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There is No Better Way in this World to Lose Something Forever than to Prejudge it!

November 15, 2019 4:54 pm

No human being in the World has ever risen to greatness without a correspondingly great soul. When this is no longer true, then will our civilization have to come to an end. Even the most misfitting child who’s changed upon the soul’s worth, sits with the genius of the Earth and turns they key to the whole World. In one applies it around themselves like scaffolding, theory can obscure and individual. When working in difficult places, scaffolding does provide the builder a secure place to stand and gives architects the opportunity to view an emerging building from new angles. However, a builder’s rough scaffolding can easily camouflage and be mistake for the intricate architecture is surrounds. Similarly, people can erect theory around other individual’s quickly—often automatically—when they are uncertain and hoping for a surer vantage point, as in the opening vignette. One of the most formidable challenges of being human, then, is to draw structure from a particular orientation without letting theory obscure the complex, unique individual in front of you. We have preserved this life, and the soul has preserved us. Exploring deeply can mean thinking not about the way one came to be the way one is, but that one is. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

The Greeks, who were apparently strong visual learners, originated the term stigma to refer to bodily signs designs to expose something unusual and bad about the moral status of the signifier. The signs were cut or burnt into the body and advertised that the bearer was a slave, a criminal, or a traitor—a blemished person, ritually polluted, to be avoided, especially in public places. Later, in Christian times, two players of metaphor were added to the term: the first referred to bodily signs of holy grace that took the form of eruptive blossoms on the skin; the second, a medical allusion to this religious allusion, referred to bodily signs of physical disorder. Today the term is widely used in something like the original literal sense, but is applied more to the disgrace itself than to the bodily evidence of it. Furthermore, shifts have occurred in the kinds of disgrace that arouse concern. Society establishes the means of categorizing persons and the complement of attributes felt to be ordinary and natural for members of each of these categories. Social setting established the categories of person likely to be encountered there. The routines of social intercourse in established settings allow us to deal with anticipated others without special attention or thought. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

When a stranger comes into our presence, then, first appearances are likely to enable us to anticipate one’s category and attributes, one’s “social identity”—to use a term that is better than “social status” because person attributes such as “honesty” are involved, as well as structural ones, like “occupation.” We lean on these anticipations that we have, transforming them into normative expectations, into righteously presented demands. Typically, we do not become aware that we have made these demands or aware of what they are until an active question arises as to whether or not they will be fulfilled. It is then that we are likely to realize that all along we had been making certain assumptions as to what the individual before us ought to be. Thus, the demands we make might better be called demands made “in effect,” and the character we impute to the individual might better be seen as an imputation made in potential retrospect—a characterization “in effect,” a virtual social identity. The category and attribute one could in fact be proved to possess will be called one’s actual social identity. While the stranger is present before us, evidence can arise of ones possessing an attribute that makes one different from others in the category of persons available for one to be, and of a less desirable kind—in the extreme, a person who is quite thoroughly bad, or dangerous, or weak. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

One is thus reduced in our minds from a whole and unusual person to a tainted, discounted one. Such an attribute is a stigma, especially when its discrediting effect is very extensive; sometimes it is also called a failing, a shortcoming, a limitation. It constitutes a special discrepancy between virtual and actual social identity. Note that there are others types of discrepancy between virtual and actual social identity, for example the kind that causes us to reclassify an individual from one socially anticipated category to a different but equally well-anticipated one, and the kind that causes us to alter our estimation of the individual upward. Not, too, that not all undesirable attributes are at issues, but only those which are incongruous with our stereotype of what a given type of individual should be. The term stigma is used to refer to an attribute that is deeply discrediting, but should be seen as a language of relationships, not attributes, is really needed. An attribute that stigmatizes one type of possessor can confirm the usualness of another, and therefore is neither creditable nor discreditable as a thing in itself. For example, some jobs in American cause holders without the expected college education to conceal this fact; others job, however, can lead the few of their holders who have a higher education to keep this a secret, lest they be marked as failures and outsiders. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

Similarly, a middle class boy may feel no compunction in being seen going to the library; a professional criminal, however, writes this: “I can remember before now on more than one occasion, for instance, going into a public library near where I was living, and looking over my shoulder a couple of times before I actually went in just to make sure no one who knew me was standing about and seeing me do it.” So, too, an individual who desires to fight for one’s country may conceal a physical defect, lest one’s claimed physical status be discredited; later, the same individual, embittered and trying to get out of the army, may success in gaining admission to the army hospital, where one would be discredited if discovered in not really having an acute sickness. A stigma, then, is really a special kind of relationship between attribute and stereotype, although I do not propose to continue to say so, in part because there are important attributes that almost everywhere in our society are discrediting. The term stigma and its synonyms conceal a double perspective: does this stigmatized individual assume one’s differentness is known about already or is evident on the spot, or does one assume it is neither known about by those present nor immediately perceivable by them? In the first case one deals with the plight of the discredited, in the second with that of the discreditable. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

This is an important difference, even though a particular stigmatized individual is likely to have experience with both being discredited, and discreditable, the two cannot always be separated. However, remaining committed to understanding and describing one’s World as he or she experiences it—even when formulating—helps individuals be sure they are focusing on the architecture, not the scaffolding. “No confraternity or sodality has ever been made sacred expect by the faith of those who formed it, as there is no known power beyond this World or in in that can make anything sacred except the power we claim for ourselves. We are children of the Universe no matter who thinks otherwise, we live and breathe and think and dream as do all sentient beings, and no one has a right to condemn us or deny us the right to love and live,” (Page 425 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice). Three different types of stigma may be mentioned. First there are abomination of the body—the various physical deformities. Next there are blemishes of individual character perceived as weak will, domineering or unnatural passions, treacherous and rigid beliefs, and dishonesty, these being inferred from a known record of, for example, mental disorder, imprisonment, addiction, alcoholism, sexuality, unemployment, suicidal attempts, and radical political behavior. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

Finally, there are tribal stigma of race, nation, and religion, these being stigma that can be transmitted though lineages and equally contaminate all members of a family. In all of these various instances of stigma, however, including those the Greeks had in mind, the same sociological features are found: an individual who might have been received easily in ordinary social intercourse posses a trait that can obtrude itself upon attention and turn those of us whom one meets away from one, breaking that claim that one’s other attributes have on us. One possesses a stigma, an undesired differentness from what we had anticipated. We and those who do not depart negatively from the particular expectations at issue I shall call the normal. Some have “rebelled in their own way against the inevitable isolation that closes around us all; they have survived because the beauty of life would not let them leave it; and a thirst for knowledge has been born in them—a thirst for new ages and new forms and new expression of art and love—even as they see everything that have cherished crumbling and fading away. This is our Universe. We too are made of stardust as are all things on this planet; we too belong,” (Page 426 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice). #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

The attitudes we normal have toward a person with a stigma, and the actions we take in regard to one, are well known, since these responses are what benevolent social action is designed to soften and ameliorate. By definition, of course, we believe the person with a stigma is not quite human. On this assumption we exercise varieties of discrimination, through which we effectively, if often unthinkingly, reduce one’s life chances. We construct a stigma-theory, an ideology to explain one’s inferiority and account for the danger one represents, sometimes rationalizing an animosity based on other differences, such as those of social class. We use specific stigma terms such as cripple, bastard, moron in daily discourse as a source of metaphor and imagery, typically without giving a thought to the original meaning. We tend to impute a wide range of imperfections on the basis of the original one, and at the same time to impute some desirable but undesired attributes, often of a supernatural cast, such as “six sense,” or “understanding”: For some, there may be a hesitancy about touching or steering the blind, while for others, the perceived failure to see may be generalized into a gestalt of disability, so that the individual shouts at the blind as if they were deaf or attempts to lift them as if they were crippled. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

Those confronting the blind may have a whole range of belief that is anchored in the stereotype. For instance, they may think they are subject to unique judgment, assuming the blinded individual draws on special channels of information unavailable to others. Further, we may perceive one’s defensive response to one’s situation as a direct expression of one’s defect, and then see both defect and response as just retribution for something one or one’s parents or one’s tribe did, and hence a justification of the way we treat one. Now turn from the normal to the person one is normal against. It seems generally true that members of a social category may strongly support a standard of judgment that they and others agree does not directly apply to them. Thus it is that a business person may demand womanly behavior from females or ascetic behavior from monks, and not construe oneself as someone who ought to realize either of these styles of conduct. The distinction is between realizing a norm and merely supporting it. The issue of stigma does not arise here, but only where there is some expectation on all sides that those in a given category should not only support a particular nor but also realize it. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

Also, it seems possible for an individual to fail to live up to what we effectively demand of one, and yet be relatively untouched by this failure; insulated by one’s alienation, protected by identity beliefs of one’s own, one feels that one is a full-fledged normal human being, and that we are the ones who are not quite human. One bears a stigma but does not seem to be impressed or repentant about doing so. Sometimes it may be difficult to know, at times, whether we have been hurt more by friends or our enemies. Human’s awesome scientific advances into the infinitude of pace as well as the infinitude of sub-atomic particles seems mostly likely to lead to the total destruction of the World unless we can make great advances in understanding and deal with interpersonal and inter-group tensions. I believe that when we accept ourselves as we are, then we change. I believe that we have learned this from others in society as well as within our own experiences—that we cannot change, we cannot move away from what we are, until we thoroughly accept what we are. Then change seems to come about almost unnoticed. Another result that comes out of being myself is that relationships then become real. Real relationships have an exciting way of being vital and meaningful, and real relationships tend to change instead of reaming static. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

