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Should I Ever Take Ease Upon a Bed of Leisure, May that Same Moment Mark My End!

85It is a lust again of time and for the future, for the mysteries of the natural World. For being the watcher that I became that long-ago night in Paris, when I was forced into it. I lost my illusions. I lost my favorite lies. You might say I revisited that moment and was reborn to darkness of my own free will. The transition to a study of the negative aspects of bureaucracy is afforded by the application of Veblen’s concept of trained incapacity, Dewey’s notion of occupational psychosis, or Warnotte’s view of professional deformation. Trained incapacity refers to that state of affairs in which one’s abilities function as inadequacies or blind spots. Actions based upon training and skills which have been successfully applied in the past may result in inappropriate responses under changed conditions. An inadequate flexibility in the application of skills, will, inchanging milieu, result in more or less serious maladjustments. Thus, to adopt a barnyard illustration used in this connection by Kenneth Burke, chickens may be readily conditioned to interpret the sound of a bell as a signal for trained chickens to their doom as they are assembled to suffer decapitation. In general, one adopts measures in keeping with one’s past training and, under new conditions which are not recognized as significantly different, the very soundness of this training may lead to the adoption of the wrong procedures. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

ImageAgain, in Burke’s almost echolalic phrase, “people may be unfitted by being fit in an unfit fitness”; their training may lead to the adoption of the wrong procedures. Dewey’s concept of occupational psychosis rests upon much the same observations. As a result of their day to day routines, people develop special preferences, antipathies, discriminations and emphases. (The term psychosis is used by Dewey to denote a “pronounced character of the mind.”) These psychoses develop through demand put upon the individual by the particular organization of one’s occupational role. The concepts of both Veblen and Dewey refer to a fundamental ambivalence. Any action can be considered in terms of what it attains or what it fails to attain. “A way of seeing is also a way of not seeing—a focus upon object A involves a neglect of object B.” In his discussion, Weber is almost exclusively concerned with what the bureaucratic structure attains: precision, reliability, efficiency. This same structure may be examined from another perspective provided by the ambivalence. What are the limitations of the organizations designed to attain these goals? For reasons which we have already noted, the bureaucratic structure exerts a constant pressure upon the official to be “methodical, prudent, disciplined.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

ImageIf the bureaucracy is to operate successfully, it must attain a high degree of reliability of behavior, an unusual degree of conformity with prescribed patterns of actions. Hence, the fundamental importance of discipline which may be as highly developed in a religious or economic bureaucracy as in the army. Discipline can be effective only if the ideal patterns are buttressed by strong sentiments which entail devotion to one’s duties, a keen sense of the limitation of one’s authority and competence, and methodical performance of routine activities. The efficacy of social structure depends ultimately upon infusing group participants with appropriate attitudes and sentiments. As we shall see, there are definite arrangements in the bureaucracy for inculcating and reinforcing these sentiments. At the moment, it suffices to observe that in order to ensure discipline (the necessary reliability of response), these sentiments are often more intense than is technically necessary. There is a margin of safety, so to speak, in the pressure exerted by these sentiments upon the bureaucrat to conform to one’s patterned obligations, in much the same sense that added allowances (precautionary overestimations) are made by the engineer in designing the supports for a bridge. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

ImageHowever, this very emphasis leads to a transference of the sentiments from the aims of the organization onto the particular details of behavior required by the rules. Adherence to the rules, originally conceived as a means, becomes transformed into an end-in-itself; there occurs the familiar process of displacement of goals whereby an instrumental value becomes a terminal value. Discipline, readily interpreted as conformance with regulations, whatever the situation, is seen not as a measure designed for specific purposes but becomes an immediate value in the life-organization of the bureaucrat. This emphasis, resulting from the displacement of the original goals, develops into rigidities and an inability to adjust readily. Formalism, even ritualism, ensures with an unchallenged insistence upon punctilious adherence to formalized procedures. This may be exaggerated to the point where primary concern with conformity to the rules interferes with the achievement of the purposes of the organization, in which case we have the familiar phenomenon of the technicism or red tape of the official. An extreme product of this process of displacement of goals is the bureaucratic virtuoso, who never forgets a single rule binding his or her actions and hence is unable to assist many of one’s clients. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

ImageA case in point, where strict recognition of the limits of authority and literal adherence to rules produced this result, is the pathetic plight of Bernt Balchen, Admiral Byrd’s pilot in the flight over the South Pole. According to a ruling of the department of labor Bernt Balchen cannot receive his citizenship papers. Balchen, a native of Norway, declared his intention in 1927. It is held that he has failed to meet the condition of five years’ continuous residence in the United States of American. The Byrd Antarctic voyage took him out of the country, although he was on a ship carrying the American flag, was an invaluable member of the American expedition, and in a region to which there is an American claim because of the exploration and occupation of it by Americans, this region being Little America. The bureau of naturalization explains that it cannot proceed on the assumption that Little America is American soil. That would be trespass on international questions where is has no sanction. So far as the bureau is concerned, Balchen was out of the country and technically has not complied with the law of naturalization. Such inadequacies in orientation which involve trained incapacity clearly derive from structural sources. The process may be briefly recapitulated. An effective bureaucracy demands reliability of response and strict devotion to regulations. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

ImageSuch devotion to the rules of an effective bureaucracy leads to their transformation into absolutes; they are no longer conceived as relative to a set of purposes. This interferes with ready adaptation under special conditions not clearly envisaged by those who drew up the general rules. Thus, the very elements which conduce toward efficiency in general produce inefficiency in specific instances. Full realization of the inadequacy is seldom attained by members of the group who have not divorced themselves from the meanings which the rules have for them. These rules in time become symbolic in cast, rather than strictly utilitarian. The usefulness of organizations makes them a necessity. The appointment of people to administer those organizations is unavoidable. In the arrangements of human society, there is a necessary place for human institutions.  However, organizations and bureaucracy may lead to anxiety.  A way of escaping anxiety that is considered most radical consists in avoiding all situations, thoughts or feelings which might arouse anxiety. This may be a conscious process, as when the person who fear driving or mountain climbing avoids doing these things. More accurately speaking, a person may be aware of the existence of anxiety and aware of avoiding it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

ImageOne may also, however, be only dimly or not at all aware of avoiding activities. One may, for instance, procrastinate in matter which, without one’s knowledge, are connected with anxiety, such as making decision, going to the doctor or writing a letter. Or one may pretend, that is, subjectively believe that certain activities one contemplates—such as taking part in a discussion, giving orders to employees, separating oneself from another person—are unimportant. Or one may pretend not to like doing certain things and discard them on that basis. This a young lady whom going to parties involves gears of being neglected may avoid going altogether by making herself believe that she does not like social gatherings. If we go one step farther, to the point where such avoidance operates automatically, we have the phenomenon of an inhibition. An inhibition consists in an inability to do, feel or think certain things, and its function is to avoid the anxiety which would arise if the person attempted to do, feel, or think those things. There is no anxiety present in awareness, and no capacity for overcoming the inhibitions by conscious effort. Inhibitions are present in their most spectacular form in the hysterical losses of functioning: hysterical blindness, speechlessness or paralysis of a limb. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

ImageIn the sphere pleasures of the flesh and frigidity and impotence represent such inhibitions, although the structure of these inhibitions may be very complex. In the mental sphere inhibitions in concentration, in forming or expressing opinions, in making contacts with people are well-known phenomena. It might be worth while to spend several pages merely enumerating inhibitions, as to convey a full impression of the variety of their forms and the frequency of their occurrence. I think, however, that I may leave it to the reader to review one’s own observations on that score, because inhibitions are nowadays a well-known phenomenon and easily recognizable, if they are fully developed. Nevertheless it is desirable to consider briefly the preconditions that are necessary in order to become aware that inhibitions exist. Otherwise we should underestimate their frequency because usually we are not aware of how many inhibitions we really have. In the first place, we must be aware of the desire to do something in order to be aware of the inability to do it. For instance, we have to be aware of possessing ambitions before we can realize that we have inhibitions on that score. The question may be asked whether we do not always at least know what we want. Decidedly not. Let us consider, for example, a person listening to a paper and having a critical thought about it. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

ImageA minor inhibition would consist in a timidity about expressing the criticism; a stronger inhibition would prevent one from organizing one’s thoughts, with the result that they would occur to one only after the discussion was over or the net morning. However, the inhibition may go so far as not to permit the critical thoughts to come up at all, and in this case, assuming that one really feels critical, one will be inclined to accept blindly what has been said or even to admire it; and one will be quite unaware of having any inhibitions. In other words, if an inhibition goes so far as to check wishes or impulses there can be no awareness of its existence. A second factor that may prevent awareness occurs when an inhibition has such an important function in a person’s life that one prefers to insist that it is an unchangeable fact. If, for instance, there is an overpowering anxiety of some kind connected with any sort of competitive work, resulting in an intense fatigue after every attempt to work, the person may insist that one is not strong enough to do any work; that belief protects one, but if one admitted an inhibition one might have to return to work and thereby expose oneself to the dreaded anxiety. Truth comes after states and ecstasies and then takes it place. It is easier to glimpse the truth than to stay in it. For the first, it is often enough to win a single battle; for the second, it is necessary to win a whole war. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

ImageCompensatory trends in an individual will influence the forms of his or her creating will take, but they do not explain the process of creativity itself. Compensatory needs influence the particular bent or direction in culture or science, but they do not explain the creation of the culture or science. Because of this I learned very early in my psychological career to regard with a good deal of skepticism current theories explaining creativity. And I learned always to task the questions: Does the theory deal with creativity itself, or does it deal only with some artifact, some partial, peripheral aspect, of the creative act? The other widely current psychoanalytic theories about creativity have two characteristics. First, they are reductive—that is, they reduce creativity to some other process. Second, they generally make it specifically an expression of neurotic patterns. The usual definition of creativity in psychoanalytic circles is regression in the service of ego. Immediately the term regression indicates the reductive approach. I emphatically disagree with the implication that creativity is to be understood by reducing it to some other process, or that it is essentially an expression of neurosis. Creativity is certainly associated with serious psychological problems in our particular culture—Van Gogh went psychotic, Gaugin seems to have been a schizoid, Poe was an alcoholic, and Virginia Woolf was seriously depressed. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

