prevent us from suffering because other are afflicted. It is on another plane from suffering. #RandolphHarris 12 of 12
Sometimes One Can Mistake Gratitude for Love—Dogs are Hardly an Article of Faith
Love or the lack of it is at the root of everything. Guard your children. Weigh wisdom of intervention if such is even possible. Ponder the question of inevitability. To cease wishing is a contemporary emotional and spiritual wasteland, almost like inhabiting the land of the dead. Another characteristic is satiety; if wishes are thought of only as pushed toward gratification, the end consisting of the satisfying of the need, the reality is that emptiness and vacuity and futility are greatest where all wishes are met. For this means one stops wishing. Without faith we cannot want anymore, we cannot wish. The truth of faith consists in true symbols concerning the ultimate. And the faithful is one human being with the power of thought and the need for conceptual understanding. There is a dimension of meaning expressed in the symbolism of the whish, this is what gives the wish its specifically human quality, and without this meaning, the emotional and spiritual aspects of wanting become dried up. When we have faith, it is a symbol that peace and prosperity are just around the corner and it is only a matter of time until all our need will be met. However, the relation to the ultimate is not the same in each case. The philosophical relation is in principle a detached description of the basic structure in which the ultimate manifests itself. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
The relation of faith is in principle an involved expression of concern about the meaning of the ultimate for the faithful. The difference is obvious and fundamental. However, it is, as the phrase “in principle” indicates, a difference which is not maintained in the actual life of philosophy and of faith. It cannot be maintained, because the philosopher is a human being with an ultimate concern, hidden or open. And the faithful one is a human being with the power of thought and the need for conceptual understanding. This is not only a biological fact. It has consequences for the life of philosophy in the philosopher and or the life of faith in the faithful. An analysis of philosophical systems, essays or fragments of all kinds shows that the direction in which the philosopher asks the question and the preference one gives to special types of answers is determined by cognitive consideration and by a state of ultimate concern. The historically most significant philosophies show not only the greatest power of thought but the most passionate concern about the meaning of the ultimate whose manifestations they describe. The philosophy, in its genuine meaning, is carried on by people in whom passions of an ultimate concern is united with a clear and detached observation of the way ultimate reality manifests itself in the process of the Universe. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
At most general faith means much the same as trust. Therefore, we are being asked to have faith as knowledge of specific truths revealed by God. Faith is a practical commitment beyond the evidence to one’s belief that God exists. We are to have a firm and certain knowledge of God’s benevolence towards us, founded upon the truth of the freely given promise in Christ, both revealed to our minds and sealed upon our hearts through the Holy Spirit. It is this element of ultimate concern behind the philosophical ideas which supplies the truth of faith in them. Our vision of the Universe and our predicament within it unites faith and conceptual work. We may hold that in our sinful state we will inevitably offer a resistance to faith that may be overcome only by God’s grace. It is, however, a further step for individuals of faith to put their revealed knowledge into practice by trusting their lives to God and seeking to obey his will. Humans contain the potentialities of these creative principles, and can choose to make their lives an ascent towards and then a union with the intuitive intelligence. The One is not a being, but infinite being. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
Thus Christian and Jewish philosophers who held to a creator God could affirm such a conception that God is infinite, and created the World. God, as the creator of all, is not far from any one of us. Philosophy is not only the mother’s womb out of which science and history have come, it is also an ever-present element in actual scientific and historical work. The frame of reference within which the great physicists have seen and are seeing the Universe of their inquiries is philosophical, even if their actual inquiries verify it. In no case is it a result of their discoveries. It is always a vision of the totality of being which consciously or unconsciously determines the frame of their thought. Because this is so one justified in saying that even in the scientific view of reality an element of faith is effective. Scientific view of reality an element of faith is effective. Scientists rightly try to prevent these elements of faith and philosophical truth from interfering with their actual research. This is possible to a great extent; but even the most protected experiment is not absolutely pure—pure in the sense of the exclusion of interfering factors such as the observer, and as the interest which determines the kind of question asked of nature in an experiment. What we said about the philosopher must also be said about the scientist. Even in one’s scientific work one is a human being, grasped by an ultimate concern, and one asks the question of the Universe as such, the philosophical question. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