Very rarely do we permit ourselves to understand precisely what others are saying. Our first reaction to most of the statements which we hear from other person is an immediate evaluation, or judgment, rather than an understanding of it. I believe this is because understanding is risky. If I let myself really understand another person, I might be changed by that understanding. And we all fear change. So as I say, it is not an easy thing to permit oneself to understand an individual, to enter thoroughly and completely and empathically into one’s frame of reference. It is also a rare thing. To understand is enriching in a double way. I learned from other’s experiences in ways that change me, that make me a different and, I think, a more responsive person. Even more important perhaps, is the fact that my understanding of these individuals permits them to change. It permits them to accept their own fears and bizarre thoughts and tragic feelings and discouragements, as well as their moment of courage and kindness and love and sensitivity. And it is their experience as well as mine that when someone fully understands those feelings, this enables them to accept those feelings in themselves. Then they find both the feelings and themselves changing. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

Whether it is understanding a woman who feels that very literally she has a hook in her head by which other lead her about, or understanding a man who feels that no one is as lonely, no one is as separated from others as he, I find these understandings to be of value to me. However also, and even more importantly, to be understood a very beneficial value to these individuals. Here is another learning which has had importance for me. I have found it enriching to open channels whereby others can communicate their feelings, their private perceptual Worlds, to me. Because understanding is rewarding, I would like to reduce the barriers between others and me, so that they can, if they wish, reveal themselves more fully. On a national scale, we cannot permit another individual to think differently than we do. Yet it has come to seem to me that this separateness of individuals, the right of each individual to utilize one’s experience in one’s own way and to discover one’s own meanings in it,–this is one of the most priceless potentialities of life. Not surprisingly, one good way to start designing an essential being is to plan to allow one’s soul to flourish and let its heart shape the rest. The soul gets you through times of no money better than money will get you through times of no soul. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

Each person is an island unto oneself, in a very real sense; and one can only build bridges to other islands if one is first of all willing to be oneself and permitted to be oneself. So I find that when I can accept another person, which means specifically accepting the feelings and attitudes and beliefs that one has as a real and vital part of one, then I am assisting one to become a person: and there seems to me great value in this. The next learning I want to state may be difficult to communicate. It is this. The more I am open to the realities in me and in the other person, the less do I find myself wishing to “fix things.” As I try to listen to myself and the experiencing going on in me, and the more I try to extend that same listening attitude to another person, the more respect I feel for the complex process of life. So I become less and less inclined to hurry to fix things, to set goals, to mold people, to manipulate and push them in the way that I would like them to go. I am much more content simply to be myself and to let another person be oneself. I know this must seem strange. If we are not going to do things to people, what is life for? If we are not going to mold them to our purposes, what is life for? If we are not going to teach the thing things that we think they should learn, what is life for? If we are not going to make them think and feel as we do, what is life for? #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

How can anyone hold such an inactive point of view as the one I am expressing? I am sure that attitudes such as these must be a part of the reaction of many of you. Yet the paradoxical aspect of my experience is that the more I am simply willing to be myself, in all this complexity of life and the more I am willing to understand and accept the realities in myself and in the other person, the more change seems to be stirred up. It is a very paradoxical thing—that to the degree that each one of us is willing to be oneself, then one finds not only oneself changing; but one finds that other people to whom one relates are also changing. At least this is a very vivid part of my experience, and one of the deepest things I think I have learned in my personal and professional life. All my professional life I have been going in directions that others thought were foolish, and about which I have had many doubts myself. However, I have never regretted moving in directions which felt right, even though I have often felt lonely or foolish at the time. I have found that when I trusted some inner non-intellectual sensing, I have discovered wisdom in the move. In fact, I have found that when I have followed one of these unconventional paths because it felt right or true, then in five or ten years many of my colleagues have joined me, and I no longer need to feel alone in it. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

As I gradually come to trust my total reactions more deeply, I find that I can use them to guide my thinking. I have come to have more respect for those vague thoughts which occur in me from time to time, which feel as thought they were significant. I am inclined to think that these unclear thoughts or hunches will lead me to important areas. I think of it as trusting the totality of my experience, which I have learned to suspect is wiser than my intellect. It is fallible I am sure, but I believe it to be less fallible than my conscious mind alone. My attitude is very well expressed in saying carrying on my own humble creative effort, I depend greatly upon that which I do not yet know, and upon that which I have not yet done. Very closely related to this learning is a corollary that, evaluation by others is not a guide for me. The judgments of others, while they are to be listened to, and taken into account for what they are, can never be a guide for me. This has been a hard thing to learn. I remember how shaken I was, in the early days, when a scholarly thoughtful being who seemed to me a much more competent and knowledgeable psychologist than I, told m what a mistake I was making by getting interested in psychotherapy. It could never lead anywhere, and as a psychologist I would not even have the opportunity to practise it. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

In later years it has sometimes jolted me a bit to learn that I am, in the eyes of some others, a fraud, a person practicing medicine without a license, the author of a very superficial and damaging sort of therapy, a power seeker, a mystic, and so forth. And I have equally been disturbed by equally extreme praise. However, I have not been too much concerned because I have come to feel that only one person (at least in my lifetime, and perhaps ever) can know whether what I am doing is honest, thorough, open, and sound, or false and defensive and unsound, and I am that person. I am happy to get all sorts of evidence regarding what I am doing and criticism (both friendly and hostile) and praise (both sincere and fawning) are a part of such evidence. However, to weigh this evidence and to determine its meaning and usefulness is a task I cannot relinquish to anyone else. Experience is, for me, the highest authority. The touchstone of validity is my own experience. No other person’s ideas, and none of my own ideas, are as authoritative as my experience. It is to experience that I must return again and again, to discover a closer approximation to the truth as it is in the process of becoming me. Neither the Bible nor the prophets—neither Dr. Freud nor research—neither the revelations of God nor man or woman—can take precedence over my own direct experience. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

My experience is not authoritative because it is infallible. It is the basis of authority because it can always be checked in new primary ways. In this way its frequent error or fallibility is always open to correction. I enjoy the discovering order in my experience. It seems inevitable that I seek for the meaning or the orderliness or lawfulness in any large body of experience. In is this kind of curiosity, which I find it very satisfying to purse, which as led me to each of the major formulations I have made. It is justified because it is satisfying to perceive the World as having order, and because rewarding results often ensure when one understands the orderly relationships which appear in nature. Suppose our hypotheses were disproved! Suppose our opinions were not justified! Every bit of evidence one can acquire, in any area, leads one that much closer to what is true. And being closer to the truth can never be harmful or dangerous or unsatisfying thing. So while I still hate to readjust my thinking, still hate to give up old ways of perceiving an conceptualizing, yet at some deeper level I have, to a considerable degree, come to realize that these painful reorganizations or what is known as learning, and that though painful they always lead to a more satisfying because somewhat more accurate way of seeing life. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

I feel I can only puzzle my way though life and I will find a much more satisfying approximation to the truth. I am sure the facts will be my friends. The very way of feeling which has seemed to me the most private, most personal, and hence the most incomprehensible by others, has turned out to be an expression for which there is a resonance in many other people. It has led me to believe that what is most personal and unique in each one of us is probably the very element which would, if it were shared or expressed, speak most deeply to others This has helped me to understand artists and poets as people who have dared to express the unique in themselves. When I can sensitively understand the feelings which people are expressing, when I am able to accept them as separate persons in their own right, then I find that they tend to move in certain directions. And what are these directions in which they tend to move? The words which I believe are most truly descriptive are words such as beneficial, constructive, moving toward self-actualization, growing toward maturity, growing toward socialization. I have come to fee that the more fully the individual is understood and accepted, the more one tends to drop the false fronts with which one has been meeting life, and the more one tends to move in a direction which is forward. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

I would not want to be misunderstood on this. I do not have a Pollyanna view of human nature. I am quite aware that out of defensiveness and inner fear individuals can and do behave in ways which are incredibly cruel, horribly destructive, immature, regressive, anti-social, hurtful. Yet none of the most refreshing and invigorating parts of my experience is to work with such individuals and to discover the strongly beneficial directional tendencies which exist in them, as in all of us, at the deepest levels. Life at its best, is a flowing, changing process in which nothing is fixed. Life is the most richest and most rewarding it is a flowing process. To experience this is both fascinating and a little frightening. I find I am at my best when I can let the flow of my experience carry me, in a direction which appears to be forward, toward goals of which I am but dimly aware. In thus floating with the complex stream of my experiencing, and in trying to understand its ever-changing complexity, it should be evident that there are no fixed points. Life is guided by a changing understanding of an interpretation of my experience. It is always in process of becoming. I can only try to live by my interpretation of the current meaning of my experience, and try to give others the permission and freedom to develop their own inward freedom and thus their own meaningful interpretation of their own experience. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

If there is such a thing as truth, this free individual process of search should I, believe, converge toward it. And in a limited way, this is also what I seem to have experienced. “But what endures is what has always matter: love—that we love one another as surely as we are alive. And if there is any hope for us to ever really be good—that hope will be realized through love. To love any one person or thing truly is the beginning of the wisdom to love all things. This has to be so. It has to be. I believe it and I do not really believe anything else,” (Page 440 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice). Where is the being who is free of the ego? To one we must bow deep reverence, in wondering admiration, in enforced humility. Here is one who has found one’s true self, one’s personal independence, one’s own being. Here at last is a free being, someone who has found one’s real worth in a World of false values. Here at last is a truly great being and truly sincere being. Whosoever enters into this realization becomes a human Sun who sheds enlightenment, radiates strength, and emanates love to all beings. One’s serenity is alive and buoyant, not lethargic and dull. “And it came to pass that the work of the Lord did prosper unto the baptizing and uniting to the church of God, many souls, yea, even tens of thousands. Thus we may see that the Lord is merciful unto all who will, in the sincerity of their hearts, call upon his holy name,” reports Helaman 3.26-27. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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The Right Way to Teach Beings is to Propose Truth, Not Impose it!