ImageObviously creativity and originality are associated with persons who do not fit into their culture. However, this does not necessarily mean that the creativity is the product of the neurosis. The association of creativity with neurosis presents us with a dilemma—namely, if by psychoanalysis we cured the artists of their neuroses would they no longer create? This dichotomy, as well as many others, arise from the reductive theories. Furthermore, if we create out of some transfer of affect or drive, as implied in sublimation, of if our creativity is merely the by-product of an endeavor to accomplish something else, as in compensation, does not our very creative act then have only a pseudo value? We must indeed take a strong stand against the implications, however they may creep in, that talent is a disease and creativity is a neurosis. We sail on a vast expanse, ever uncertain, ever drifting, hurried from one to the other goal. If we think to attach ourselves firmly to any point, it totters and fails us; if we follow, it eludes our grasp…vanishing forever. Nothing stays for us. This is our natural condition, yet always the most contrary to our inclination; we burn with desire to find a steadfast place and an ultimate fixed basis whereon we may build a tower to reach the infinite. However, our whole foundation breaks up, and Earth opens to the abysses. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

Image We may not then look for certainty. Our reason is always deceived by changing shows, nothing can fix the infinite between the two infinities, which at once close and fly from it. The heart has its reason which reason know not. The relationship between power and love is shown in myth. Recall that Eros, god of love, is the offspring of Aphrodite and Ares, god of war or strife. In what better way could the ancient Greeks have told us that there is no love without aggression? However, even more surprising is the name of another child which blessed this union, Harmonia. The word means that which is fitting, in proportion, in concord—and it seems paradoxical in the extreme. However, is it not appropriate that harmony should  be a dynamic proportion between strife and beauty? The empirical relationship of power and love is illustrated in the closeness of the two in the problem of violence, the converse of power. Violence is most apt to occur between persons who are closely tied emotionally and, therefore, vulnerable to each other. According to a statistical study of homicides in the city of Sacramento, which is in the state of California, the majority of murders are committed against a member of the family. The most dangerous room, again judged in terms of the likelihood of murder occurring there, is the bedroom. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

ImageAccording to M. E. Wolfgang, “If you are a woman over 16, your murderer will most likely be a husband, lover, or relative. When a man is killed, the killer is most likely to be his wife. The bedroom is the most murderous room in the house.” Maybe that is why bad partners are sent to sleep on the couch. In marriage and in relationships between couples we see a similar relationship between love and power. There is a necessity of combining self-assertion (power) with tenderness (love) in the pleasures of the flesh. Without tenderness, the caring and the sensitivity for the feelings and delight of the other is absent; and without self-assertion the capacity to put one’s self fully into the act is missing. When love and power are seen as opposites, love tends to be the abject surrender of one partner and the subtle (or not so subtle) domination by the other. These are often the sadomasochistic marriages. When the aim is to be guided only by love, assertion and aggression are obviously ruled out as being too tainted with power. There results a clinging to one another, an absorption in each other. Missing are the firmness of assertion, the structure and the sense of dignity that guard the rights of each of the partners. Such relationships may swing back and forth, from surrender as a form of love to violence as a form of power. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

ImageEveryone is familiar with the news clippings telling how a devoted wife or husband of thirty years suddenly took a hatchet to his or her mate in a peculiarly bloody murder. This extreme example reveals the problem in a love that does not have within it a realistic assertion of power. There is statistical grounds for the common saying that marriage with someone who is undercontrolled—for instance, blows up from time to time—may make for turmoil and frequent fighting, but it does not make for murder. The docile, overcontrolled individual, the one who appears kind all the time, can be the one who releases one’s aggression in one big blowup. This accords with our thesis that violence occurs when a person cannot live out one’s needs for power in normal ways. It is only when one’s intermittent nature becomes obvious, however remarkable and uplifting they may have seemed, that one who experienced them is ready to seek for the higher Truth. This is not only a matter of personal feeling, but also of impersonal intuitive knowledge confirmed by reason and experience. Not everyone will enter into the kingdom of Heaven. Only to a very few is it given to enter and remain stabilized in the kingdom; many more must be content with glimpses only. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

ImageThe belief is all too common that union with God is experienced as a tremendous uprush of ecstatic emotion. This is true in several cases, but not in all. In any case, only after the excitement has abated and calm has descended on the being will one be able to see whether this is merely another of those temporary glimpses or whether it is really a lasting discovery of one’s divine identity. For the truth is that such a durable discovery of one’s divine identity. For the truth is that such a durable discovery, such an ever-present fulfillment of one’s highest possibilities, comprises much more than this inspired, but still personal experience. It is true that our sins and faults are automatically dispersed by the inrush of Enlightenment, but it is equally true that they will return if we have no prepared our selves to be able to stay in the Light. To gaze upon this great light without sufficient precious training of the inward life is ordinarily not possibly for more than a short time. The few exceptions who were able to stay in the light unbrokenly were beings of special genius and special destiny. Those who have obtained the abiding state are in the sanctuary, but those who have attained the transient one are only at the gate. Visions, mental states, and experiences may succeed each other progressively, but they are not the same as a continuous stabilized awareness of that which is behind all these temporary states. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

ImageIn one’s earlier years, if it does not fulfill one’s expectations, the seeker may try one kind of institution of a religious or mystical character and then move to a different one. In this way one may experiment with different creeds and different forms of practice. This may be useful so far as it exposes one to the influences which are needed to balance one another. However, if one ever does, it may be bewildering. Most traditional forms, or the newer organizations which have some sort of spiritual teaching, are useful in the beginning to most people. However, this is not to say that they are going to be useful always. They have their limitations, and at certain stage may prevent further advance. However, those who can stand alone are always smaller in number:  most persons will frankly admit that they cannot, certainly most young and elderly persons. This is the justification for the need of organizations, groups, churches, and priesthoods. They offer what seems fixed support in life, stable in doctrine, superior nobler holier and wiser than what the ordinary person finds in oneself. This is why philosophy attracts the few, those who are, or who can be trained to become, strong enough to walk a lonely path. For us, the end is always on the covenant path through the temple to eternal life, the greatest of all gifts of God. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

ImageWe know this flight in our dreams, perhaps because we knew it in some celestial realm beyond this Earth before we were born. However, sometimes we cannot conceive of the sight of eternal life as Earthly creatures because we have somehow forgotten, or damaged and torn our heart and soul. Seeing darkness where we expect to see light reminds us that one of the fundamental needs we have in order to grow is to stay connected to our source of light—Jesus Christ. He is the source of our power, the Light and Light of the World. Without a strong connection to Christ, we begin to spiritually die. Knowing that, Satan tries to exploit the Worldly pressures we all face. He works to dim our light, short-circuit the connection, cut off the power supply, leaving us alone in the dark. Satan operates a lot like Lestat in Ann Rice’s Tales of the Body Thief. When David is reborn in a new body, tall, with tan skin and blonde hair and lean, Lestat turns him into a Vampire to steal his joy. He was infuriated that David experienced a miracle which allowed him to give up his 74-year-old body and take over the beautiful body of a twenty-six-year-old male. Out of the miracle came youth, rebirth, and Lestat could not stand to see David profit. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

ImagePressures in life are common conditions in morality, but Satan works hard to isolate us and tell us we are the only one experiencing them. When tragedies overtake us, when life hurts so much we cannot breathe, when we have taken a beating like the man on the road to Jericho and been left for dead, Jesus come along and pours blessings into our wounds, lefts us tenderly up, takes us to an inn, looks after us. Jesus will ease the burdens which are put upon our shoulders, that even we cannot feel then upon our backs, that we may know of a surety that the Lord, our God will and does visit his people in our afflictions. It is not intended that we run faster than we have the strength. However, in spite of that many of us run very, very fast and the energy and emotional supply sometimes registers close to being on E—empty. When expectations overwhelm us, we can step back and ask Heavenly Father what to let go of. Part of out life experience is learning what not to do. However, even so, sometimes life can be exhausting. Jesus assures us, “Come unto me, all ye that labour and are heavy laden, and I will give you rest,” reports Matthew 11.28. Christ is willing to join with us in the yoke and pull in order to listen our burdens. Christ is rest. Should I ever take ease upon a bed of leisure, may that same moment mark my end! #RandolphHarris 18 of 18Image

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Miss-Fabulous-aaliyah-31078570-1597-2560If the intellectual were to admit that one also has power, although a different kind from that of the politician, the businessman, and the military leader, it would clear the air. Furthermore, modern society clearly needs the intellectuals and their guidance; the corporate power needs to be shared with them as well as with the other disinherited groups of society. It is worthwhile to recall that in The Queen of the Damned, by Anne Rice, Lestat de Lioncourt, the intellectual vampire appears to be getting ready to be decapitated, but is pulled in by Queen Akasha, the 6,000-year-old most powerful and first vampire in the World. However, later Queen Akasha faces a struggle, when all the vampires turn against her and is herself decapitated by one of the redhead witches the was responsible for bring the dark forces into her life that cursed her with vampirism. This is a graphic allegory of the role of intellectual and the nutrient power that one can express in our day. Be careful who you are willing to die for, as they may not be there to nourish you in your time of need. I have argued against the idea that there is an irreconcilable incompatibility between power and the intellectual. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22

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

 

 

 

I Love You Anyway, is it So Rare that I Have Been Sleeping with the Dead?