Intellectual inquiry into the faith is to be understood as faith seeking understanding (fides quaerens intellectum). To believe is to thin with assent (credere est assensione cogitare). It is an act of the intellect determined not by the reason, but by the will. Faith involves a commitment to believe in a God, to believe God, and to believe in God. What is eternal is unchanging. In the same way the historian is consciously or unconsciously a philosopher. It is quite obvious that every task of the historian beyond finding of the facts is dependent on evaluation of historical factors, especially the nature of mortals, one’s freedom, one’s determination, one’s development out of nature and so forth. It is less obvious but also true that even in the fact of finding historical facts philosophical presuppositions are involved. This is especially true in deciding, out of the infinite number of happenings in every infinitely small moment of time, which facts shall be called historically relevant facts. The historian is further forced to give one’s evaluation of sources and their reliability, a task which is not independent of one’s interpretation of human nature. Finally, in the moment in which a historical work gives implicit or explicit assertions about the meaning of historical events for human existence, the philosophical presuppositions of history are evident. Where there is philosophy there is an expression of an ultimate concern; there is an element of faith, however hidden it may be by the passions of the historian for pure facts. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
God does not possess anything superadded to his essence, and his essence includes all his perfections. No one can attain to truth unless one philosophizes in the light of faith. Our faith in eternal salvation shows that we have theological truths that exceed human reason. And if one could attain truths about religious claims without faith, these truths would be incomplete. Higher truths are attained through faith. All these consideration show that, in spite of their essential difference, there is an actual union of philosophical truth and the truth of faith in every philosophy and that this union is significant for the work of the scientist and the historian. This union has been called philosophical faith. The term is misleading, because it seems to confuse the two elements, philosophical truth and the truth of faith. Furthermore, the term seems to indicate that there is one philosophical faith, a philosophia perennis, as it has been termed. However, only philosophical questions are perennial, not the answers. There is a continuous process of interpretation of philosophical elements and elements of faith, not one philosophical faith. Revealed theology is a single speculative science concerned with knowledge of God. Because of its greater certitude and higher dignity of subject matter, it is nobler than any other science. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
Philosophical theology, though, can make demonstrations using the articles of faith as its principles. Moreover, it can apologetically refute objections raised against the faith even if no articles of faith are presupposed. There is truth of faith in philosophical truth. And there is philosophical truth in the truth of faith. In order to see the latter point we must confront the conceptual expression of philosophical truth with the symbolical expression of truth of faith. Now, one can say that most philosophical concepts have mythological ancestors and that most mythological symbols have conceptual elements which can and must be developed as soon as the philosophical consciousness has appeared. In the idea of God the concepts of being, life, spirit, unity and diversity are implied. In the symbol of the creation concepts of finitude, anxiety, freedom and time are implied. The symbol of the “fall of Adam” implies a concept of mortal’s essential nature, of one’s conflict with oneself, of one’s estrangement from oneself. Only because every religious symbol has conceptual potentialities is theo-logy possible. There is a philosophy implied in every symbol of faith. However, faith does not determine the movement of the philosophical thought, just as philosophy does not determine the character of one’s ultimate concern. Symbols of faith can open the eyes of the philosopher to qualities of the Universe which otherwise would not have been recognized. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Faith is the starting point, scripture offers the data, and philosophy is a supplement not a competitor. Faith, philosophy, and scripture help make sense of each other. However, faith does not command a definite philosophy, although churches and theological movements have claimed and used Platonic, Aristotelian, Kantian or Humean philosophies. The philosophical implications of the symbols of faith can be developed in many ways, but the truth of faith and the truth of philosophy have no authority over each other. In the past few years, a number of persons in psychiatry and related fields have been pondering and exploring the problems of wishing and willing. We may assume that this confluence of concern must be in answer to a strong need in out time for a new light on these problems. It is not wishing that cases illness but lack of wishing. The problem is to deepen people’s capacity to wish, and one side of our task in therapy is to create the ability to wish. Wish is an optimistic picturing in imagination. It is a transitive verb—to wish involves an act. Wishing is similar to faith because it allows us to see beyond our experience and knowledge and hope that something good may happen, and so we send out more beneficial vibrations into the Universe. Every genuine wish is a creative act. I find support for this in therapy: it is indeed a beneficial step when the patient can feel and state strongly, for example, “I wish to buy a beautiful Cresleigh home and feel safe and secure in my community.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