November 10, 2019 6:26 am

I climbed swiftly up the mountain until I was in the thick of the old forest that extended to the very end of my ancestral land, moving effortlessly through the snow that had exhausted me when I was a young boy and a young man. Many of the old trees I recalled were gone, and I was in a dense thicket of spruce and other fire trees when I came to the cement bench I had hauled to this high and deserted place when I had first returned in the twentieth century. It was a common kind of garden bench, curved about the bark of an immense tree, and deep enough for me to sit comfortably with my back against the tree to look down on the distant Chateau with her glorious lighted windows. On, the cold Winters I had spent under that roof, I thought, but only in passing. I was almost used to it now, the splendid palace that the old castle had become, and this sense of ownership, of being the lord of this land, the lord who could walk out to the very boundaries, and gaze on all that one ruled. I shut out the sound of distant music, voices, laughter. I wake slowly and without enthusiasm, spinning out each moment as long as possible. Here, under the bedclothes, is the safety of the primeval cave, the womb warmth of the lord’s lair. All humanity loves the security and comfort of these slow, drowsy moments: to us, they are vital. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

More than sleep itself, they stoke up our energy, making unreal past and future, and all the present except the sweet laziness of muscle and the mind’s soft meanderings. It is, I supposed, about an hour before full consciousness crowds in on me and I can no longer lie in peace. I wish, I really wish, it were possible to prolong that state of trance indefinitely, to hibernate my way into eternity so that the World’s events, great and small, passed unnoticed and unfelt. However, as I have gradually extended my sleeping hours from the normal eight to twelve or more, to fill in the long and empty days, I suppose I cannot complain. For myself, I am content enough alone, although at times the need for emotional contact with another human being becomes hard to bear. I cannot be bothered to cook anything, so I make a pot of tea, have a slice of break, switch on the radio, and attempt to read the day-old paper. Before long it beings to bore and annoy me. I turned my head to the left and started to gaze at the murals on the wall, which had the eerie perfection of a vampire painter, and it made them look both magnificent and contrived at the same time, as if someone had blasted the walls with photographic images and then a team had painted them in. Thus, if a man should die, yet his personality in his home allowed to live on in that his possessions and choice of their settings are left and where they are, his presence will continue to be felt. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

If he has passed his physical body and mental characteristics on to his children, and they continue to live in this home, his presence will be felt more strongly. Furnished rooms, though obviously not completely empty, have this same anonymity, so that the newcomer, feeling lost in the void, is indefinably cheered at the discovery of an bedroom with comforters and pillows already on the bed, or a living room with plush sofas and art on the walls, with their message that the vacant space has been filled in the past and can be so in their own share of its future. To be precise, I have no roots, and, apart from an African wood carving on the mantelpiece and a couple of books on the bedside table, the room is as impersonal as when I first took it. The carving is about all I have left f my childhood and family (from whom, obviously, I had to sever myself) and was collected by my grandfather, who specialized in African primitives. The books, relics of school-day enthusiasm, have remained unopened for months now, giving way to an endless stream of newspapers and periodicals. A part from the extremes of fear and weakness of resolution, no softness of any kind must be shown or shared, for softness has no place in our World. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

It is at once shunned and despised when we come across it, because to be soft is to be constantly shamed and hurt, to lose illusions before others can be built up, to invite trickery, to open the door for the profiteer, the violent or the mad, to allow that vital and precious awareness to be dulled. From the time of my own high school days, I have heard judgments and words, sometimes spoken by the people I love, sometimes by those I despise. It can be difficult to ignore the self-defeating invective. It took many years of experience in life, and some invaluable psychoanalytic therapy, for me to overcome such influences on my own attitude. However, even before I had succeeded in rebutting and then rejecting the hostile viewpoints, I had reacted to them. Since them, I have learned through observation that my reaction was not unusual. The need for self-acceptance is buried within many of us, and we can only throw off the influence of those who think us beneath them by always striving, despite the hardship and impediment, to excel even beyond our own capacities. Our ethical standards must be above reproach, our honesty greater than that of others, our loyalty to friends and ideals firmer than that of other people, precisely because—knowingly or not—they think so little of some of us, and precisely in that order that we must think the more of ourselves. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

At each turn of life and at all moments of the day, it is important for us to convince ourselves that we are as good as the next person; in fact, better. It is necessary for us to believe in ourselves, as it must be for all successful persons. Because humankind can make it so difficult for us to preserve our self-esteem, it may be necessary to hold aloft our own activities, to drive on with our own achievements in order that our faith in self can survive the impact of many crushing blows. And those who have studied the personality adjustments of people in other marginalized groups, whether of the character, will recognize the struggle as following a not uncommon pattern. The stages of the Quest for Truth passes by degrees from the disciplining of the ego to the opening of consciousness to God. For me personally, I was spurred by a belief that if my learning were greater, my thinking deeper, my talents more creative, then the loftier would be the stature which I could assume in my own eyes. On this journey there are stages of ascent, stations of understanding lights of peace, and shadows of despair. If we continue the inner work we will pass through various stages of development. It would be a mistake to believe that one has reached a final attitude or a fixed set of values. Between the beginner and the adept is this difference: that the state of being which the one looks up to with awe-struck wonder seems entirely natural to the other. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

Here is, perhaps, a phase of the laws of compensation. It is a counterpart of the bravado displayed by the cowardly, the overlording shown by the diminutive, the conceit by those who suffer from an inferiority of feeling to utilize scientific foundation for its group attitude as justification for discrimination. In other fields, it is called a defense mechanism, or a Napoleonic complex. However, it is not the origin that matters. We are concerned with the results, whether beneficial or destructive to society and to the individual. A small person is anti-social when one seeks to compensate for one’s defects, in one’s own image, for whatever inferior trait by a display of dictatorial traits in which one uses other people as pawns. One’s behavior stems from a factor beyond his or her control, and may be turned to other directions, and does not make it the more palatable for society. When people are oppressed and discriminated against, however, many of their achievements may stem from the effort of the individual to excel in order to combat the influence of universal condemnation on one’s self-esteem. This is a beneficial consequence, even though it may (or may not) arise from an unfortunate source. People tell us we should tolerate others with differences, but tolerance is one of the ugliest words in our language. No word is more misunderstood. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

We appeal to other beings to be tolerant of others—in other words to be willing to stand them. I do not want to be tolerated, and I cannot see why anyone else should be struggling to be tolerated. If people are no good, they should not be tolerated, and if they are good, they should be accepted. In the intergroup relations people are far from having attained acceptance of peoples other than themselves. Tolerance—in the sense of willingness to put up with the existence of others—is still to be achieved. However, what is it but a miserable compromise? In the name of humanity appeals are made to various groups to tolerate each other, when tolerance is actually hardly more desirable than intolerance. The latter is only slightly more inhumane than the former. People cutting across all racial, religious, national, and caste lines, frequently react to rejection by a deep understanding of all others who have likewise been scorned because of their belonging to a marginalized group. It is not for us to join with those who reject millions or billion of our fellow beings of all types and groups, but to accept all beings, an attitude forced upon us happily by the stigma of being cost out of the fold of society. And today, the deep-rooted prejudices that restrict marriages and friendships according to social strata—family wealth, religion, color, and a myriad of other artifices—are conspicuously absent among the submerged groups that makes up the marginalized members of our society. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

The sympathy for all humankind—including groups similarly despised in their own right—that is exhibited by so many people who feel like they are outcasts, can be a most rewarding factor, not only for the individual, but for society. The person learning to accept oneself can—and often does—demonstrate that he or she harbors no bitterness, for one learns, of necessity, the meaning of turning the other cheek. One is forced by circumstances to answer hate with love, abuse with compassion. It is no wonder, then, that one can as a doctor, educator, or pacifist, show a tenderness to others, no matter how tragic their dilemma, that is seldom forthcoming from people who have themselves not deeply suffered. The humiliations of life can distill a mellow reaction, a warmth and understanding, not only for people in like circumstance, but for all the unfortunate, the despised, the oppressed of the Earth. People who are rejected and accept their circumstances are compelled to constantly search for the answers to their problems within themselves. Reminded of the “baseness” and the “ugliness” of one’s acts, one wishes to understand what differentiates one from all other around them. This introspective study pervades the entire personality and all its activities. The great why, the infantile manifestation of curiosity that strives, in the less inhibited mind of the child, to gain the key to the ultimate riddle of a being’s life and its meaning, is typical of those who have been marginalized. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

Unable, perhaps, to develop the extrovert qualities which require a receptive World in which to have free play; struggling to find a solution to the mystery of one’s own imperious desires; not suited for unquestioning acceptance of the facts of one’s self without an understanding of these facts—the invert finds much of one’s thought process consumed with inner projection. The flare-up of temper, the critical perception of a work of art, the basis of a broken friendship, the unfinished task at work, the daydream and the nightmare—whence come these facets of life, what are their hidden meanings, how do they tie in with the total personality? These perceptive abilities, sharpened by inner search, can be and frequently are applied to an understanding of all people. On the surface this seems to be confined to the ability to recognize hidden, latent, or well-disguised talent behind the façade of respectability, but it also permits recognition of the concealed meaning of a poem, the delayed break of a handshake, even the condemnatory attitude of a hostile person. This ability is, in a sense, a form of self-protection. Analytical abilities that are developed by introspection, sharpened by the search for a glimpse behind anonymous mask, are extended to the understanding of all phases of human behavior. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

Because some individual learns that one’s activities, thoughts, philosophies, aspirations, are understandable in the light of full knowledge of the intricacies of the emotional structure; because one learns that the motives for an action may be camouflaged so thoroughly that it seems to stem from the very opposite of its actual source; because, in short, one is forced to obtain a wealth of knowledge about the personal psychological make-up, one can and frequently does this to the fuller understanding of others. And when to this understanding is added compassion for all individuals and groups, no matter to what tragic pass life has brought them, a rare combination of worthwhile traits is obtained. It is understood that beyond discussion, not based on unthinking faith, blind passion, illogical reasoning, or linger prejudices that are one time or another were part of the ruling mores of society fails to receive its day in court. Not all people have been able to utilize their disadvantageous position for self-improvement in every respect and in all direction. I have pointed out the struggle to excel, but many people are easily defeated. Their resiliency in the face of the burden they carry is insufficient to meet the experiences of life. I have outlined the understanding that is extended to other individuals and groups that struggle, each in its own manner, against exclusion. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