ImageBut, finally, when I put the papers aside and sat thinking these things over, the strangeness of it did not matter. What mattered was that I was more utterly alone in the World than I had ever been in all my life. That Claudia was gone beyond reprieve. And I had less reason to live than I had ever had, and less desire. Armand showed no concern at my facing him, and as soon as our eyes met I wished the World were not one black empty ruin of ashes and death. I wished it were fresh and beautiful, and that we were both living and had love to give each other. I wanted to lay down my soul, to find some transcendent pleasure that would obliterate pain and make me utterly forget even myself. Before, all art had held for me the promise of a deeper understanding of the human heart. Now the human heart meant nothing. I did not denigrate it. I simply forgot it. The almost perfect symmetrical balance of the Claude Monet 1874, The Railroad Bridge at Argenteuil—how out of the dense growth of the near bank, a train emerges, as we witness nature in the process of giving way to the forces of civilization. With eternal nature being pitted against the contemporary moment expressing how this painting captures the dawn of a new World, a World of opposition and contradiction. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

ImageAs I stood on the sidewalk before the doors of the hotel waiting for the carriage that would take me to meet Armand, I saw the people who walked there—the restless boulevard crowd of well-dressed ladies and gentlemen, the hawkers of papers, the carriers of luggage, the drivers of carriages—all these in a new light. Yet, the magnificent paintings of the Louvre still were not for me intimately connected with the hands that had painted them. They were cut loose and dead like children turned to stone. Without love, all the beauty in the World is reduced to ashes. The principle of monotheism is that beings are infinite, that there is no partial quality in one which can be hypostatized into the whole. God, in the monotheistic concept, is unrecognizable and indefinable; God is not a thing. If beings are created in the likeness of God, one is created as the bearer of infinite qualities. In idolatry beings bows down and submits to the projection of one partial quality in oneself. One does not experience oneself as the center from which living acts of love and reason radiate. One becomes a thing, his neighbor becomes a thing, just as his gods are things. The idols of the heathen are silver and gold, sliver and gold, but I would rather have Jesus than silver and gold—work of being’s hands are inferior to my Lord. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

ImageSo many people have mouths but they speak now; eyes have they, but they see not; they have ears but they hear not; nether is there any breath in their mouths. They that make them are like them; so is everyone that trusts in them. “And thus they might murder, and plunder, and steal, and commit whoredoms and all manner of wickedness, contrary to the laws of their country and also the laws of God. And whosoever of those who belonged to their band should reveal unto the World of their wickedness and their abominations, reports Helaman 6.23-24. Monotheistic religions themselves have, to a large extent regressed into idolatry. Beings projects their power of love and of reason unto God; one does not feel them any more as one’s own powers, and then one prays to God to give one back some of what one, men and women, have projected unto God. In early Protestantism and Calvinism, the required religious attitude is that beings should feel oneself empty and impoverished and put one’s trust in the grace of God, that is, into the hope that God may return to one part of one’s own qualities, who one has put into God. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

ImageEvery act of submissive worship is an act of alienation and idolatry in this sense. What is frequently called love is often noting but this idolatrous phenomenon of alienation; only that not God or an idol, but another person is worshipped in the way. The loving person in this type of submissive relationship, projects all his or her love, strength, thought, into the other person, and experiences the loved person as a superior being, finding satisfaction in complete submission and worship. This does not only mean that one fails to experience the loved person as a human being in his or her reality, but that one does not experience one’s self in one’s full reality, as the bearer of productive human powers. Just as in the case of religious idolatry, one has projected all one’s richness into the other person, and experiences this richness not any more as something which is one’s, but as something alien from oneself, deposited in somebody else, with which one can get in touch only by submission to, or submergence in, the other person. The same phenomenon exists in the worshipping submission to a political leader, or to that state. The leader and the state actually are what they are by the consent of the governed. However, they become idols when the individual projects all one’s powers into them and worships them, hoping to regain some of one’s powers by submission and worship. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

ImageIn Rousseau’s theory of the state, as in contemporary totalitarianism, the individual is supposed to abdicate one’s own rights and to project them unto the state as the only arbiter, which is the kind of behavior we are seeing from the mayor and governor of California in particular at this time. And that is the reason career politicians like Edmund Gerald Brown Jr., who served as the 34t and 39th Governor of California from 1975 to 1983 and from 2011 to 2019 are dangerous because they can basically set up a dictatorships and then pass that same kind of authority on to their successor to the point the people and their votes do not matter because the state has all the power and virtually goes unchallenged. He was also mayor of Oakland, California from 1999-2007, so Edmund Gerald Brown Jr. was able to deeply embed his roots of corruption in California. Furthermore, it did not help the people that Edmund Gerald “Pat” Brown Sr. also served as the 32nd Governor of California from 1959 to 1967. This allowed the Brown’s to run California as if were their family business. For instance, the twin tunnel project to ship water from the Sacramento River to Southern California was actually Pat Brown’s idea, which stated when he was in office and was supposed to take sixty years, and this was a project Jerry Brown also tried to implement. However, environmentalist believe that this $104 billion project would destroy the environment and be too expensive. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

ImageIn fascism, which we are seeing a resurgence of with the democrats having a super majority in California and with them being in bed with a low of judges, is a type of Stalinism that leads absolutely to the alienation of individuals who worship the state at the altar of an idol, and it makes little difference by what names this idol is knowns as: state, class, collective, or what else. Under Jerry Brown and his father Pat Brown an Ethnic cleansing started in San Francisco, California in 1967 and the population of Black went from about 100,000 to 40,000. The Browns red tagged many of the Victorian homes and businesses owned by Blacks and tore them down to put up project-based housing high rises and to expand the freeway. This displaced a lot of Black Americans and lead to the loss of a lot of Black wealth (millions of dollars per household) from the appreciated equity of the property. The ethnic cleansing inspired the 2019 film The Last Black man in San Francisco. Therefore, we can speak of idolatry or alienation not only in relationship to other people, but also in relationship to oneself, when the person is subject to irrational passions. The person who is mainly motivated by one’s lust for power, does not experience oneself any more in the richness and limitlessness of a human being, but one becomes a salve to one partial striving in one, which is projected into external aims, by which one is possessed. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

ImageThe person who is given to the exclusive pursuit of one’s passion for money is possessed by one’s striving for it; money is the idol which one worships and the projection of one isolated power in oneself, one’s greed for it. In this sense, the neurotic person is an alienated person. One’s actions are not one’s own; while one is under the illusion of doing what one wants, one is driven by forces which are separated from one’s self, which work behind one’s back; one is a stranger to oneself, just as one’s fellow beings are a stranger to the individual. One experiences the other and one’s self not as what they really are, but distorted by the unconscious forces which operate in them. The insane person is the absolutely alienated person; one has completely lost oneself as the center of one’s own experience; one has lost the sense of self. What is common to all these phenomena—the worship of idols, the idolatrous worship of God, the idolatrous love for a person, the love of a political leader or the state, and the idolatrous worship of the externalization or irrational passions—is the process of alienation. It is the fact that beings do not experience themselves as the active bearer of one’s own power and richness, but as an impoverished thing, dependent on powers outside of oneself, unto whom one has projected one’s living substance. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

ImageWhat is common to all these phenomena—the worship of idols, the idolatrous worship of God, the idolatrous love for a person, the worship of a political leader or the state, and the idolatrous worship of the externalizations of irrational passions—is the process of alienation. It is the fact that beings do not have experience one’s self as the active bearer of one’s own powers and richness, but as an impoverished thing, dependent on powers outside of oneself, unto whom one has projected one’s living substance. As the reference to idolatry indicates, alienation is by no means a modern phenomenon. Suffice it to say that it seems alienation differs from culture to culture, both in the specific spheres which are alienated, and in the thoroughness and completeness of the process. Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total; it pervades the relationship of a being to one’s work, to the things one consumes, to the state, to one’s fellow beings, and to oneself. Beings have created a World of things created by beings as it never existed before. They have constructed a complicated social machine to administer the technical machine they built. Yet this whole creation of theirs stands over and above them. One does not feel oneself as a creator and center, but as the servant of a Golem, which one’s hands have built. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

ImageThe more powerful and gigantic the forces are which one unleashes, the more powerless one feels oneself as a human being. One confronts oneself with one’s own forces embodied in things one has created, alienated from oneself. One is owned by one’s creation, and has lost ownership of oneself. One has built a golden calf, and says “these are your gods who have brought you out of Egypt.” However, this is a trap cunningly invented by Satan for your downfall and the body as a tomb dug for your divine soul. Holiness is not necessarily limited to hermits and spiritual teachers; it may also belong to householders. Whether it be the Long or the Short Path, both may be pracitsed in the daily routine of life. The problem is to take advantage of outside help and yet leave the student individually free. Its solution is simple. One can get this help through books written by seers, sages, and philosophers. Those who can only advance by hanging on to a teacher make only a pseudo-advance and one day their house of cards will come tumbling about their ears. However, it is equally true that those who can only progress by dispensing with a teacher, progress father into the morass of ignorance. One alone who can take a teacher’s guidance in a free spirit; who comprehends that while the teacher points out a path, it is for one to strive, toil, and adventure forth; such a being will derive much from one’s discipleship. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

ImageWhen one finds that one can go no farther by oneself, the time has come to look within for more grace or to look without for more guidance. One needs the one to get away from one’s own selfishness or the other to get away from one’s own darkness. There is sometimes conflict between submission to authority and obedience to conscience. The importance of language in an evolving culture is that it provides symbolic forms by means of which we can reveal ourselves and by means of which others stand revealed to us. Communication is a way of understanding each other; if there are no such ways, each of us becomes like the man who, in a dream, find oneself wandering in a foreign country where one can understand nothing of what is being said around one nor feel anything from the person next to one. One’s isolation is great, indeed. During the week end of the Moon landing, a TV reporter interviewed members of the crowd in Central Park just after the landing. One answer to his question of what they were waiting for was: “To see the extravehicular activity.” Now this phrase “extra vehicular activity” gives one pause. Its main word consists of six syllables and is highly technical; it tells, like many technical phrases, what the astronauts are not going to do (extravehicular) rather than what they are going to do. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

ImageThe word “activity” may mean any act under the Sun—swimming, flying, crawling, diving, and so forth. There is no poetry in the sentence, no meaning that is not technical, nothing personal. We finally discover the polysyllabic phrase means “to walk on the Moon.” However, that is a poetic phrase. No word of over one syllable, coming straight out of our own lives (from the age of eight months when we learned to walk), a phrase associated with all the romance of the Moon. It is actually more truthful than its scientific parallel in the sense that it reveals not an abstraction but an act that will be done by human beings like you and me. The more technical we become without a parallel development in the meaningfulness of personal communication, the more alienated we also become. Communication is then replaced by communique. The breakdown of communication is a spiritual one. Words get their communicative power from the fact that they participate in symbols. Through drawing meanings together into a Gestalt, a symbol gets a numinous quality which points toward a reality greater than itself. The symbol gives the word its power to carry across to one some meaning from the emotions of another. Symbolic breakdown is, therefore, spiritual tragedy. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