That wish, in effect, moves the conflict from a submerged, unarticulated plane in which one takes no responsibility but expects God and parent to read his or her wishes by telepathy, to an overt, healthy conflict over what one wants. On the basis of theological myth of creation God exults when mortals come through with a wish of one’s own. The wish in interpersonal relationship requires mutuality. This is a truth shown in its breach in many myths, and brings the person to one’s doom. Peer Gynt in Ibsen’s play runs around the World wishing and acting on his wishes; the only trouble is that is wishes have noting to do with the other person he meets but are entirely egocentric, encased in cask of self, sealed up with a bung of self. In The Sleeping Beauty, by the same token, the young princes who assault the briars in order to rescue and awaken the slumbering girl before the time is ripe, are exemplars of behavior which tries to force the other in love and pleasures of flesh before the other is ready; they exhibit a wishing without mutuality. The young princes are devoted to their own desires and needs without relation to Thou. If wish and will can be seen and experienced in this light of autonomous, imaginative acts of interpersonal mutuality, there is profound truth in St. Augustine’s dictum, “Love and do what you will.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
We cannot be naïve about human nature. We know full well that this wishing is stated in ideal terms. We know that the trouble is precisely that mortals do wish and will against their neighbor, that imagination is not only the source of our capacity to form the creative mutual wish but it is also bounded by the individual’s own limits, convictions, and experience; and, thus, there is always in our wishing an element of doing violence to the others as well as to ourselves, no matter how well analyzed we may be or how much the recipient of grace or how many times we have experienced satori. This is called the willful element, willful here being the insistence of one’s own wish against the reality of the situation. Willfulness is the kind of will motivated by defiance, in which the wish is more against something than for its object. The defiant, willful is correlated with fantasy rather than with imagination, and is the spirit which negates reality, whether it be a person or an aspect of impersonal nature, rather than sees it, forms it, respect it, or takes joy in it. There are two realms of will, the first consisting of an experience of the self in its totality, a relatively spontaneous movement in a certain direction. In this kind of willing, the body moves as a whole, and the experience is characterized by a relaxation and by an imaginative, open quality. This is an experience of freedom which is anterior to all talk about political or psychological freedom; it is a freedom, presupposed by the determinist and anterior to all the discussions of determinism. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
In contrast, the will of the second realm is that in which some obtrusive element enters is that in which some obtrusive element enters, some necessity for a decision of an either/or character, a decision with an element of an against something alone with a for something. If one uses the Freudian terminology, the “will of the Super-Ego” would be included in their realm. We can will to read but not to understand, we can will knowledge but not wisdom, we can will scrupulosity but not mortality. This is illustrated in creative work. In the second realm of will is the conscious, effortful, critical application to creative endeavor, in preparing a speech for meeting or revising one’s manuscript, for example. However, when actually giving the speech, or when hopefully creative inspiration takes over in our writing, we are engrossed with a degree of forgetfulness of self. In this experience, wishing and willing become one. One characteristic of the creative experience is that it makes for a temporary union by transcending the conflict. The temptation is for the second ream to take over the first; we lose our spontaneity, our free flow of activity, and will become effortful, controlled and so forth, Victorian will power. Our error, then, is that will tries to take over the work of imagination. This is very close to a wish. Will is the capacity to organize oneself so that movement in a certain direction or toward a certain goal may take place. Wish is the imaginative playing with the possibility of some act or state occurring. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