However, many people, even those in marginalized groups, are deeply rooted in prejudice. They have been unable to learn the lesson that should be so apparent to them in the face of the World’s bigotry and persecution. I have depicted the individual turned compassionate toward one’s fellow beings, but there are those whose cruelty is lustful and murderous. Self-study and insight are not always present, nor is skepticism of necessity a constructive force. However, it is the very essence of democracy, the antithesis of totalitarianism, that justice and fair play are desirable ends in themselves. Repression and intolerance are to be condemned, no mater what lofty purpose may motivate them or what useful result may unwittingly issue therefrom. The beneficial reaction that turns repression to the finer purpose in life is far from a justification of that of course. In fact, the opposite is true, for it is a demonstration of character, power, and intellect of the invert that gives the lie to the name-calling of one’s enemies and proves all the more one’s worthiness of acceptance by society. The desirable ends which I have outlined must, in fact, be weighed against the needless sufferings, the dejection and humiliation, the extortion and the court trials—all issuing from the same repressive character of modern culture. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

The great energy of those who have utilized the contempt of their fellows as an incentive to further creativity must be balanced against the energy expended and wasted in the struggle against this very same contempt. There is a poetic irony in the future of the once marginalized in society, for one will use the high attainments of character to struggle against the very injustices that are so largely responsible for these attainments, and the successful termination of repressive attitudes may erase the very achievements that were used to effect this termination. Nevertheless, I am convinced that there is a permanent place in the scheme of things for the person reaching for self-actualization—a place that transcends the reaction to hostility and that will continue to contribute to social betterment after social acceptance. Power is required for communication. To stand up before an indifferent or hostile group and have one’s say, or to speak honestly to a friend truths which go deep and hurt—these require self-affirmation, self-assertion, and even at times aggression. This point is so self-evident that it is generally overlooked. Hence, many are mighty in contradiction. My experience in psychotherapy convinces me that the act which requires the most courage is the simple truthful communication, unpropelled by rage or anger, of one’s deepest thoughts to another. We generally communicate most openly only to those who are our equals in power. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

Violence itself is a kind of communication. They cannot communicate with language, so they strike out in violence. However, it is still a language, however rudimentary or primitive, appropriate in certain conditions, and necessary in others. Some people are violence because they do not possess the self-esteem necessary for communication. They cannot stand and deliver themselves of their feelings in relation to others; indeed, unable to formulate them, they are unsure of what their feelings really are. The sooner people in power turn their minds away from exploiting taxpayers and the less affluent for financial gain and become concerned with the rights of people as human beings, the sooner the violence will be mitigated. There is something more important that powerful nations need to send to our leaders and children. This is the poets. For the poets (and writers in general) are the ones skilled in communication. They can speak in universal forms which will be understood by people of whatever color or nationality. They speak the language of consciousness, of dignity, regardless of race or color; they can cultivate the integrity of the marginalized and the other characteristics that are essential to being human. For they know that communication makes community, and community is the possibility of human beings living together for their mutual psychological, physical, and spiritual nourishment. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

The kind of communication that overcomes the impulse to violence and that binds persons to each other is a kind of talking that is conciliatory and restorative. In psychotherapy we find that the difficulties experiences by a man and a wife in a relationship can be gauged roughly how much trouble they have in communicating with each other. When there is difficulty understanding what the other is talking (or not talking) about, we can assume an estrangement. Then the person is simply not (or perhaps does not want to be) tuned in on the wave length of the others. Intellectualizing or talking abstractly is a symptom of the same thing—a desire not to communicate one’s real feelings, a blocking-off of one’s total self. As hostility grows, projection increases also; there is apt to be a good deal of allegations and an increase in distance, all of which is indicative of growing hostility. We know that we shall get to the stage of violence ere long. Psychotherapy is reversing that process so that the person can talk on the same wave length. Even if the couple decides to divorce, at least they decide it together, and the process has that much more community in it. Communication recovers the original “we” of the human being on a new level. Authentic communication depends on authentic language. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

Authentic talk is organic—the speaker communicates not merely with words but with one’s body also; one’s gestures, one’s movements, one’s expression, one’s tone of voice communicate the same thing as one’s words. One speaks not as a disembodied voice but as one organic totality to another. We would not communicate unless we valued the other, considered one worth talking to, worth the effort to make our ideas clear. This is communicating without talking down, without patronizing. Communication implies the presence of social interest. One has to have an interest in the other to make it worthwhile to hear one. This means one relates to another not as receptacle for the expression one one’s pleasures of the flesh, or as a being to be exploited for the assuaging of one’s own loneliness, or in any other way as an object, but as a human being in the full meaning of that term. Communication leads to community—that is, to understanding, intimacy, and the mutual valuing that was preciously lacking. Community can be defined simply as a group in which free conversation can take place. Community is where I can share my innermost thoughts, bring out the depths of my own feelings, and know they will be understood. These days there is a greater search for community, partly because our human experience of community has largely evaporated and we are lonely. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

The term community gives birth to a rich cluster of words, all of which have powerful connotations. There is commune, a relatively new word with an optimistic ring; and communion, an old word with new meaning that has for many of us a still more beneficial tone. However, when we come then to a cognate which is taken negatively by many people—namely communism. All these words have the same root. Community is destroyed by destructive violence. If I, like Cain, commit a senseless act of ending a life, I must flee into the desert, driven by my guilt at having take the life of my brother Abel; a cleavage now exists between me and other members of my erstwhile community. In this sense I shrink my World and thus kill part of myself. I need my enemy in my community. He or she or they keep me alert, vital. I need one’s criticism. Strange to say, I need him or her or them to posit myself against. If I could learn something from one, I would walk twenty miles to see my worst enemy. However, beyond what we specifically learn from our enemies, we need them emotionally: our psychic economy cannot get along well without them. Persons often remark that curiously to them, they feel a singular emptiness when their enemy dies or is incapacitated. All of which indicates that our enemy is as necessary for us as is our friends. Both together are part of authentic community. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

Community is where I can accept my own loneliness, distinguishing between that part of it which can be overcome and that part of it which is inescapable. Community is the group in which I can depend upon my fellows to support me; it is partially the source of my physical courage in that, knowing I can depend on others, I guarantee that they also can depend on me. It is where my moral courage, consisting of standing against members of my own community, is supported even by those I stand against. “And it came to pass that I prayed unto the Lord that he would give unto community grace, that they might have charity,” reports Ether 12.36. O Solitude! if I must with thee dwell, let it not be among the jumbled heap of murky buildings; climb with me the steep,–Nature observatory—whence the dell, its flowery slopes, its river’s crystal swell, may seem a span; let me thy vigils keep ‘mongst boughs pavillion’d, where the deer’s swift leap startles the wild bee from the fox-glove bell. But though I’ll gladly trace these scenes with thee, yet the sweet converse of an innocent mind, whose words are images of thoughts refin’d, is my soul’s pleasure; and it sure must be almost the highest bliss of human-kind, when to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

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True, Nature Does Have Rhythm in its Day and Night; it Does Have Balance and Harmony, Summer and Winter!

November 8, 2019 2:30 am

Do not tell me you are the People of Purpose when your purpose is to do just what they sent you to do! For the love of your souls, find yourself a finer purpose! Just as I did. In any case, the African Americans came to the Bowery and the sociologists fund them in good shape when they got there, regardless of how he felt about it. When the defense boom came many of the African Americans left but some stayed on, seeing in life on the Bowery what the Irish and the Swedes and Poles saw, seeing in it what the seaman and those without homes saw—an end to fight back, a resting place, a refutation of the old hymn, “There is no hiding place down here.” The Bowery offered a hiding place so secret that the fugitive could not be found even by himself. The Jew is a rarity and a curio on the Bowery. On either side of the street are districts primarily Jewish. Until Puerto Ricans came in to share the East Side tenements with them, this was an area where Jewish life filled the air and flavored the stores and the streets. However, the peddlers, sweatshop workers, teachers, and rabbis looked upon the Bowery as beyond the pale. Some Jews made Bowery history. Monk Eastman and his gang of thus, almost all Jewish, were sponsored by Tim Sullivan who counted on them to deliver votes and loot from their side just as the Irish and Italians did. Jews also appeared in the Bowery theaters as producers, actors, directors, and impresarios. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

They were part of the Bowery’s history but not fully a part of the Bowery until the depression. Then some of them drifted down to the breadlines and the psychologists found them in a bay way. These were the shattered, declassed ones. They cropped up with skills that were unusual on the Bowery. They were bookkeepers, teachers, musicians, tailors, and sales people; but temperamentally they were shot. After the war Jews ran to about two percent of the Bowery population. Dr. Levinson has said that most of them have deteriorated much further than the average non-Jewish Bowery resident. Alcohol itself, said the Doctor, is outside the Jews’ “cultural patter,” and presumably those Jews who take to it suffer a cirrhosis not only of the liver but of the psyche. Perhaps it is only those disturbed Jews who end up on the Bowery or else their fate disturbs them ore than it does the others. In any case, Dr. Levinson says, Jews on the Bowery are more likely to be psychopathic or mentally defective. Even rare than a Jewish Bowery Man is a Chinese. Chinatown abuts the Bowery, and Chinese stores spill out of the tight narrow streets of their quarter onto the Street, but no Chinese panhandler works there. Patrolman Leo O’Hea, who has walked the beat along the Bowery for a quarter of a century, says the blotter is clean of Chinese names. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