ImageThe symbol always implies more than it states; it is essentially connotative. Thus, words, in so far as they are symbolic, point to more than they specifically can say; what counts is the afterglow, the ripples of meaning that appear like a stone being dropped in a lake, the connotative rather than the denotative aspects of the words. It is a Gestalt similar to that which the poet uses. A form emerges out of the very speaking of words—which is why people tend to become more poetic when they report something under stress. It also must be remembered that in the days before the art of writing was widely used almost all the earliest texts were handed down from generation to generation by word of mouth alone. This entailed wonderful fears of memory which we must admire but it also entailed the possibility of conscious or unconscious alteration of the texts themselves, against which we must guard ourselves. Whether it happened or not, however, one thing was psychologically unavoidable. This was the interpretation of passages, phrases, or single words according to the unconscious complexes governing the minds and controlling the character of those who preserved and passed down the texts. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

ImageThe inevitable consequence is that words which bore one meaning when they were uttered by the original author came bit by bit to receive a modified or altogether different meaning when they had passed through the mouths and pens of scribes and priests. Many fail to perceive that the real battlefield of human life is internal and not external; some who cannot comprehend the unity of Spirit and matter; beings, in short, who had yet to realize that they were virtuous or sinful primarily as their thoughts were virtuous and sinful—these are set up today as the arbiters of how we twenty-first century beings shall live in a World whose circumstances and systems are beyond their own narrow imaginations. The quest indeed has been turned into something impossibly remote from us, something only to be talked about at tea-tables because we cannot implement it. Such a situation is unacceptable to the philosophic student. Better ostracism, abuse, slander, and misunderstanding than this. All this, of course, is exactly contrary to what we have been taught. We are taught that the more specific and limited a word is, the more accurately we talk. More accurately, yes, but not more truthfully. For we tend, with this point of view, to make our language more and more technical, impersonal, objective, until we are talking in purely scientific terms. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

ImageThis is one legitimate way of communicating, and certainly the way that thrives in a technological age. However, it ends up with computor language; and what I really want to know about my friend as he walks besides me is in the country is as absent as though we were in two vacuum tubes. Beings are not God. There is a fundamental error in making the unity with God to be a unity of nature and not of Grace. The Godly being is untied to God, not however in virtue of one’s essences but by a process of re-creation and regeneration. The mystic who talks vaguely of being one with God must surely know that the experience has not put one in personal management of the Universe. If the mystic really attains a complete identity with the World-Mind, then all the latter’s evolutionary and dissolutionary powers and especially its all-pervading all-knowing character would become the common property of both. However, even the most fully mystic has no such powers and no such character. The frontiers between God and beings cannot be obliterated although the affinity between them can be established. If a being really appreciated one’s own finite littleness and the higher power’s sublime infinity, one would never have the impertinence to claim the attainment of “union with God.” All such talk is irresponsible babble, the careless use of words without semantic awareness of what is being said. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

ImageNo human mind can capture the One Life-Power in all its magnitude, and its understanding of itself and its Universe. All it can do is to act as a mirror, in the deepest recesses of its own being, and in its own humble way, of the attributes which it confers on the Absolute from its own limited human point of view. The rest is silence. Although God is inaccessible to beings, beings are not inaccessible to God. The quest for meaning (and moorings) in a seemingly fathomless World can be found in the earliest forms of literature. The Assyrian-Babylonian text Gilgamesh (3000 B.C.), for example, alludes to a futile search for immortality in an absurd, capricious cosmos. A related Babylonian work, called the Poem of Creation, dramatizes a titanic struggle between the forces of chaos (exemplified by the primordial goddess Tiamat) and the forces of order (represented by the upstart deity Marduk). These legends caused me to go over a plan in my mind, a plan on which I was willing to gamble my life with the powerful freedom of a being who truly does not care for that life, who has the extraordinary strength of being willing to die. “Bless be the name of our God; let us sing to his praise, yes, let us give thanks to his holy name, for he doth work righteousness forever,” Alma 26.8. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15Image

God’s Gift to His Sorrowing Creatures is a Joy Worthy of their Destiny for Harmony is Next to Godliness!

ImageHow many people do you think have the stamina for immortality? They have the most dismal notions of immortality to begin with. For in becoming immortal they want all the forms of their live to be fixed as they are and incorruptible: cars made in the same dependable fashion, clothing of the cut which suited their prime, people attired and speaking in the manner they have always understood and valued. When, in fact, all things change except the individual; everything except the person is subject to constant corruption and distortion. Soon, with an inflexible mind, and often even with the most flexible mind, this immorality becomes a penitential sentence in a madhouse of figures and forms that are hopelessly unintelligible and without value. One evening some people rise and realize what they have feared perhaps for decades, that they simply want no more of life at any cost. That whatever style or fashion or shape of existence made immortality attractive to one has been swept off the face of the Earth. And nothing remains to offer freedom from despair except their children. Otherwise they will have ceased long ago to speak of themselves or of anything. They will vanish. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

ImageI sat back impressed by the obvious truth of it, and yet at the same time, everything in me revolted against that prospect. I became aware of the depth of my hope and my terror; how very different those feelings were from the alienation that he described, how very different from that awful wasting despair. There was something outrageous and repulsive in that despair suddenly. I could not accept it. The alienated being, unable to achieve oneself or reach others, uneasily asks, “Who am I?” What this means in a society like ours is we need tremendous faith, for we have to rely upon the infinite life-power to sustain us henceforth. In taking the vow of obedience, one shows forth one’s great humility, for one confesses that one is unable to guide one’s own life and thought wisely, but will take our guidance henceforth from those who stand nearest to God. As a result, some people take a vow of celibacy, which makes a magnificent gesture of defiance to one’s own lower nature, against which one will henceforth fight and to which one will not willingly succumb. For many, the psychological effects of capitalism do not allow one to experience oneself as the active bearer of one’s own powers and richness, but as an impoverished thing, dependent on powers outside one’s self, unto whom one has projected one’s living substance. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

ImageUnder capitalism, much like any other economic system, alienation can become the fate not only of the workers but of managers (or bureaucrats) and owners or capitalists themselves. That is because we are not focused on spirituality, but our focus, primarily, is on money, which is an abstraction living beings use to acquire things we consume, and we are similarly alienated from each other. The relationship of beings to their fellows is one between two abstractions, two living machines, who use each other. Ultimately, therefore, beings are alienated from themselves since their aim is to sell themselves. However, things have no self and beings who have become things can have no self. The idea of being’s making a thing of themselves is the marketing orientation. This is closely linked with one’s sacrifice of all that is distinctive about themselves to win approval of the group. As a result, there is some spontaneous self which one is prevented from achieving. This leads to some people becoming neurotics, as they are unable to achieve a sense of self, and as a consequence accept a paper identity of personality as a substitute. However, this substitute offers little comfort. The central issue of the effects of capitalism on personality is the phenomenon of alienation. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

ImageBy alienation is meant a mode of experience in which the person experiences one’s self as an alien. One has become, one might say, estranged from oneself. One does not experience oneself as the center of one’s World, as the creator of one’s own acts—but one’s acts and their consequences have become one’s masters, whom one obeys, or whom one may even worship. The alienated person is out of touch with one’s own being as one is out of touch with any other person. One, like the others, is experienced as things are experienced; with the sense and with common sense, but at the same time without being related to oneself and to the World outside productively. The older meaning in which alienation was used was to denote an insane person; aliene in French, alienado in Spanish are older words for the psychotic, the thoroughly and absolutely alienated person. (“Alienist,” in English, is still used for the doctor who cares for the insane.) In the last century the word alienation was used by Hegel and Marx, referring not to a state of insanity, but to a less drastic form of self-estrangement, which permits the person to act reasonably in practical matters, yet which constitutes one of the most severe socially patterned defects. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

ImageIn Marx’s system alienation is called that condition of a being where one’s own act become to one an alien power, standing over and against one, instead of being ruled by one. However, while the use of the word “alienation” in this general sense is a recent one, the concept is a much older one; it is the same to which the prophets of the Old Testament referred as idolatry. It will help us to a better understanding of “alienation” if we begin by considering the meaning of “idolatry.” The prophets of monotheism did not denounce heathen religious as idolatrous primarily because they worshiped several gods instead of one. The essential difference between monotheism and polytheism is not one of number of gods, but is possessed in the fact of self-alienation. Beings spend their energy, their artistic capacities on building an idol, and then one worships this idol, which is nothing but the result of one’s own human effort. One’s life forces have flown into a thing, and this thing, having become an idol, is not experienced as a result of one’s own productive effort, but as something apart from one’s own being, over and against one, which one worships and to which one submits. As the prophet Hosea says (XIV, 8): “Assur shall not save us; we will not ride upon horses; neither will we say any more to the work of our hands, you are our gods; for the fatherless finds love.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

ImageIdolatrous beings bow down to the work of their own hands. The idol represents one’s own life-forces in an alienated form. However, human experience is characterized by freedom (will, creativity, expressiveness) and by limitation (natural and social restraints, vulnerability, and death). The dread of either freedom or limitation promotes extreme or dysfunctional counterreactions to that dread. These counterreactions often manifest themselves in either fanatical overreaching (if the dread centers on one’s limits) or banal timidity (if the dread centers on one’s freedom). The confrontation with or integration of the polarities promotes psychophysiological resilience. The philosopher is not to be advertised by outward signs. Yet if one feels a personal vocation to follow these customs, one is also free to do so. It is simply that there is no necessity in the general sense. There is a halfway stage in the disintegration of words. This is obscenity. It gets power from the using of words to do violence to our unconscious expectations, to destroy our mooring posts, and to undercut the forms of relationship we are used to. The words threaten us with the insecurity of formlessness. Obscenity expresses what has previously been prohibited, reveals what previously was not revealed. Thus it insists on and gets our attention. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