Will and wish may be seen as operating in polarity. Will requires self-consciousness; wish does not. Will implies some possibility of either/or choice; wish does not. Wish gives the warmth, the content, the imagination, the innocence’s play, the freshness, and the richness of the will. Will gives the self-direction, the maturity, to wish. Will protect wish, permits it to continue without wish, will loses its life-blood, its viability, and tends to expire in self-contradiction. If you have only will and no wish, you have the dried-up, Victorian, neopuritan mortal. If you have only wish and no will, you have the driven, unfree, infantile person who, as an adult-remaining-an-infant, may become the robot mortal. Awareness of one’s feelings lays the groundwork for knowing what one want. This point may look very simple at first glance—who does not know what one wants? However, the amazing thing is how few people actually do. If one looks honestly into oneself, does one not find that most of what one thinks one wants is just routines like fresh fish on Friday; or what one wants is what one thinks one should want—like being a success in his or her work; or wants to want—like loving one’s neighbor? One can often see clearly the expression of direct and honest wants in children before they have been taught to falsify their desires. The child exclaims, “I like ice cream, I want a cone,” and there is no confusion about who wants what. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Such directness of desire often comes like a breath of fresh air in a murky land. It may not be best that one has the cone at the time, and it is obviously the parents’ responsibility to say Yes or No if the child is not mature enough to decide. However, let the parents not teach the child to falsify one’s emotions by trying to persuade him or her that he or she does not want the cone! To be aware of one’s feelings and desires does not at all imply expressing them indiscriminately wherever one happens to be. Judgment and decision are part of any mature consciousness of self. However, how is one going to have a basis for judging wat one will or will not do unless one first knows what one wants? For an adolescent to be aware that one wants to drive a brand-new BMW 3 Series, does not mean that one acts on this impulse. However, suppose he never lets his impulses reach the threshold of awareness because they are not socially acceptable? How is he then to know years later, when he buys a care, whether he wants to drive it or not, or whether because thus is then the acceptable and expected act, the routine thing to do? People who voice with alarm the caution that unless desires and emotions are suppressed they will pop out every which way, and everyone, will experience neurotic emotions. As a matter of fact, we know that it is precisely the emotions and desires which have been repressed which later return to drive the person compulsively. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
The Victorian gyroscope kind of person had to control his or her emotions rigidly, for, by virtue of having locked them up in jail, one had turned them into lawbreakers. However, the more integrated a person is, the loses compulsive become one’s emotions. In the mature person feelings and wants occur in a configuration. In seeing a dinner as part of a drama on the stage, to give a simple example, one is not consumed with desires for food; one came to see a drama and not to eat. Or wen listening to a concert singer, one is not consumed with pleasures of the flesh even though she may be very attractive; the configuration is set by the fact that one chose in coming to hear music. Of course, as we have indicted, none of us escape conflicts from time to time. However, these are different from being compulsively driven by emotions. Every direct and immediate experience of feeling and wanting is spontaneous and unique. That is to say, the wanting and feeling are uniquely part of that particular situation at the particular time and place. Spontaneity means to be able to respond directly to the total picture—or, as it is technically called, to respond to the figure-ground configuration. Spontaneity is the active “I” becoming part of the figure ground. In a good portrait painting the background is always an integral part of the portrait; so an act of a mature human being is an integral part of the self in relation to the World around it. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
Spontaneity, thus, is very different from effervescence or egocentricity, or letting out one’s feelings regardless of the environment. Spontaneity, rather is the acting “I” responding to a particular environment at a given moment. The originality and uniqueness which is always part of spontaneous feeling can be understood in this light. For just as there never was exactly that situation before and never will be again, so the feeling one has at that time is new and never to be exactly repeated. It is only neurotic behavior which is rigidly repetitive. God’s great plan of happiness provide a perfect balance between eternal justice and the mercy we can obtain through the Atonement of Jesus Christ. It also enables us to be transformed into new creatures in Christ. A loving God reaches out to each of us. We know that through his love and because of his Atonement of his only begotten Son, all humankind may be saved, by obedience to the laws and ordinances. Eternal relationships are also fundamental to our theology. The family is ordained of God. Under the great plan of our loving Creator, the mission is to achieve the supernal blessing of exaltation in the celestial kingdom. Finally, God’s love is so great that, except for the few who become people of perdition, God has provided a destiny of glory for all his children, including those who have passed away. Our loving Heavenly Father wants us to have joy. “Do not tell secrets to those whose faith and silence you have not already tested,” reports Kate Atkinson. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
Desire’s Perfect Goal Should Not Disenthrall Thy Soul—Here is a Star, there is a Star, Some Lose Their Way!