There are no Chinese vagrants. The patrolman has no very fancy scientific notions of “why,” but he knows that when a Chinese boy breaks a window all that an officer need do is to tell his brother or his cousin or his uncle and the matter is take care of. The boy is likely to apologize. In time the Chinese may become so Americanized that the family will lose the antique function of mutual responsibility, of collective conscience. Until then, however, there are not likely to be Chinese flophouses. The only times when any police action was needed were the days of the tong wars—a kind of bloody commercial rivalry—and during the period when the exclusion laws were so rigid that no Chinese man could hope to marry a Chinese young lady in New York. In those days, women of the evening from the Bowery would then come down to Chinatown to pay the “house calls” of their profession, and now and then the police would feel obliged to intervene. The Bowery is above all American. More than three quarters of its regular derelict population are a mixture of races and native-born, often tracing a native American lineage far back into their country to stand in front of the Salvation Army Building on an afternoon—cheerfully facing nothingness. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Dr. Levinson and his colleagues had these native-born Americans examine the telltale ink blots of the Rorschach test, and from their fancied images they pieced together this view of the personality type (which I have presumed to annotate): “The homeless man has had a very poor psychosexual history, as a result of which he has developed a fear of either accepting or sharing affection,” says Dr. Levison. (There is a musician who used to play with the Philadelphia Symphony. One day he came home and found a stranger in his wife’s bed. He turned around, walked out, and buried his poor psychosexual history on the Bowery.) The Doctor continues: “At some time, the mother figure had brought about a good deal of ambivalence and anxiety. To love meant to be hurt, to be rejected to be deserted.” (A seaman, now permanently beached on the Bowery, says that he never had a home. He grew up in an orphanage. Sure, he had girls, but “you know the kind you meet on a waterfront…Oh a nice girl would be something else again.” So he never got married. He would not make anybody a good husband, he says.) “He now denies to himself his need for affection and tends to respond to the demands of the World of reality by repression. By withdrawing into passivity…Since he replaces activity by passivity, he atones for his guilt.” (“I didn’t commit no crime, see,” says Thomas Finn. “What I did, I did only to myself, right?”) #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

“He is able to accept life and to continue existing on the Bowery because being there is a solution to his problems. His life on the Bowery is an acting out of his conflicts, an ‘undoing’ and assuaging of guilt, and is a replacement of his phallicism by castration.” (An old man says that he finds it hard to stay at the Muni—the Municipal Lodging House—because of the “queens.” Disgusting, he says. The queens are young men who swing their hips and gather courts around them in secluded spots. Courtiers and courtesans vie for the queen’s affections, and the old Bowery hands shrink to the wall in horror.) Dr. Levinson concludes: “It is hypothesized that being homeless has only exacerbated latent personality trends and that living on the Bowery is the solution of the emotional problems of these men and the natural outcome of the dynamics involved.” Psychologist agree that the Bowery Men need a place where an effortless going to hell is the accepted way of life. They need a place where no one requires anything of them, where no one ever says: “You can do better.” The institution the Bowery Men need is one where everyone agrees: “Mac, you can’t do better.” They need the sweet delights of hopelessness, and anyone who seeks to energize them with hope betrays them, for he calls their spirit into action; calls them again to try again to lose; calls them again to compare themselves with other men, to assert their worth—when all that they want is for the World to leave them alone, worthless and careless, beyond redemption or competition. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

Where else could these men find such an institution? Where could they find a home in which all the talents and learning of psychologist are bent to give them the certainty they need that they have lost themselves? It is probably as difficult for a social worker or a missionary to let a man despair as it is for a doctor to oblige a patient with euthanasia. For that reason the Bowery Men have made their own community on the street. Sociologists describe this institution—creation by the men themselves, tailor-made for them and for no others—as a subculture. Professor H. Warren Dunham, of Wayne University, gives the psychologist short shrift. It is all very well, he says in effect, to diagnose individuals as suffering from dependency needs (“Inadequate personality” and so on), but the stubborn fact remains that a lot of men not on the Bowery fit that picture just as well. Society, says Dr. Dunham, keeps producing “inadequately socialized types,” and the skid rows are there to receive them. The World, after all, is full of opportunities for failure. A boy can flunk an exam or catch the look of scorn in a girl’s eye. A man can lose a job, or possibly hold a job too long whole his friends rise, perhaps stepping smilingly upon his neck as they go up. A businessman can lose his money and suddenly realize that he has nothing else. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

And the World is scornful of failures. People persecute failures even by feeling sorry for them. Even when stretching out a helping hand, successful men make it clear that it is more blessed to give than to receive—though the receiver plainly stands in greater need of blessing. Those who no longer aspire, who do not wish to rise on anybody’s shoulders, who do not wish to sell more, make more, show more, even give more than others—these are among the “inadequately socialized” who have built the modern Bowery. There they need struggle no longer against the critics, the status-seekers and the status-makers who pigeonhole people. The Bowery, it would seem, is a grotesque limbo beyond good and evil, where there is no first or last, no past or future—a death wherein one may have the delights and torments of being a spectator at one’s own funeral. In the quiet attitudes of the men in flops—the old ones often sit for hours with hands crossed in their laps—it is easy to read a prayerful solemnity. In the prim detached way in which pleasures of the flesh is regarded there is something monastic. These men use the usual four-letter words, but this is mere ritual and no more. Such words are expletives and no longer serve to recall the warmth of the fires below. There is an air of finality on the Street. Each man things it is all over. He used to live some other way. There used to be another self. It is all gone now, as if he had taken holy orders, changed his name, and put on his rags as a sign. What they are a sign of is, of course, the crucial difference between the Bowery Man’s retreat and that of a monk. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

Learnedly, Dr. Levinson terms it “ego-devaluating, not a religious retreat.” Still it is a retreat, an escape into tranquility. And here one is brought up short by the obvious bond linking the unshaved bum sprawled flat on his face in the street with the businessman, the advertising executive, the cocktail drinking wife, the harried suburbanite—the whole organization, brief-cased, golf-and-bridge, scotch-and-soda set. All understand that the major objective of life is tranquility freedom from tension, and an end to worry. The parents who send their children joyfully off to life adjustment courses do so with the notion that they will have fewer conflicts, fewer tensions. Life will be smoother. However, if life is not smoother and the ideal is still tranquility; if one is not fully adjusted to life and the objective is still to avoid tension; if the tranquilizers are too expensive on in the end fail to secure the all-important inner peace—then it may be a consolation to us all to know that there is a Bowery, a place where life is thoroughly anesthetized. It is our brothers who have pioneered there. It is not a state of dreamy futility but one of intense usefulness. There is some confusion about the kind of life an enlightened being will live. It is popularly believed that one sits in one’s cave or one’s hunt sunk continually in meditation. The idea that one can be active in the World is not often accepted, especially by the masses who have not been properly instructed in these matters and who do not know differences between religion and mysticism and between mysticism and philosophy. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

The truth is that the enlightened being may not practise meditation; but one has no dependence upon it, because one’s enlightenment being fully established will not be increased by further meditation. Whenever one does meditate, it is either for the purpose of withdrawing from the World totally for short periods, at intervals, either for one’s own satisfaction or to recuperate one’s energies, or to benefit others by telepathy. When it is said “for one’s own satisfaction,” what is meant is that meditation in seclusion may have become a way of life in one’s previous incarnation. This generates a karmic tendency which reappears in this life and the satisfaction of this tendency pleases one, but it is not absolutely essential for one. One can dispense with it when needful to do so, whereas the unenlightened being is too often at the mercy of one’s tendencies and propensities. There is no classification into matter and spirit for the Sage. There is only one life for one. If a being can find reality only in trance, if one says that the objective World is unreal, one is not a Sage. The being who becomes immobilized by one’s inheritance of asceticism and escapism will also become indifferent to the sorrows of a humankind whom one regards as materialistic. The seeker of truth is self-disciplined to live in the World with one’s heart and thought molded after one’s own fashion, and will not turn in contempt or helplessness from the so-called materialistic but, on the contrary, will find their ignorance the motive for one’s incessant service of enlightenment to them. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

The stultified stony apathy of the first is shamed by the courageous acceptance of life as a whole of the second. The saint is satisfied to attain freedom from one’s lower self but the Master does not stop there. One seeks also to carry enlightenment to others, remove their misery, and save them from the illusion in which they are involved. One’s attainments in the mental, ethical, and philosophic spheres must take concrete shape in the disinterested service of humanity, or one is no illuminate. Truth seekers certainly wish that all others might attain to their own inner peace. However, because one has not oneself realized this higher unity (which is all-embracing) one does not feel that one bears any personal responsibility for their uplift. One the contrary while the ascetic, under the illusion that Worldly life is a snare set by Satan, sits smugly in one’s retreat, the illuminate knows that all life is divinely born, never relaxes one’s efforts for the enlightenment of humankind. Imagination is the outreaching of mind. It is the individual’s capacity to accept the bombardment of the conscious mind with ideas, impulses, images, and every other sort of psychic phenomena welling up from the preconscious. It is the capacity to dream dreams and see visions, to consider diverse possibilities, and to endure the tension involved in holding these possibilities before one’s attention. Imagination is casting off mooring ropes, taking one’s changes that there will be new mooring posts in the vastness ahead. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

In creative endeavors the imagination operates in juxtaposition with form. When these endeavors are successful, it is because imagination infuses form with its own vitality. The question is: How far can we let our imagination loose? Can we give it rein? Dare to think the unthinkable? Dare to conceive of, and move among, new visions? At such times we face the danger of losing our orientation, the danger of complete isolation. Will we lose our accepted language, which makes communication possible in a shared World? Will we lose the boundaries that enable us to orient ourselves to what we call reality? This, again, is the problem of form or, stated differently, the awareness of limits. Psychologically speaking, this is experienced by many people as psychosis. Hence some psychotics walk close to the wall in hospitals. They keep oriented to the edges, always preserving their location in the external environment. Having no localization inwardly, they find it especially important to retain whatever outward localization is available. As director of a large mental hospital in Germany which received many brain-injured soldiers during the war, Dr. Kurt Goldstein found that these patients suffered radical limitation of their capacities for imagination. He observed that they had to keep their closets in rigid array, shoes always placed in just this position, shirts hung in just that place. Whenever a closet was upset, the patient became panicky. He could not orient himself to the new arrangement, could not imagine a new form that would bring order to the chaos. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