ImageObscenity is the process of attacking what has been sacred and occurs when the word is losing its holy character. It is often factually true that words have already lost all roots to their meaning and have become nothing but empty forms. The same is true in modern art. By showing blood and gore and using sensational colors that carry these impressions, many painters are crying out: “You must look, you must pay attention, you must see in a new way.” This can, indeed, teach us, shocked as we are, not just to look but to see. The breakdown in language has become very clear to many. Nobody really communicates with words anymore. Words have lost their emotional impact, intimacy, ability to shock and make love. However, there is one word Americans have not destroyed. One word which has maintained its emotional power and purity. As you have guessed already, that word is God. It has kept its purity only because it is a force we all call on in our time of need. People who do not believe in God also call on him in situation of extreme distress. The word God does have emotional power. It is connected with tenderness and gentleness, but can also be aggressive and vengeful. An act of God is usually used to describe a disaster beings are not directly responsible for. A miracle is often used to describe when God makes the impossible possible. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

ImageHowever, a word becomes aggressive as a stage in its deterioration: it loses its original meaning, takes on the aggressive for in obscenity, and then may pass into oblivion, as when a person is upset and says, “God damn!” And that is one reason we are not supposed to take the Lord’s name in vein, we must never let the creator of the Universe pass into oblivion, or else we may cease to exist. When it is used to incite people’s aggressive emotions, language can be as violent as physical force. About 230,000 people recently attended a peaceful, graceful demonstration in Hong Kong, China to protest a bill that would allow Hong Kong people to be extradited to mainland China for criminal prosecution. People want the extradition bill terminated because legislation would mean there is no longer any difference between Hong Kong and China. Hong Kong was guaranteed autonomy until 2047. Because there is so much at stake, tensions did flare up and police had to disperse hundreds. Some are only concerned with getting the word out and are totally oblivious to the fact that if you keep chanting, people will get mad, and this rage will have nothing to do with the extradition bill. It will be because words people use in anger to get their points across. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

ImageObscenity is a form of psychic violence and can be used with great effect, a weapon that can excite people to lethal physical violence.  Once should know this when using language. It is a mark of our time that each side in a disagreement uses violent language. This amounts to using violence to defeat violence—which never words, whether it is done by police and administration or by young people themselves. In the stories of the crucifixion the agony and the death of Jesus are connected with a group of events in nature: Darkness covers the land; the curtain of the temple is torn in two; the Earth is shaken and the bodies of saints rise out of their graves. Nature, with trembling, participates in the decisive event of history. The Sun veils its head; the temple makes the gesture of mourning; the foundations of the Earth are moved; the tombs are opened. Nature is in an uproar because of something is happening which concerns the Universe. Since the time of the evangelists, wherever the story of Golgotha has been told as the turning event in the World-drama of salvation, the role of nature played in this drama has also been told. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

ImagePainters of the crucifixion have used all their artistic power to express the darkness over the land in almost unnatural color. I remember my own earliest impression of Good Friday—the feeling of the mystery of the divine suffering, first of all, through the compassion of nature. And so did the centurion, the first pagan who witnessed for the Crucified. Filled with awe, with numinous dread, he understood in a naive-profound way that something more had happened than the death of a holy and innocent man. We should not ask whether clouds or a dust storm darkened the Sun on a special day of a special year, whether an Earthquake happened in Palestine just at that hour, whether the curtain before the holy of holies in the temple at Jerusalem had to be repaired or whether the raised bodies of the saints died again. However, we should ask whether we are able to feel with the evangelists and the painters, with the children and the Roman soldiers, that the event at Golgotha is one which concerns the Universe, including all nature and all history. With this question in our mind let us look at the signs reported by our evangelist. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

ImageThe Sun veiled its face because of the depth of evil and shame which it saw under the Cross. However, the Sun also veiled its face because its power over the World had ceased once and forever in these hours of its darkness. The great shining and burning God of everything that lives on Earth, the Sun who was praised and feared and adored by innumerable human beings during thousands and thousands of years, had been deprived of its divine power when one human being in ultimate agony maintained his unity wit that which is greater than the Sun. Since those hours of darkness it is manifest that not the Sun, but a suffering and struggling soul which cannot be broken by all the powers of the Universe is the image of the Highest, and that the Sun can only be praised in the way of St. Francis, who called it our brother, but not our god. The curtain of the temple was torn in two. The temple tore its gown as the mourners did because Christ, to whom the temple belonged more than to anybody else, was thrown out and killed by the servants of the temple. However, the temple belonged more than to anybody else, was thrown out and killed by the servants of the temple. However, the temple—and with it, all temple on Earth—also complained of its own destiny. The curtain which made the temple a holy place, separated from other places, lost is separating power. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

ImageOne who was expelled as blaspheming the temple, had cleft the curtain and opened the temple for everybody, for every moment. This curtain cannot be mended any more, although there are priests and ministers and pious people who try to mend it. They will not succeed because Christ, for whom every place was a sacred place, a place where God is present, has been brought on the Cross in the name of the holy place. When the curtain of the temple was torn in two, God judged religion and rejected temples. After this moment temples and churches can only means places of concentration on the holy which is the ground and the meaning of every place. And like the temple, the Earth was judged at Golgotha. Trembling and shaking the Earth participated in the agony of the man on the Cross and in the despair of all those who had seen in him the beginning of the new eon. Trembling and shaking the Earth proved that it is not the motherly ground on which we can safely build our houses and cities, our cultures and religious systems. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

ImageTrembling and shaking the Earth pointed to another ground on which the Earth itself rests: the self-surrendering love on which all Earthly powers and values concentrate their hostility and which they cannot conquer. Since the hour when Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed his last and the rocks were split, the Earth ceased to be the foundation of what we build on her. Only insofar as it has a deeper ground, can it stand; only insofar as it is rooted in the same foundation in which the Cross is rooted, can it last. And the Earth not only ceases to be the solid ground of life; she also ceases to be the lasting cave of death. Resurrection is not something added to the death of him who is the Christ; but it is implied in his death, as the story of the resurrection before the resurrection indicates. No longer is the Universe subjected to the law of death out of birth. It is subjected to a higher law, to the law of life out of death by the death of Christ who represented eternal life. When one man in whom God was present without limited committed his spirit into this Father’s hands, the tombs were opened and bodies were raised. Since this moment the Universe is no longer what it was; nature has received another meaning; history is transformed and you and I are no more, and should not be any more, what we were before. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

ImageLiving beings are not God. Yet one can approach God so intimately, be suffused by his presence so completely, that the first mystics to call this state union with God may be excused. The telepathic closeness which sometimes exists between two separated lovers, relatives, or friends is a slight hint of the telepathic closeness which exists between the harmonized human ego and its divine soul. In my alleged claim that every human being can develop the divinity within oneself, I do not mean that we humble mortals can ever rise to the stature of the Almighty, and I completely concur with the warning against beings attempting to join partners with God. I mean only that we have within us something that is lined with and related to God: it is our higher self, the discovery of and union with which represents the limit of our possible attainment. If it is wiser and humbler to leave some mystery at the bottom of all our intellectual understanding of life than to indulge in self-deceiving finality about it, then it is no less wiser and humbler to acknowledge the ultimate mystery at the heart of all our immediate mystical experience of life. The mystic’s claim to know God when one knows only the deepest part of one’s own self, is one’s particular kind of vanity. Whatever terminous and transcendental consciousness one may discover there, something ever remains beyond it lost in utter inscrutability. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

ImageThe World-Mind is impenetrable by human power. This agnostic conclusion does not, however, touch the validity of the mystic’s more legitimate claim, that the human soul is knowable and that an unshakeable union with it is attainable. The mystic may indeed feel the very stuff of God in one’s rapture but this does not supply one with the whole content of God’s knowledge. If therefore one claims not only to be one with God but also to be one with God’s entire consciousness, it is sheer presumption. The mystical union with God can never be a union of nature and substances, can never achieve a complete identity of the atom with the Infinite. What is possible of achievement is, to speak in terms of spatial symbolism which is the only satisfactory way of treating such a transcendental subject, to unite with a single point within the immeasurable infinite of God. We should learn to discern the truth not only through our rational minds but also through the very still and small voice of the Spirit. We can trust in our loving Heavenly Father, who is constantly trying to help be become the person he knows we can become. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

ImageIn addition to our rational minds, another dimension to gaining knowledge can give us guidance and understanding. It is the still and soft voice of his Holy Spirit speaking to our hearts and also to our minds. We have been given two sources of information, through our physical and spiritual capacities. When these two perspectives are then combined in our souls, one complete picture shows the reality of things as they truly are. We will find our Father’s voice in many places. We will find it when we pray, study the scriptures, attend church, engage in faithful discussion, or go to the temple. However, answers are sometimes slow to come. Still, if you have made the wrong decision, God will not let you proceed too far without a warning impression. Much grotesque misconception exists among the mystics about this claim to have untied with God, however. Not having passed through the metaphysical discipline and consequently having only a confused notion of what God is, they do not comprehend how exaggerated their claim is. For if they were really untied with God, they should have the power of God too. They would be able to set up as creators of entire Universes, of Suns, Stars, and cosmic systems. This feat is plainly beyond them. Let us hear no more of such babble and let them confine their strivings to realizable aims. God’s gift to his sorrowing creatures is a joy worthy of their destiny. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16Image

Refuse to Cover the Signs of the End in Our Lives and in Our Souls–We Are a Generation of the End and We Should Know What We Are!