The love that lasts longest is the love that is never returned. Love would conquer all, of course, but one has to know when it is there first. Glaucus was a fisherman. One day he had drawn his nets to land and had taken a great many fishes of various kinds. So he emptied his nets and proceeded to sort the fishes on the grass. The place where he stood was a beautiful island in the river, a solitary spot, uninhabited, and not used for pasturage of cattle, not visited by anyone but himself. On a sudden, the fishes, which had been laid on the grass, began to revive and move their fins as if they were in the water; and while he looked on astonished, they one and all moved off to the water, plunged in, and swam away. He did not know what to make of this, whether some god had done it, or some secret power in the herbage. “What herb has such a power?” he exclaimed; and gathering some of it, he tasted it. Scarce had the juices of the plant reached his palate when he found himself agitated with a longing desire for the water. Glaucus could no longer restrain himself, but bidding farewell to Earth, he plunged into the stream. The gods of the water received him graciously and admitted hi to the honour of their society. They obtained the consent of Oceanus and Tethys, the sovereign of the sea, that all that was mortal in him should be washed away. #RandolphHarris 1 of 10
A hundred rivers poured their waters over Glaucus and then he lost all sense of his former nature and all consciousness. When he recovered, he found himself changed in form and mind. His hair was sea-green, and trailed behind him on the water; his shoulders grew broad, and what had been thighs and legs assumed the form of a fish’s tail. The sea-gods complimented him on the change of his appearance, and Glaucus fancied himself rather a good-looking personage. One day, Glaucus saw a beautiful maiden Scylla, the favourite of the water-nymphs, rambling on the shore, and when she had found a sheltered nook, laving her limbs on the clear water, he fell in live with her. Glaucus showed himself on the surface, spoke to the maiden, saying such things as he thought most likely to win her to stay; for she turned to run immediately on sight of him, and ran till she had gained a cliff overlooking the sea. Here she stopped and turned round to see whether it was a god or s sea animal, and observed with wonder his shape and colour. Glaucus, partly emerging from the water and supporting himself against a rock, said, “Maiden, I am not monster, nor sea animal, but a god; and neither Proteus nor Triton ranks higher than I. Once I was a mortal, and followed the sea for a living; but now I belong wholly to it.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 10
Then he told the story of his metamorphosis, and how he had been promoted to his present dignity, and added, “But what avails all this if it fails to move your heart?” Glaucus was going on in this strain, but the maiden, Scylla, turned and hastened away. Glaucus was in despair, but it occurred to him to consult the enchantress, Circe. Accordingly he repaired to her island. After mutual salutations, Glaucus said, “Goddess, I entreat your pity; you alone can relieve the pain I suffer. The power of the herbs I know as well as any one, for it is to them I owe my change of form. I love Scylla. I am ashamed to tell you how I have sued and promised to her, and how scornfully she has treated me. I beseech you to use your incantations, or potent herbs, if they are more prevailing, not to cure me of my love—for that I do not wish—but to make Scylla share it and yield me a like return.” To which Circe replied, for she was not insensible to the attractions of the sea-green deity, “You had better pursue a willing object; you are worthy to be sought, instead of having to seek in vain. Be not different, know your own worth. I protest to you that even I, goddess though I be, and learned in the virtue of plants and spells, should not know how to refuse you. If Scylla scorns you, scorn her; meet one who is ready to meet you half way, and thus make a due return to both at once.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 10