The patient was then thrown into what Dr. Goldstein called the “catastrophic situation.” Or when asked to write his name on a sheet of paper, the brain-injured person would write the name in some corner close to the boundaries. He could not tolerate the possibility of becoming lost in the open spaces. His capacities for abstract thought, for transcending the immediate facts in terms of the possible—what I call, in this context, imagination—were severely curtailed. He felt powerless to change the environment to make it adequate to his needs. Such behavior is indicative of what life is when imaginative powers are cut off. The limits have always to be kept clear and visible. Lacking the ability to shift forms, these patients found their World radically truncated. Any limitless existence was experiences by them as being highly dangerous. Not brain-injured, you and I nevertheless can experience a similar anxiety in the reverse situation—that is, in the creative act. The boundaries of our World shift under our feet and we tremble while waiting to see whether any new form will take the place of the lost boundary or whether we can create out of this chaos some new order. As imagination gives vitality to form, form keeps imagination from driving us into psychosis. This is the ultimate necessity of limits. Artists are the ones who have the capacity to see original visions. They typically have powerful imaginations and, at the same time, a sufficiently developed sense of form to avoid being led into the catastrophic situation. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

The artists are the frontier scouts who go out ahead of the rest of us to explore future. We can surely tolerate their special dependencies and harmless idiosyncrasies. For if we can listen seriously to them, we will be better prepared for them. There is a curiously sharp sense of joy—or perhaps better expressed, a sense of mild ecstasy—that comes when you find the particular form required by your creation. Let us say you have been puzzling about it for days when suddenly you get the insight that unlocks the door—you see how to write that line, what combination of colors is needed in your picture, how to form that theme you may be writing for a class, or you hit upon the theory to fit your new facts. I have often wondered about this special sense of joy; it so often seems out of proportion to what actually has happened. I may have worked at my desk morning after morning trying to find a way to express some important idea. When my insight suddenly breaks through—which may happen when I am chopping wood in the afternoon—I experience a strange lightness in my step as though a great load were taken off my shoulders, a sense of joy on a deeper level that continues without any relation whatever to the mundane tasks that I may be performing at the time. It cannot be just that the problem at hand has been answered—that generally brings only a sense of relief. What is the course of this curious pleasure? #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

I propose that it is the experience of this-is-the-way-things-are-meant-to-be. If only for that moment, we participate in the myth of creation. Order comes out of disorder, form out of chaos, as it did in the creation of the Universe. The sense of joy comes from our participation, no matter how slight, in being as such. The paradox is that at the moment we also experience more vividly our own limitations. We discover the amor fati that Nietzsche write about—the love of one’s fate. No wonder it gives a sense of ecstasy! Most people are surprises to learn that the rebel operates with built-in restraints. Indeed, that is one’s chief distinction from the revolutionary who, concerned as one is with political change, experiences only outer restraints. However, the rebel, who is concerned with people’s attitudes and motives, has inner limits. One is restrained by the boundaries inherent in the order one proposes. In describing these limits, I shall speak in ideal terms to clarify my point. The first is the universality of the rebel’s vision. One’s ideal of life, which gives birth to one’s rebellion in the first place, applies not just to oneself but to others as well; and these others must include one’s enemies. To pursue the metaphor I employed earlier, if the slave kills the master he or she has no choice but to usurp the master’s throne and be killed oneself; and we have round after round of meaningless bloodshed, like the sultans’ murders in the seraglio. The excitement of the ego trip is secondary to the rebel; one is concerned chiefly with one’s vision. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

In this vision of the World are present the restraints upon one’s actions. Sokrates is restrained from making a secret deal with Sparta not by the Athenians, who condemned him to death, but by the requirements of one’s own personally chosen ethics. Jesus could not take up the sword without betraying his own vision of the World. The rebel scorns as a motive personal revenge (actually the nursing of feelings of rejection, of one’s own hurt pride—authentic enough but not the basis for a genuine rebellion). One does not have the right to demand revenge, and furthermore there is no time to do so. The essential characteristic of the rebel is one’s capacity to transcend one’s own particular hurt pride in identification with one’s people and with one’s universal ideal. Another limit is the rebel’s compassion. As we noted in the case of Daniel Ellsberg, the compassion of the rebel is one of the things that makes one a rebel in the first place. One identifies with people who suffer and feels a passionate desire to do something about this suffering. This arises from one’s sensitivity and empathy for other people which inform one’s vision. True, the revel is sometimes so absorbed in the universal application of one’s ideal that one neglects one’s own family. Well, like us all, one remains a human being of good and bad traits. One’s capacity for empathy makes one more compassionate of peoples—if not always for the members of one’s family—and enables one to form one’s vision. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

The limits also come from the fact that the rebel’s mind meets other minds. The others’ views of reality restrain and sharpen one’s; and in encounter between them, they work out something of greater value for both. This is why dialogue is so important for the rebel. Dialogue includes all the tangling of emotions, temperament, and diverse goals which occurs in any real interchange. The authentic rebel knows that the silencing of all one’s adversaries is the last thing on Earth one wishes: their extermination would deprive one and whoever else remains alive from the uniqueness, the originality, and the capacity for insight that these enemies—being human—also have and could share with one. If we wish the death of our enemies, we cannot talk about the community of beings. In the losing of the chance for dialogue with out enemies, we are the poorer. We would lose not only our enemies’ good ideas, but the restraints they give us as well. The rebel is committed to giving a form and pattern to the World. It is a pattern born of the indomitable thrust of the human mind, the mind which makes out the mass of meaningless data in the World an order and form. Born as we are out of chaos, why can we never establish contact with it? No sooner do we look at it than order, pattern, shape is born under our eyes. This is not only true of the novelist, but of the painter, the engineer, and the intellectual as well—indeed, true of us all. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

The forming of the World begins with the simple act of perception, which arranges things in a Gestalt that has meaning for us. We institute the order. It is a product of the human mind’s continual search for meaning in a World in which meaning does not exist apart from our minds. True, nature does have rhythm it its day and night; it does have balance and harmony, Summer and Winter; without our patterns, the functions are blind and meaninglessly repetitive. However, no sooner does the human mind look at this chaos than order is born. Out of the meeting of the human mind and the chaos of nature some meaning is established by which we can orient ourselves. The rebel is one who can grasp this meaning with a clarity that reaches beyond that of the masses of people. An act of rebellion of [the rebel’s] part seems like a demand clarity and unity. The most elementary form of rebellion, paradoxically, expresses an aspiration to order. Those who hold political power may not trust the rebel’s vision and may hang on to their power to oppose it. However, in this new vision, this very pattern and order, there are present the restraining factors on the rebel oneself. When one writes a sonnet or any other kind of poetry, the chosen form exercises a restraint upon the poet just as the banks restrain the river. Otherwise creativity flows off absurdly in every direction and the river is lost in the sand. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

There are even limits to such a personal aim as self-actualization. The human potential movement has fallen heir to the form of innocence prevalent in America, namely that we grow toward greater and greater moral perfection. Trying to be good all the time will make one not into an ethical giant but into a prig. We should grow, rather, toward greater sensitivity to both evil and good. The moral life is dialectic between good and evil. Especially in the understanding of violence is it necessary to be aware of the good and evil in each of us. Whatever we may do, excess will always keep its place in the heart of beings, in the place where solitude is found. We all carry within us our places of exile, our crimes and our ravages. However, our task is not to unleash them on the World; it is to fight them in ourselves and in others. Rebellion, the secular will not to surrender is still today at the basis of the struggle. Origin of form, source of real life, it keeps us always erect in the savage formless movement of history. The fact that good and evil are present in all of us prohibits anyone from moral arrogance. No one can insist on one’s own moral supremacy. It is out of this sense of restrain that the possibility of forgiveness arises. “Ask in sincerity of heart that God would forgive you,” reports Moroni 6.8. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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Thee for Enlivening All the Cheerful Eyes that Glance so Brightly at the New Sun-Rise!

October 13, 2019 12:13 am

All my life I had believed in Heaven and Hell. Did Heaven look down upon this metamorphosis? We have described some of the effects of migration. People’s relatives are no longer neighbors sharing the intimacies of daily life. Their new neighbors are strangers, drawn from every part of the East End, and they are, as we have seen, treated with reserve. In point of services, neighbors do not make up for kin. Our informants were so eager to talk about their neighbors, and generally about their attitude to other residents on the estate, that we feel bound to report them. They frequently complained of the unfriendliness of the place, which they found all the more mysterious because it was so different from Bethnal Green. Why should Greenleigh be considered so unfriendly? The prevailing attitude is expressed by Mr. Morrow. “You cannot get away from it, they are not so friendly down here. It is not ‘Hello, Joe,’ ‘Hello, mate.’ They pass you with a side-glance as though they do not know you.” And by Mr. Adams. “We all come from the slums, not Park Lane, but they do not mix. In Bethnal Green you always used to have a little laugh on the doorstep. There is none of that in Greenleigh. You are English, but you feel like a foreigner here, I do not know why. Up there you had lived for years, and you knew how to deal with the people there. People here are different.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

And by Mr. Prince. “The neighbors round here are very quiet. They all keep themselves to themselves. They all come from the East End but they all seem to chance when they come down here.” Of the 41 couples, 23 considered that other people were unfriendly, eight were undecided one way or another and ten considered them friendly: the recorded opinions are those of the couples because in no interview did husband and wife appear to hold strongly different view. How does this majority who consider their fellow residents unfriendly feel about themselves? Do they also label themselves unfriendly? No one admits it, some indignantly deny it. If they are hostile themselves, they do not acknowledge it, but attribute the feelings to others. Yet they mostly reveal that their own behavior is the same as they resent in others; that (since others are unfriendly) to withdraw will avoid trouble and keep the peace; that coexistence is safer, because more realistic, than cooperation. “The policy here is do not have a lot to do with each other, then there will not be any trouble,” says Mr. Chortle succinctly. Neurotic conflicts may be concerned with the same general problems as perplex the normal person. However, they are so different in kind that the question has been raised whether it is permissible to use the same term for both. I believe it is, but we must be aware of the differences. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