ImageI do not know if God exists, and for all I do know, he does not exist. Then no sin matters. No sin achieves evil. However, they may not be true. Because if God does not exist, we are the creatures of highest consciousness in the Universe. We alone understand the passage of time and the value of every minute of human life. And what constitutes evil, real evil, is the taking of a singe human life. Whether a person would have died tomorrow or the day after or eventually, it does not matter. Because if God does not exist, this life, every second of it, is all we have. And sometimes we can feel the thoughts of others. I know you have heard the saying, “You could can the tension in the room with a knife.” Well thoughts can be a palpable in the air like smoke. Not read them, you understand, but feel the power of them. It is good to be respectful. Some do not want power over other because if they exercise such power, then one must protect it. One will make enemies. And one will have forever to deal with their enemies when all they want here is a certain space, a certain peace. Or not to be here at all. The only power that exists is inside ourselves. Of the many consequences of his rupture between state and being, most spectacular is the irrational myth of the state—the setting for modern dictatorship. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

ImageHowever, dictatorships represent only the most extreme form of the alienation of the state. In democratic societies also government, like so many other social institutions originally designed to serve beings, threatens to become their master. Behind the growing sense of isolation in society, behind the whole quest for community which infuses so many theoretical and practical areas of contemporary life and thought, is possessed in the growing realization that the traditional primary relationships of beings have become functionally irrelevant to our State and economic and meaningless to the moral aspirations of individuals. The state has power to do great good as well as evil; and we are not joining those true reactionaries who dream of dismantling it. What we are suggesting is that the state even when providing necessary services is detached from individual needs. How to redress this imbalance between state and being has become a burning issue for all beings, right and left, who would reorder our society. Meanwhile, armed with ever greater police powers and increasingly effective means of persuasion, the modern state is now in a position to exploit the most terrible anxieties of beings for its own purposes, with the help of the fake news media. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

ImageWhen the United States Government announced that it was conducting experiments of a death ray or neutron bomb, and 5G internet service, striking examples of this power was provided recently. This exquisitely refined technology will operate selectively, snuffing out human and animal life among the enemy, but leaving things—houses, antiquities, automobiles, aircrafts, shops, factories, furnishings, machines—untouched. A soldier in a tank or an office staff in a building would die, but the tank and the building would remain intact. There would be no lingering radioactivity, o that the attackers could take over and occupy the tank and the building without fear of contamination. Who would say that the alienation of modern beings is not now complete? The sketches of some—by now means all—of the conditions and influences alienating beings in modern society have been pointed out. However, can these conditions be altered and alienation overcome? Answers to this question demand the best thinking and planning of which our civilization is capable; they require thinking from the heart as well as the head; they demand co-operation among many diverse groups and nations. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

ImageThe task of healing our alienated community will be difficult, for the very tools of our analysis and planning tend to be alien forces, compelling us to deal with separate aspects of an interrelated set of problems. Being’s inhumanity to other beings is age-old, such as critics say: the oppressed less affluent have always been with us; work has always been drudgery (the fall of beings made it so); cruelty and torment are ever the common lot. As to the danger of nuclear war and mass extermination, the human beast has always lived dangerously, invented new and more terrible weapons, and in short loves hanging and drawing and quartering every bit as well as war and slaughtering. However, the argument runs, though this strange rather likeable human animal may be foolish and destructive, yet somehow one is crafty enough to survive, both as an individual and as a species. Acceptance of things as they are and have always been is the essence of this view. Its proponents consider alienation an inescapable part of the living condition of beings with which one must learn to live—alone. According to this approach, no amount or kind of social planning will succeed in alleviating the situation, and on the contrary may make it worse. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

ImageIn short, alienation is relative. Anthropology teaches that simpler, more solidaristic communities are not spared the personal disorders which we associate with complex age of information societies. And if citizens of the affluent society feel sorry for themselves, let them remember that most beings on Earth have never tasted any of the fruits of freedom. Our view, however, has been that alienation in modern society represents not a change of degree but of kind. Here we emphasize that what we are concerned with is not inhumanity, which has existed all through history and constitutes part of the human form, but a-humanity, a phenomenon of rather recent date. This a-humanity, this breakdown of distinctively human qualities and values, culminates in such horrors as the A-bomb or the concentration camp, the sudden slump of an overwrought civilization into that strange, systematized bestiality. The horror of the fake news media regime, its use of the most-up-to-date techniques of hacking and data mining, lies and distortion make it one of the lowest, sub-human, indeed sub-bestial kind, and in some way is related to the subtlest political and law enforcement experiences manifesting themselves in society and culture. Overcivilization, too much technology, and concomitant dehumanization are of the most crucial problems of our age. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

ImageThe deep suspicion of language and the impoverishment of ourselves and our relationships, which are both cause and result, are rampant in our times. We experience the despair of being unable to communicate to others what we feel and what we think, and the even greater despair of being unable to distinguish for ourselves what we feel and are. Underlying this loss of identity is the loss of cogency of the symbols and myths upon which identity and language is based. The breakdown of language is graphically pictured in Orwell’s 1984, in which the people not only go through the doublethink process but use word to mean exactly their opposites—for instance, war means peace. In Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, we are similarly gripped when Pozzo, the industrialist, commands his slave Lucky, the intellectual, to “Think, pig!….Think!” Lucky beings to orate a word salad of lengthy phrases strung together without a period that continues for three full pages. He finally collapses in a faint on the stage. It is a vivid portrayal of the situation that exists when language communicates nothing at all expect empty erudition. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

ImageThe breakdown is shown in the students’ protest against the “words, words, words” to which they must listen, in their sickness of heart at hearing the same things mouthed over and over again, and in their readiness to accuse faculty and others of “word garbage” or “verbal masturbation.” This is generally meant as a criticism of the lecture method, but it also represents what the television news has become. However, what they really are—or ought to be—talking about is a particular kind of lecture that does not communicate being from one person to another. It must be admitted that all too often this has been a characteristic of academic life, which makes the student protest against irrelevant education distinctly more relevant. The shelves of college libraries are weighed down with books that were written because other books were written because still other books were written—the meat of the meal getting thinner and thinner until the books seem to have nothing to do with the excitement of truth but only with status and prestige. And in the academic World, these last two values can be powerful indeed. Small wonder the young poets are disillusioned with talk, and they hold, as they did in the San Francisco love-in, that the best poem is a blank sheet of paper. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

ImageAt such a time, in our alienation and isolation, we long for a simple, direct expression of our feelings to another, a direct relation to one’s being, such as looking into one’s eyes to see and experience one or standing quietly beside one. We yearn for a direct expression of one’s and our moods and emotions with no barriers. We seek a kind of innocence that is as old as human evolution but some to us as something new, the innocence of children in paradise again. We long for a direct expression through our bodies of intimacy to short-cut the time of knowing the other that intimacy usually takes; we want to speak through our bodies, to leap immediately into identification with the other, even though we know it is only partial. In short, we yearn to bypass the whole symbols/verbal-language hang-up. Thus the great trend toward action therapies in or day in contrast to talking, and the conviction that truth will emerge—if it ever will—when we are able to live out our muscular impulses and experiences rather than get lost in dead concepts. Hence encounter groups, marathons, nude therapy, the use of barbiturates and other illicit substances. This is, in short, the bringing of the body into a relationship when there is no relationship. Whatever relatedness there is is ephemeral: it springs up multicolored and bright today, and often will be but a damp place where sea foam has evaporated on our hand tomorrow. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

ImageMy aim is not to derogate these forms of therapy nor to disparage the use of the body. My body remains one way in which my self can express itself—in this sense I am my body—and surely it is to be appreciated. However, I am my language as well. And I wish to point out the destructive trend represented in action therapies precisely in their implicit attempt to bypass language. For these action therapies are closely related to violence. As they become more extreme, they hover at the edge of violence, both in the activity within the group itself an in the preparation of the participants or anti-intellectualism outside. The longing for them really has its seat in despair—the despondent fact of not being understood, of not being able to communicate or to love. It is the endeavoring to jump over that period of time required for intimacy, the trying to immediately feel and experience the other’s hopes and dreams and fears. However, intimacy requires a history, even though the two people have to create history. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

ImageWe forget at our peril that beings are a symbol-making creature; and if the symbols (or myths, which are a pattern of symbols) seem arid and dead, they are to be mourned rather than denied. The bankruptcy of symbols should be seen for what it is, a way station on the path of despair. The distrust of language is bred into by experiencing the medium is the message phenomenon. Most of the words coming over TV are lies not in the sense of outright falsehood (that would imply a still remaining respect for the word) but in the sense that the words are used in the service of selling the personality of the speaker rather than in communicating some meaning. This is the more subtle form of emphasizing not the meaning of the word but the public-relations value of it. Words are not used for authentic, humanistic goals: to share something of originality or personal warmth. The medium is then the message with a vengeance; as long as the medium works, there is no message. The phrase “credibility gap,” which is conspicuous in wartime but is present in other times as well, goes much deeper than anyone’s mere intention to deceive. We listen to the news dispatches and find ourselves wondering where the truth really lies and why the reporters and anchors constantly lie, spread rumors, and distort the truth. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

ImageIn our day it often seems that deception has been accepted as the means of communication. That is why the fake news media pushed their Russia election conspiracy, to cover up the fact the TV news is full of lies and wants to confuse them people and not present the truth so they can influence the elections. In this confusion, there is a more serious aliment in our public life: language bears less and less relationship to the item being discusses. There is a denial of any relationship to underlying logic. The fact that language has its roots in a shared structure is entirely ignored. The way language is used by the fake news media often denies the whole structure of communication. There is relationship in their reports to the question asked. In extreme and persistent form, this is one species of schizophrenia; but in our day it is simply called news and politics. And suddenly the lid is torn off. The picture of Death appears, unveiled, in a thousand forms. As in the late Middle Ages the figure of Death appears in news, pictures, poetry, politics, and the Dance of Death with every living being is painted and sung, so our generation—the generation of World wars, information, technology, revolutions, and mass migrations—rediscovers the reality of death. We have seen millions die in war, hundreds of thousands die illegally migrating all over the World, hundreds of thousands in revolutions, tens of thousands in persecutions and systematic purges of underrepresented groups. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

ImageMultitudes as numerous as whole nations still wander over the face of the Earth or perish when they are turned away, in boat or by foot, from the countries they want to enter; in them is embodies a part of these tremendous events in which Death has again grasped the reins which we believed it has relinquished forever. Such people carry in their souls, and often in their bodies, the traces of death, and they will never completely lose them. You who have never taken part yourself in this great migration must receive these others as symbols of a death which is a component element of life. Receive them as people who, by their destiny, shall remind us of the presence of the End in every moment of life and history. Receive them as symbols of the finiteness and transitoriness of every human and living being concern, of every human and living being’s life, and of every created thing. We have become a generation of the End and those of us who have been refugees and exiles in our own communities or in the greater World should not forget this when we have found a new beginning here or in another land. The End is nothing external. It is not exhausted by the loss of that which we can never regain: our childhood homes, the people with whom we grew up, the country, the things, the language which formed us, the goods, both spiritual and material, which we inherited or earned, the friends who were torn away from us by sudden death. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