However, Glaucus replied, “Sooner shall trees grow at the bottom of the ocean, and seaweed on the top of the mountains, than I will cease to love Scylla, and her alone.” The goddess Circe was indignant, but she could not punish him, neither did she wish to do so, for she liked him too well; so she turned all her wrath against her rival, poor Scylla. She took her plants of poisonous powers and mixed them together, with incantations and charms. Then she passed through the crowd of gamboling beasts, the victims of her art, and proceeded to the coast of Sicily, where Scylla lived. There was a little bay on the shore to which Scylla used to resort, in the heat of the day, to breathe their air of the sea, and to bathe in its waters. Here the goddess poured her poisonous mixture, and muttered over it incantations of mighty power. Scylla came as usual and plunged into the water up to her waist. What was her horror to perceive a brood of serpents and barking monsters surrounding her! At first she could not imagine they were a part of herself, and tried to run from them and to drive them away; but as she ran she carried them with her, and when she tried to touch her limbs, she found her hands touch only the yawning jaws of monsters. Scylla remained rooted to the spot. #RandolphHarris 4 of 10
Scylla’s temper grew as ugly as her form, and she took pleasure in devouring hapless mariners who came within her grasp. Thus she destroyed six of the companions of Ulysses, and tried to wreck the ships of Aeneas, till at least she was turned into a rock, and as such still continues to be a terror to mariners. Mistakes are a deliberately wrong choice in the contest between what is clearly good and what is clearly bad is sin. We all want a partner, but some want one to the point of it being a pathology. Many people knowingly or unknowingly force a relationship due to an addiction of love. If one is honest with oneself, and know that one has nothing in common with their focus of their intertest, such as different goals, different lifestyles, and different hobbies, and the person is not attracted to the individual pursing a relationship, this is a clear indication that they do not like you in a romantic way, much like how Scylla was not in the least bit interested in Glaucus. Yet, Glaucus could not take no for an answer and ended up running her like, and the rage she experienced ruined the lives of others. Absolutely imagine if you had people dragging you into things you did not want to be part of, and you will understand why this is not a healthy thing to do. It is never a healthy thing to do. #RandolphHarris 5 of 10
People who think they can learn from their mistakes have a different brain reaction to mistake than people who think intelligence is fixed. One major difference between people who think intelligence is malleable and those who think intelligence is fixed is how one responds to mistake. When one makes a mistake, the best thing to do is to try to learn from it and figure it out. Conversely, some people who think they cannot gain intelligence will not take the opportunities to learn from their mistakes, and they usually employ defense mechanisms to justify their behaviour so they do not feel guilt or remourse. Defense mechanisms are psychological maneuvers that operate below the surface of one’s awareness (they are unconscious) to protect one from emotional pain or distress. The most familiar one is probably denial. Denial allows one to dismiss a painful reality so that one can go on acting as if a situation or event is not true—because one does not want to admit it is true. Transgression is different from being overtaken in a fault. Both sins and mistakes can hurt us and both require attention. People who try to force relations, often end up feeling insecure, hurt, and betrayed for no reason. Then these individuals start questioning themselves as to why they are never good enough for the person they are interested in. #RandolphHarris 6 of 10
There should be no license for sin, but mercy should go hand and hand with reproof. Though it may be hard to admit, there comes a time when one just needs to cut their losses and leave a person alone. The progression of a romantic relationship cannot be formed. It must evolve naturally, over time. Impatient, insecure, or damaged people try to force relationships. Mortal make these kinds of mistakes all the times. However, these things are on an essentially predetermined course. A fool is a person lacking judgment or prudence. The Saviour used the term fool to characterize the lesson in this parable about the rich man who built greater barns to store his abundant fruits and goods and then said to his soul, “Thou hast much goods laid up for many years; take thine ease, eat, drink, and be merry,” reports Luke 12.19. The distinction between sins and mistakes is important to our actions. We have seen some very bitter finger pointing. All of us make mistakes, and some of us very serious ones. Any thoughtful person feels a kind of failure because one’s sins or moral failure. One does not get clean by rolling in the mire. One does not get clean and whole by brooding unduly over the past, although we can certainly learn from our mistake. There is no strength in weakness; there is no strength in sin; and we do not overcome our mistake and our sins by fighting them directly. #RandolphHarris 7 of 10