This attitude is supported by reference to the skirmishes and back-biting which have resulted from being “too friendly” in the past. “It is better if you just talk to neighbors and do not get too friendly,” concludes Mr. Sandeman from his past experience. “You stop friends if you do not get to know them well. When you get to know then you are always getting little troubles breaking out. I have had too much of that and so I am not getting too friendly now.” Mr. Young told his wife, “When I walk into these four walls, I always tell her ‘Do not make too many friends. They turn out to be enemies.’” And one experience had turned Mr. Yule into a recluse. “We do not mix very well in this part of the estate. At first I used to lend every Tom, Dick, and Harry all my tools or lawn mower or anything. Then I had $1,000 pinched from my wallet. Now we do not want to know anyone—we keep ourselves to ourselves. There is a good old saying—the Englishman’s home is his castle. It is very true.” Usually the troubles are shadowy affairs which have always happened to people other than oneself. “We are friendly,” says Mr. Oliver in the usual style, “But we do not get too involved, because we have found that causes gossip and trouble. We have seen it happen with other people, so we do not want it to happen to us. Now we keep ourselves to ourselves.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

Whatever the justification, the result is the same. People do not treat others either as enemies or friends. They are wary, though polite. They pass the time of day in the road. They have an occasional word over the fence or a chat at the garden gate. They nod to each other in the shops. Neighbors even borrow and lend little things to each other, and when this accommodation is refused, it is a sign that acquaintance has turned into enmity. Mrs. Chortle has broken off trading as well as diplomatic relations with one of her neighbors. “These people are very dirty,” she said, “and I have told the I do not want to borrow or lend.” So has Mrs. Morrow, for the different reason that “Just because they have got a couple of ha’pence more than you they do not want to know you. In Bethnal Green it was different—neighbors were more friendly.” Even where relations have not been served, there is little of the mateyness so characteristic of Bethnal Green. Mr. Stirling summed it up by remarking, “I do not mind saying hello to any of them, or passing the time of say with them, but if they do not want to have anything to do with me, I do not want to have anything to do with them. I am not bothered about them. I am only interested in my little family. My wife and my two children—they are the people that I care about. My life down here is my home.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

Women feel the lack of friends, as of kin, more keenly than their menfolk. Those who do not follow their husbands into the society of the workplace—and loneliness is one of the common reasons for doing so—have to spend their day alone, “looking at ourselves all day,” as they say. In one interview the husband was congratulating himself on having a house, a garden, a bathroom and a TV—“the tellie is a bit of a friend down here”—when his wife broke in to say,” It is all right for you. What about the time I have to spend here on my own?” This difference in their life may cause sharp contention, especially in the early years. “When we first came,” said Mrs. Haddon, “I have just had the baby and it was all a misery, not knowing anyone. I sat on the stairs and cried my eyes out. For the first two years we were swaying whether to go back. I wanted to and my husband did not. We used to have terrible arguments about it. I use to say, “It is all right for you. I have to sit here all day. You do get a break.’” Not that all women resent it. A few, like Mrs. Painswick, actually welcome seclusion. She had been more averse to the quarrels amongst the “rowdy, shouty” Bethnal Greeners than appreciative of the mateyness to which quarrels are the counterpart, and finds the less intense life of Greenleigh a pleasant contrast. “In London people had more squabbles. We have not seen neighbors out here having words.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

What, then, are the characteristics of neurotic conflicts? A somewhat simplified example by way of illustration: An engineer working in collaboration with others at mechanical research was frequently afflicted by spells of fatigue and irritability. One of these spells was brought about by the following incident. In a discussion of certain technical matters his opinion were less well received than those of his colleagues. Shortly afterward a decision was made in his absence, and no opportunity was given him subsequently to present his suggestions. Under these circumstances, he could have regarded the procedure as unjust and put up a fight, or he could have accepted the majority decision with good grace. Either reaction would have been consistent. However, he did neither. Though he felt deeply slighted, he did not fight. Consciously he was mere aware of being irritated. The murderous rage within him appeared only in his dreams. This repressed rage—a composite of his fury against the others and of his fury against himself for his own meekness—was mainly responsible for his fatigue. His failure to react consistently was determined by a number of factors. He had built up a grandiose image of himself that required deference from others to support. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

This self-inflated image was, of course, unconscious at the time: he simply acted on the premise that there was nobody as intelligent and competent in his field as he was. Any slight could jeopardize this premise and provoke rage. Furthermore, he had unconscious sadistic impulses to berate and humiliate others—an attitude so objectionable to him that he covered it up by overfriendliness. To this was added an unconscious drive to exploit people, making it imperative for him to keep in their good graces. The dependence on others was aggravated by a compulsive need for approval and affection, combined as it usually is with attitudes of compliance, appeasement, and avoidance of fight. There was thus a conflict between destructive aggression—reactive rage and sadistic impulses—on the one hand, and on the other the need for affection and approval, with a desire to appear fair and rational in his own eyes. The result was inner upheaval that went unnoticed, while the fatigue that was its external manifestation paralyzed all action. Looking at the factors involved in the conflict, we are struck first by their absolute incompatibility. It would be difficult indeed to imagine more extreme opposites than lordly demands for deference and ingratiating submissiveness. Second, the whole conflict remains unconscious. The contradictory tendencies operating in it are not recognize but are deeply repressed. Only slight bubbles of the battle raging within reach the surface. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

The emotional factors are rationalized: it is an injustice; it is a slight; my ideas were better. Third, the tendencies in both directions are compulsive. Even if he had some intellectual perception of his excessive demands, or of the existence and the nature of his dependence, he could not change these factors voluntarily. To be able to change them would require considerable analytical work. He was driven on either hand by compelling forces over which he had no control: he could not possibly renounce any of the needs acquired by stringent inner necessity. However, none of them represented what he himself really wanted or sought. He would want neither to exploit nor to be submissive; as a matter of fact he despised these tendencies. Such a state of affairs, however, has a far-reaching significance for the understanding of neurotic conflicts. It means that no decision is feasible. A further illustration presents a similar picture. A free-lance designer was stealing small sums of money from a good friend. The theft was not warranted by the external situation; he needed the money, but the friend would gladly have given it to him as he had on occasion in the past. That he should resort to stealing was particularly striking in that he was a decent fellow who set great store by friendship. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

The following conflict was at the bottom of it. The man had a pronounced neurotic need for affection, especially a longing to be taken care of in all practical matters. Alloyed as this was with an unconscious drive to exploit others, his technique was to attempt both to endear and intimidate. These tendencies by themselves would have made him willing and eager to receive help and support. However, he had also developed an extreme unconscious arrogance which involved a correspondingly vulnerable pride. Others should feel honored to be of service to him: it was humiliating for him to ask for help. His aversion to having to make a request was reinforced by a strong craving for independence and self-sufficiency that made it intolerable for him to admit he needed anything or to place himself under obligation. So he could take, but not receive. The content of this conflict differs from that of the first example but the essential characteristics are the same. And any other example of neurotic conflict would show like incompatibility of conflicting drives and their unconscious and compulsive nature, leading always to the impossibility of deciding between the contradictory issues involved. Allowing for an indistinct line of demarcation, the difference, then, between normal and neurotic conflicts is possessed fundamentally in the fact that the disparity between the conflicting issues is much less great for the normal person than for the neurotic. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

The choices the former has to make are between two modes of action, either of which is feasible within the frame of a fairly integrated personality. Graphically speaking, the conflicting directions diverge only 90 degrees or less, as against the possible 180 degrees confronting the neurotic. In awareness, too, the differences is one of degree. Real life is far too multifarious to be portrayed by merely exhibiting such abstract contrast as that between a despair which is completely unconscious, and one which is completely conscious. We can say this much, however: a normal conflict can be entirely conscious; a neurotic conflict in all its essential elements is always unconscious. Even though a normal person may be unaware of one’s conflict, one can recognize it with comparatively little help, while the essential tendencies producing a neurotic conflict are deeply repressed and can be unearthed only against great resistance. The normal conflict is concerned with an actual choice between two possibilities, both of which the person finds really desirable, or between convictions, both of which one really values. It is therefore possible for one to arrive at a feasible decision even though it may be hard on one and require a renunciation of some kind. The neurotic person engulfed in a conflict is not free to choose. One is driven by equally compelling forces in opposite directions, neither of which one wants to follow. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

One is driven by equally compelling forces in opposite directions, neither of which one wants to follow. Hence a decision in the usual sense in impossible. One is stranded, with no way out. The conflict can only be resolved by working at the neurotic trends involved, and by so changing one’s relations with others and with oneself that one can dispense with the trends altogether. These characteristics account for the poignancy of neurotic conflicts. Not only are they difficult to recognize, not only to they render a person helpless, but they have as well a disruptive force of which one has good reason to be afraid. Unless we know these characteristics and keep them in mind, we shall not understand the desperate attempts at solution which the neurotic enters upon, and which constitute the major part of a neurosis. Murder rarely fits the stereotype of an unsuspecting, helpless, passive victim stalked by a cold, calculating killer. Most homicides are preceded by angry quarrels in which the victim plays an active part in bringing about one’s own death. Can innocence, once it becomes involved in action, escape murder? This troublesome question confronts us with renewed sharpness after the events of the past years, especially after the Orlando nightclub shooting 12 June 2016. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

However, it is a question that has troubled beings ever since the dawn of consciousness and the forming, in our forefathers’ minds, of the legend of the Garden of Eden. When we take an endeavor to resolve the knotty question, we wonder does the victim, for example, have anything to do with making oneself the victim? The question takes us into the very heart of the meaning of innocence. Does the virgin herself, beyond flirting, constitute the challenge to the man to end her virginity? Is not innocence curiously bound up with murder in the ritual of sacrifice in practically all cultures? What is the meaning of the phenomenon to be found in the dim beginnings of human history and coming down to this very hour of sacrificing virgins and youths to the Cretan Minotaur or the Moloch of modern walfare? When we push the question of innocence and murder to the furthest reaches of human consciousness, we may find it to be one of those perdurable problems that we cannot answer satisfactorily via intellect alone but must live the questions now. Perhaps you will then live along some distant day into the answer. However, in our endeavor to think it through, we can expect new light to be thrown on the mainsprings of violence. Most important of all, an analysis of the problem of innocence and murder foreshadows the emergence of new ethics for the coming age. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