ImageThe End is more than all this; it is in us, it has become our very being. We are a generation of the End and we should what we are. Perhaps there are some who think that what has happened to the and to the whole World should now be forgotten. Is it not more dignified, truer and stronger to say “yes” to that which is our destiny, to refuse to cover the signs of the End in our lives and in our souls, to let the voice of Death be heard? Amid all the new possibilities offered to us, must we not acknowledge ourselves to be that which destiny has made us? Must we not confess that we are symbols of the End? And this End is of an age which was both great and a lie. It is the End for all finitude which always becomes a lie when it forgets that it is finite and seeks to veil the picture of death. However, who can bear to look at this picture? Only one who can look at another picture behind and beyond it—the picture of Love. For love is stronger than death. Every death means parting, separation, isolation, opposition and not participation. So it is, too, with the death of nations, the end of generations, and the atrophy of souls. Our souls become poor and disintegrate insofar as we want to be alone, insofar as we bemoan our misfortunes, nurse our despair and enjoy out bitterness, and yet turn coldly away from the physical and spiritual need of others. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

ImageLove overcome separation and creates participation in which there is more than that which individuals involved can bring to it. Love is the infinite which is given to the finite. Therefore we love in others, for we d not merely love others, but we love the Love that is in the and which is more than their or our love. In mutual assistance what is most important is not the alleviation of need but the actualization of love. Of course, there is no love which does not want to make the other’s need its own.  However, there is also no true help which does not spring from love and create love. Those who fight against death and disintegration through all kinds of relief agencies know this. Often very little external help is possible. And the gratitude of those who receive help is first and always gratitude for love and only afterwards gratitude for help. Love, not help, is stronger than death. However, there is no love which does not become help. Where help is given without love, there new suffering grows from the help. It is love, human and divine, which overcomes death in nations and generation and in all the horror of our time. Help has become almost impossible in the face of the monstrous powers which we are experiencing. Death is given power over everything finite, especially in our period of history. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

ImageHowever, death is given no power over love. Love is stronger. It creates something new out of the destruction caused by death; it bears everything and overcomes everything. It is at work where the power of death is strongest, in war and persecution and homelessness and hunger and physical death itself. It is omnipresent and here and there, in the smallest and most hidden ways as in the greatest and most visible ones, it rescues life from death. It rescues each of us, for love is stronger than death. Use the power inside you. Do not abhor it anymore. Use that power! And when they see you in the streets above us, use that power to make your face a mask and think as you gaze on them as on anyone: beware. Take that word is if it where an amulet given to you to wear about your neck. And when your eyes meet with your enemy’s eyes, or the eyes of anyone else, speak to them politely what you will, but think of that word and that word only. It is an icon of love. Feel the love. Not physical love, you must understand. True love is what a student and teacher share. Knowledge would never be withheld by a real teacher. No geographical limits ought to be set for the sources whence a being draws spiritual sustenance. Why exclude other lands and remain shut in with India alone? #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

ImageNor should any temporal limits be set for it. Why exclude the modern Word and remain shut in with the ancient one alone? Enlightened individuals have been born all through history, have contributed their ideas beliefs experiences and revelations, and all through the social scales. This is so, must be so, because Truth, Reality, Goodness, and Beauty, in their best sense, are in the end got from within. God is in your very being. To know him as something apart or far-away in time and distance or as an object outside yourself, separate from you—that is not the Way—impossible. Jesus gave away the secret: he is within you. It is surprising how widely people have ignored Jesus’ message (“The kingdom of Heaven is within you”) when its means is so clear, its phrasing so strong. If a being lives in harmony with the divine World-Idea, one may also live in trust that one will receive that which belongs to one. This will be brought about either by guiding one to it or guiding it to one. “All things whatsoever the Father hath are mine.” That which you need is yours now—if only you could raise yourself to the recognition of your true relation to your Overself. The heart, which abandons itself to the Supreme Mind, finds itself related to all its works, and will travel a royal road to particular knowledges and powers. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16Image

Our Eternal Life is Useless to Us if We Do Not See the Beauty Around Us, the Creation of Mortals Everywhere!

ImageI think the very name of Paris brought a rush of pleasure to me that was extraordinary, a relief so near to well-being that I was amazed, now only that I could feel it, but that I had so nearly forgotten it. I wonder if you can understand what it meant. My expression cannot convey it now, for what Paris means to me is very different from what it meant then, in those days, at that hour’ but still, even now, to think of it, I feel something akin to that happiness. And I have more reason now than ever to say that happiness is not what I will ever know, or will ever deserve to know. I am not so much in love with happiness. Yet the name Paris makes me feel it. Mortal beauty often makes me ache, and mortal grandeur can fill me with that longing I felt so hopelessly in the Mediterranean Sea. But Paris, Paris drew me close to her heart, so I forgot myself entirely. Forgot the damned and questioning preternatural thing that doted on mortal skin and mortal clothing. Paris overwhelmed, and lightened and rewarded more richly than any promise. It was the mother of New Orleans, understand that first; it had given New Orleans its life, its first populace; and it was what New Orleans had for so long tried to be. However, New Orleans, though beautiful and desperately alive, was desperately fragile. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

ImageThere was something forever savage and primitive there, something that threatened the exotic and sophisticated life both from within and without. Not an inch of those wooden streets nor a brick of the crowded Spanish houses had not been bought from the fierce wilderness that forever surrounded the city, ready to engulf it. Hurricanes, floods, fevers, the plague—and the damp of the Louisiana climate itself worked tirelessly on every hewn plank or stone façade, so that New Orleans seemed at all times like a dream in the imagination of her striving populace, a dream held intact at every second by a tenacious, though unconscious, collective will. However, Paris, Paris was a Universe whole and entire unto herself, hollowed and fashioned by history; so she seemed in this age of Napoleon III with her towering buildings, her massive cathedrals, her grand boulevards and ancient winding medieval streets—as vast and indestructible as nature itself. All was embraced by her, by her volatile and enchanted populace thronging the galleries, the theaters, the cafes, giving birth over and over to genius and sanctity, philosophy and war, frivolity and the finest art; so it seemed that if all the World outside her were to sink into darkness, what was fine, what was beautiful, what was essential might there still come to its finest flower. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

ImageEven the majestic trees that graced and sheltered her streets were attuned to her—and that waters of the Seine, contained and beautiful as they wound through her heart; so that the Earth on that spot, so shaped by blood and consciousness, had ceased to be the Earth and had become Paris. We were alive again. We were in love, and so euphoric was I after those hopeless nights of wandering in Eastern Europe. The estrangement of many late-nineteenth-century artist from prevailing cultural values established a model of rejection; and since their time the alienated hero—if one can be called a hero—has occupied a major place in the World of art and literature. For more than a century the European literary outlook has one constant, always predominant and ever more profoundly rooted characteristic: the consciousness of estrangement and loneliness. This mood colors the poetry of Yeats, Rilke, Pound, Eliot; it figures in the works of Gide, Kafka, Thomas Mann, Hemingway, Thomas Wolfe, Alberto Moravia, and Sartre—to name just a few. To the alienated being as seen by these authors, life is essentially meaningless or absurd—the idea of absurdity being another contribution by Kierkegaard to the lexicon of alienation. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

ImageA World than can be explained by reasoning, however faulty, is a familiar World. However, in a Universe that is suddenly deprived of illusions and of light, beings feel a stranger. One is an irremediable exile, because one is deprived of memories of a lost homeland as much as one lacks the hope of a promised land to come. This divorce between beings and their life, the actor and one’s setting, truly constitutes the feeling of absurdity. A stranger is unrelated to anything or anyone at all, a being for whom everything is meaningless, a being who murders and feelings nothing, a being who ends one’s tale of nothingness and absurdity by saying, “For all to be accomplished, for me to feel less lonely, all that remained to hope was that on the day of my execution there should be a huge crowd of spectators and that they should greet me with howl of execrations.” The idea that the human condition is essentially one of alienation now plays an important part in society. If you crammed a ship full of human bodies till it burst, the loneliness inside would be so great, that they would turn to ice…so great is our isolation that even conflict is impossible. When the fake news media and people in our society are directed toward the atomized World of beings and its values to the point life seems surreal and becomes deliberately nihilistic, meaningless, even anti-art, anti-law and order, anti-truth and ugly, something Biblical is taking place. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

ImageThe new century is full of such deep antagonisms, the unity of its outlook on life is so profoundly menaced, that the combination of the farthest extremes, the unification of the greatest contradictions, becomes the main them, often the only theme in life. Humanity is caught at a moment of inhumanity, caught at a time of discontinuity, of appalling, invidious, silent horror. Many people find themselves alienated and revolted by the prevailing values of their society. Others too rebel, although more quietly. In a recently study, the decline of utopian thinking in the young generation in the Untied States has been described as a nation unwilling to accept what the culture offers. Alienation, once seen as the conquest of a cruel (but changeable) economic order, has become for many the central fact of human existence, characterizing being’s thrownness into a World in which one has no inherent place. Formerly imposed upon beings by the World around them, estrangement increasingly is chosen by them as their dominant reaction to the World. Where can love be found if your heart will not feel? Indifference is their chief response. Looming over the alienated mass society and its culture is the power of the modern state. Remote from human needs, implacable in its thrust for power, bureaucratic government completes the process of alienation which we have been sketching. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

ImageOnce again, we are witnessing not the beginning but the culmination of a long development. We can trace the rise of the secular state to Machiavelli. With Machiavelli we stand at the gateway of the modern World. The desired end is attained; the state has won its full autonomy. Yet this result has had to be bought dearly. The state is entirely independent; but at the same time it is completely isolated. The sharp knife of Machiavelli’s thought has cut off all the threads by which in former generations the state was fastened to the organic whole of human existence. The political World has lost its connection not only with religion or metaphysics but also with all the other forms of being’s ethical and cultural life It stands alone in an empty space. Existential psychology (for our purposes) is both complementary to and integrative of other psychological approaches. Not only is it concerned with the psychological influences of biology, environment, cognition, and social relations, but it is also concerned with the full network of relations—including those with cosmic features—that inform and underlie those modalities. Let us take the case of Babette, for example, to illustrate this integrative view. For years, Babette has felt empty inside, hollow—and for years she has masked over those feelings. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