If people dwell upon them too much, they may succumb to their sins. The avoidance of guilt can be addictive, too. Guilt-avoidance has become a drug of choice for many people, because it is so pleasurable, almost intoxicating, to think of oneself as morally pure. Those who are addicted to guilt-avoidance are usually a bit inconsistent. They avoid the guilt themselves, but they do not mind imposing a bit of it—maybe even a lot of it—on others. It can be immensely pleasurable to notice the flaws of others while ignoring your own. However, that is a sin, too. All things considered, we are on a safer ground when we focus on our own sins, not those of others. At least this is how we process theologians see things. We believe that when we harm others, or fail to act in ways that prevent them from being harmed, we violated something deep within the nature of nature. We have violated an Eros toward life’s flourishing that is divine. In sinning against others, we sin against God. It takes courage to stand up. The freedom to be different. The freedom to take guilt and make something beautiful of it. Humans have the freedom to turn guilt into love. Few gifts are more desirable than a clear conscience—a soul at peace with itself. Only God can heal a troubled soul. However, if we want God to forgive us, we must follow the procedure he has given to us. #RandolphHarris 8 of 10
Confession is a necessary requirement for complete forgiveness. It is an indication of true Godly sorrow. It is part of the cleansing process—the starting anew requires a clean page in the diary of our conscience. Confessions should be made to the appropriate person who has been wronged by us and to the Lord also. In addition, the nature of our transgression may be serious enough to require a confession to God in prayer. “Therefore I say unto you, Go; and whoever transgressed against me, him shall you judge according to the sins which he or she has committed; and if he or she confess his or her sins before thee and me, and repents in the sincerity of one’s heart, that person one shall forgive, and I will also forgive that individual,” reports Mosiah 26.29. Remember, it is complete deliverance from the tortures of a guilt-ridden soul that we seek. Repentance is not easy. Godly sorrow brings one to the depth of humility. This is why the gift of forgiveness is so sweet and draws the transgressor so close to the Saviour with a special bond of affection. Full repentance liberates the individual with joy unspeakable. #RandolphHarris 9 of 10
Any type of open and truthful disclosure reduces stress and helps individuals come to terms with their behaviour. It is not coincidental that some of the most powerful people or institutions in may cultures encourage people to confess their transgressions. And there is strong evidence that writing about upsetting experiences or dark secrets can benefit your mental and physical well-being. Similar to religious confessions, expressive writing encouraged individuals to explore their deepest thoughts and feelings about upsetting experiences. For such emotional purges to work, people must be completely honest with themselves. Putting emotional turmoil into words changes how we think about it. Giving concrete form to secret experiences can help categorize them in new ways. Talking or writing about a disturbing event helps us to understand it better. And things we do not understand cause greater anxiety. Once we are able to express our upheavals, we tend to ruminate about them less, freeing us up to focus on others thing. Dozens of studies have also shown that expression is linked to less stress and improved sleep and cardiovascular function. Also, better sleep is associated with enhanced immune function and better general health—which correlates with better mental health, too. Confession can help people get through difficult times. #RandolphHarris 10 of 10
Randolph Harris II International Institute 