ImageBabette has consumed herself with barbiturates, for example, forged herself with food, and inflated herself with falsehoods. However, when the shades close at night, or when the partying ceases, the hollowness in Babette returns—and with increasing ferocity. The very latest imports from France and Spain: crystal chandeliers and Oriental carpets, silk screens with painted birds of paradise, canaries singing in great domed, golden cages, and delicate marble Grecian gods and beautifully painted Chinese vases could not keep her happy. Even though the luxury enthralled many, the new flood of art and craft and design, one could start at the intricate pattern of the carpet for hoers, or watch the gleam of the lamplight change the somber colors of a Dutch painting. She even hired a painter to make the walls of her room a magical forest of unicorns and golden birds and laden fruit trees over sparkling streams. An endless train of dressmakers and shoemakers and tailors came to her mansion to outfit her in the best fashions, so that she was always a vision, not just of an heiress beauty, with her curling lashes and her glorious raven black hair, but of the taste of finely trimmed hats and lace gloves, flaring velvet coats and capes, and sheer white puffed-sleeve gowns with gleaming blue sashes. Babette was treated as if she were a magnificent doll. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

ImageAnd then strange things began to happen. Babette would be found in the arm of her chair reading the work of Aristotle or Boethius or a new novel just come over the Atlantic. Or pecking out the music of Chopin, Bach, and Mozart. We heard the night before with an infallible ear and a concentration that made her ghostly as she sat there hour after hour discovering the music—the melody, then the bass, and finally bringing it together. Babette was a mystery. It was not possible to know what she knew or did not know. Babette was exasperated when she steps into my office on this misty evening. She is 20, depressed, and isolated She has tried many treatments, she tells me bitingly, but they invariably fall short of the mark. To be sure, she is quick to elaborate, they do help to a point. Thy serve to maintain her, or get her through the night. They help her to change habits, for example, or to chemically alter her mood. They give her thought exercises and practical, rational advice. They reward her when appropriate and discourage her when necessary. They help her to learn the reasons for her despair, and the distortions, consequently, of having misunderstood those reasons. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

ImageExistential therapy could help to break this pattern, I think to myself as Babette sits across from me. It could work in conjunction with other therapies, deepening her hard-won gains. For example, in addition to helping Babette think more logically about her hollowness, I would also work with her to explore that hollowness—to see what it is about, to immerse herself in it, and to experience its (immediate, kinesthetic, and affective) dimensions. The more she can work with these dimensions, I would propose, the less they will threaten her and the more she can range freely within them. She can then be freed from the vicious cycle of compartmentalized therapies to seek richer meanings of long terms in her life—and she can forgo her compensatory masks. The problems of Babette and her oversimplified cures—indeed the problems of mainstream psychology—are but microcosms of a society wide epidemic. It is an epidemic of part-methods treating part-lives, of quick fixes and easy solutions that console, but fail to genuinely confront, human problems. The signs of the epidemic are legion: The erosion of the environment is traceable to get-rich-quick methods of industrial disposal. Impression management, trickle down economics, and “just say no” to drugs are the new watchwords of presidential politics. Great procurements of revenue are spent on a strong and powerful military (while funds for health care, those without homes, affordable housing, and job training dwindle). #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

Image Divisiveness and violence become increasingly acceptable problem-solving strategies. Given the above, what is our position—the existential-integrative position—in psychology, and how will t be used? First, existential-integrative psychology is a revaluation of the oversimplified and one-dimensional thinking that, in our experience, permeates conventional portrays of human being. We perceive two basic dangers in the conventional approach—a tendency to unduly bot reduce and exaggerate the human condition. On the reductionist side, we see an increasing trend toward conceiving human beings as machines—precise mathematical tools that can readily accommodate to an automated, routinized lifestyle. With respect to exaggeration, we are concerned about trends in our field that depict the human being as a god (one can predict and control both internal and external environments) and trends that shun the challenges of human vulnerability. We are also concerned about more recent trends, such as those of postmodernism, which appear to stridently subvert the (shared) or foundational aspects of human being and leap headlong into relativism. Beyond these critical analyses, however, existential-integrative psychology also proposes a vision. While we have already hinted at this vision psychotherapeutically, we now present a more comprehensive statement. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

ImageWhether one be outside in the World or inside in the cloister is not so important to one as whether one’s thoughts and feelings, one’s character and consciousness have right direction. Either of these environments may be a hindrance or a help to one’s spiritual aspirations, depending on its particular nature.  Yes, if one uses it for this specific purpose, even the Word may be a means of advancement. It is less important whether or not we live under monastic rules than whether we live faithfully in the purpose which prompted those rules to be formulated. The purification of the mind may be accomplished at home or it may be accomplished in an ashram-monastery. Do not be carried away from truth by the bigots who denounce the one or the other place!  People who have stepped out of the World may have stepped into a vocation which is proper and good for the, but it is not necessary and not right to suggest that everyone else should do so. First of all, everyone else could not do so. It is not a matter so much of staying with the Worldings and doing their work nor of fleeing to isolated religious groups and following their disciplines, as of comprehending the mentalist secret and of keeping an inner detachment. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

ImageDetachment from the World is an absolute necessity for the beings who seek authentic inner peace, and not its imagined counterfeit. However, renouncement of the World is not necessary to any expect those who have an inborn natural vocation for spiritual isolation. There is something deeper than our ordinary thoughts and feelings, something that is our inmost essential self. It is the soul. It is here, if we can reach to it, that we may meet in fellowship with the Divine. Through it the World-Mind reveals something of its own mysterious nature. One has come far when one has come to feel not only that divinity truly is but also that it is as near as one’s own being. One discovers that Consciousness, the very nature of mind under all its aspects, the very essence of be-ing under the personal selfhood, is where beings and God finally meet. One knows that God indisputably exists, not because some religious doctrines which are rigid and strict avers it but because one’s own experience proves it. There is a vital and definite connection between every being’s mind and the Universal Mind, between one’s individual existence and Its existence. Because of this connection one is called upon to worship It to commune with It and to love It. Only as a result of being liberate from oneself, taken out of oneself, can one find the universal being. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

ImageThe illuminated beings of earlier generations, who usually appeared at the beginning of each historical epoch and from whose ranks the great social lawgivers and religion-founders were drawn, had no personal master for none was available at the time. Who taught them? It was none other than the World-Mind, operating directly through each being’s Overself and within one’s human consciousness. Whoever is unable to find an outward master in our own times may still find, when one has worked on oneself sufficiently to be ready for it, this same direct inward help (grace) from the World-Mind if one turns to that Mind. Through the power of the God within the seeker can be led to a higher truth, or what the Greek thinkers called the Logos can help one to find for oneself. If one refuses to seek and cling to the human personality of any master but resolves to keep al the strength of one’s devotion for the divine impersonal Self back of one’s own, that will not bar one’s further progress. It, too, is a way whereby the goal can be successfully reached. However, it is a harder way. Socrates got his wisdom from within himself. He had no master. The teachings of Jesus were not based on any of the ancient doctrines—that is, those of the great Jewish people, Egyptians, or Indians. They were entirely Self-inspired. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

ImageThe human mind is fortunate in this, that it has a connection with the Divine Mind. It can become one’s spiritual teacher and moral guide. However, one must be careful: first, not to mix one’s own opinion with what one receives; second, and not less but more important, to put oneself through a preparatory and purificatory discipline to make the connection vitalized. After all, it is the Overself which was the real Teacher to all of the teachers. “We know that we have passed out of death into life, because we love the brethren. One who does not love remains in death,” reports I John 3.14. In our time, as in every age, we need to see something which is stronger than death. Death has become powerful in our time, in individual human beings, in families, in nations and in living beings as a whole. Death has become powerful—that is to say that the End, the finite, and the limitations and decay of our beings have become visible. For nearly a century this was concealed in Western civilization. We had become masters in our early household. Our control over nature, and our social planning has widened the boundaries of our beings; the affirmation of life had drowned out its negation which no longer dared make itself heard, and which fled into the hidden anxiety of our hearts, becoming fainter and fainter. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

ImageWe forgot that we are finite, and we forgot that the abyss of nothingness surrounding us. We had gathered into our barns the fruits of thousands of years of toil. All generations of beings had labored so that we, the generation of fulfillment, might tread death under our feet. It was not death in the sense of the natural end of life which we thought to have destroyed, but death as a power in and over life, as the Lord and master of the soul. We kept the picture of death from our children and when here and there, in our neighborhood and in the World, mortal convulsions and the End became visible, our security was not disturbed. For us these events were merely accidental and unavoidable, but they were not enough to tear off the lid which we had fastened down own the abyss of our being. Lestat possessed the wisdom of a sorcerer, the powers of a witch…I might have come to understand that he had somehow managed to wrest a conscious life from the same forces that governed these monsters. “I was obliged to be industrious. Whoever is equally industrious will succeed equally well. The aim and final reason of all music should be none else but the glory of God and refreshing the soul. Where this is not observed there will be no music, but only a devilish hubbub,” reports Johann Sebastian Bach. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15Image

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

16Individuals in the mass societies of the twenty first century are to an ever increasing extent involved in public affairs; it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore them. However, ordinary individuals have ever less the feeling that they can understand or influence the very events upon which their life and happiness [are] known to depend. Many public issues are highly complex; to exercise citizenship intelligently, men and women and others must have an inkling of where their interests are possessed. If they find politics incomprehensible, they will be encouraged to depend on experts and leaders and the fake new media (also known as the propaganda department) to interpret and decide for them. However, as a poet, there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one’s language from corruption. And that is particularly serious now. It is being so quickly corrupted. When it is corrupted, people lose faith in what they hear, and this leads to violence. When an age is in the throes of profound transition, the first thing to disintegrate is the language. This leads directly to the upsurge of violence. Billy Budd, at his trial after he had killed the master-at-arms with his fist, exclaims: “Could I have used my tongue I would not have struck him. I could say it only with a blow.” Not being able to find his tongue (because of his severe stuttering), he could only speak by means of the physical expression of his passion. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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