Innocence is generosity, especially in children, who can still believe and trust since they have yet to experience that betrayal which leads to cynicism. Innocence has to do with the heart in that it is a feeling state, a way of perceiving life rather than a calculation. It is “virgin” in that it is before the awakening to the vast possibilities in life for sensuality, tenderness, exploitation, and betrayal. The lack of experience in pleasures of the flesh has historically been taken for the symbol of innocence, although it should be remembered that it is a symbol and not the content. Innocence is, in addition, a condition of powerlessness. One of our problems, as we discuss innocence, will be to establish the extent to which this powerlessness is capitalized on by the innocent person. The question is: How far is innocence used as a strategy of living? When we reflect on the shooting at Kent State in 1970, we immediately see a demonstration of part of our thesis. This is possessed in the fact that two of the four students killed were not involved in the protest at all. One was dressed in his Reserve Officer raining Corps (ROTC) uniform and was going across that campus to take a test in war tactics, and another was on her way to music class. The moral of this is clear: there are no bystanders anymore. This implies something about the solidarity of human beings—the fact that we are all part of the tragic event. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

Without a surrender of one’s own consciousness, no one today can draw one’s own moral skirts about him and claim an immunity from these events. Television, social media, and mass communication are only symptoms of a basic participation in the events of importance to the human race. To breathe is to judge. We can be confident that we shall find that this awareness of our own involvement is not at all the excuse for masochistic breast-beating or quietist withdrawal from the struggles. It can lead us rather to a new sharpening of our own ethical sensitivity and a discovery, though it be only partial, of the basis on which a lasting and effective struggle for racial integration or a relief from the compulsive hold of warfare may be founded. As a representative of these four students and their innocence, I shall choose one of them, Allison Krause, who was reported to have dropped a flower the day before the shooting into the barrel of one of the guardsmen’s rifles saying: “Flowers are better than bullets.” She is pictured in a poem by Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, which, despite its tendency toward sentimentality, reveals some important points: Nineteen-year-old Allison Krause, you were killed because you loved flowers. Bullets, pushing out the flower…let all the apple trees of the World, not in white—but in mourning be clothed. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

So far we see only the event as it occurred that day: four victims of murder, the whole event summed up in the ironic and cruel trajectory of stray bullets. However, Yevtushenko knows that this simple innocence has only touched the surface. In the succeeding lines we see the complexity of innocence and of evil: “But a Vietnam girl—the same age as Allison—taking in her hand a gun, is an armed flower, the wrath of the people.” I take both the phrase “armed flower” and “thorny flower of protest,” a phrase that appears later on in the poem, as referring to the dimension of experience added to the original purity of innocence. We now have wrath as the basic motivation. Yevtushenko is now talking about a different kind of innocence—an armed flower, no longer the product of a childlike powerlessness but the power of wrath. The Vietnamese girl knows the flower grows on a thorny bush and has to be handled with care. She has an innocence that does not avoid evil and that there is, in the depth of the human soul as well as in human history, no such thing as pure evil or pure good. Yevtushenko’s juxtaposition of flower and armed reminds us of the phrase used by Jesus in the Gospel according to Saint Mark with which He adjured His disciples as He sent them out into the World: “Be ye wise as serpents but harmless as doves.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

This is, again, a curious juxtaposition of innocence and experience, which, it was hoped, would become the foundation for effective social action in the work of the disciples. Now, when I speak of trusting our religious demands, just what do I mean by “trusting”? Is the word to carry with it license to define in detail an invisible World, and to anathematize and excommunicate those whose trust is different? Certainly not! Our faculties of belief were not primarily given us to make orthodoxies and heresies withal; they were given us to live by. And to trust our religious demands means first of all to live in the light of them, and to act as if the invisible World which they suggest were real. It is a fact of human nature, that beings can live and die by the help of a sort of faith that does without a single strict and rigid doctrine or definition. The bare assurance that this natural order is not ultimate but a mere sign or vison, the external staging of a many-storied Universe, in which spiritual forces have the last word and are eternal,–this bare assurance is to such beings enough to make life seem worth living in spite of every contrary presumption suggested by its circumstances on the natural plane. Destroy this inner assurance, however, vague as it is, and all the light and radiance of existence is extinguished for these persons at a stroke. Often enough the wild-eyed look at life—the suicidal mood—will then set in. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

In the same way the Spirit is always present, a moving power, sometimes in stormy ecstasies of individuals and groups, but mostly quiet, entering our human spirit and keeping it alive; sometimes manifest in great moments of history or a personal life, but mostly working hiddenly through the media of our daily encounters with beings and World; sometimes using its creation, the religious communities and their Spiritual means, and often making itself felt in spheres far removed from what is usually called religious. Like the wind the Spirit blows where it wills! It is not subject to rule or limited by method. Its ways with beings are not dependent on what beings are and do. You cannot force the Spirit upon yourself, upon an individual, upon a group, or even upon a Christian church. Although one who is the foundation of the church was oneself of the Spirit, and although the Spirit as it was present in one is the greatest manifestation of Spiritual Presence, the Spirit is not bound to the Christian church or any one of them. The Spirit is free to work in the spirits of beings in every human situation, and it urges beings to let Him do so; God as Spirit is always present to the spirit of beings. It is through this spirit that more specific powers can be extracted for the sake of communication and personal empowerment. “Yea, say unto them, except they repent to the Lord God will destroy them,” reports Alma 8.16. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

It is Well to Seek Guidance—The Error and Exaggeration Creep in When One Becomes too Concentrated on a Single Source of Guidance!

October 11, 2019 12:03 am

More full of visions than a high romance? Light hoverer around our happy pillows! It was about nine a.m. when I called Stirling, and, unable to contain myself, spilled out all of the story of recent events, as I invited him to dinner to discuss them in greater detail. Perhaps I wanted him to know this was a loaded invitation. I thought it only fair. He surprised me. He insisted that we meet for lunch. He asked if it would not be too inconvenient if we gathered at twelve noon. All population elements are represented in the community, but three families out of five (58 percent) trace their ancestry to “American stock” that came to Graystone Hills before the Civil War. In spite of popular belief, “the Irish element” has contributed less than 9 percent to the ranks of class V. The Poles are found here twice as frequently, and the Germans and Norwegians only one-third as frequently as we may expect if change factors alone are operating. The concentration of “American stock” is overlooked by people in Graystone Hills who commonly use a European ancestral background as a symbolic label. This is understandable in the case of the Poles; they were imported as strikebreakers, and they have not outlived this experience of their ethnic background. Authority and individuality need not contend with one another in a being’s mind. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

Many of these “American” families have lived in Graystone Hills as long as its “leading families”; however, length of residence is their only similarity to leading families, for through the generations they have achieved notorious histories. Unfortunately, the unsavory reputation of an ancestor is remembered and often used as an explanation for present delinquency. It is interesting to note that the doctrine of “blood” which explains the rise to eminence of class I is used on the same way to justify the derogation of class V. And, significantly, present behavior of class V gives the people who hold such an explanation is unwarranted, but people in Graystone Hills are not sociologists! Often such remarks as the following are made about these families or some member of them, “Blood will out”; “You cannot expect anything else from such people”; “His great-grandfather was hanged for killing a neighbor in cold blood!” Class V families are excluded from the two leading residential areas. They are found in the others, with large concentrations north of the tracks and below the canal. Below the canal and the Mill Addition are populated mainly by “Americans.” Down by the Mill is “Irish Heaven,” whereas the section north of the tracks is divided into the Norwegian and Poles areas. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

A low, flat, swamp-like sub-area within this section, Bluffs, is almost exclusively Polish. The higher ground north of the tracks, populated mainly by Norwegians with a slight intermingling of Irish and Germans, is known as “Ixnay.” Below the canal is referred to by many names, all symbolic of its undesirability: down by the garbage dump; where the river rats live; behind the tannery; the bush apes’ home; squatters’ paradise; where you will find the God-damned yellow hammers; the tannery flats; and along the tow-path. The dilapidated, box-like homes contain crude pieces of badly abused furniture, usually acquired secondhand. A combination wood and coal stove, or kerosene burner, is used both for cooking and heating. An unpainted table and a few chairs held together with baling wire, together with an ancient sideboard—with shelves above to hold the assorted dishes, and drawers below for pots, pans, and groceries—furnish the combined kitchen and dining room. There may be some well-worn linoleum or strips of roofing on the floor. The “front room” generally serves a dual purpose, living room by say and bedroom by night. Here too the floor is often covered with linoleum or roofing strips, seldom with a woven rug. Two or three overly used chairs in various stages of disrepair share the room with a sagging sofa that leads a double life as he routine of day alternates with that of night. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

If an additional bed is needed, an iron one may stand in a corner or along one wall. A simple mirror that shows signs of age, perhaps abuse, shares the wall with a few cheap prints of pictures cut from magazines that show how undressed a woman may be without being nude. Now and again a colored print of a saint and a motion picture star will be pasted or nailed beside a siren. An improvised wardrobe made by driving a row of nails in the wall generally occupies one corner. A table, a radio, and some means of lighting the room complete its furnishings. Old iron beds that sag in the middle, made with blankets, and comforts in the absence of sheets, a chest of drawers, a chair or two, and a mirror that looks out on the stringy curtains and the bare floor complete the furnishings of tiny bedrooms. Musical instruments, magazines, and newspapers other than The Bugle seldom find their way into these homes. Less than 1 percent have telephones. Privacy in the homes is almost non-existent; parents, children, “in-laws” and their children, and parts of broken family may live in two or three rooms. There is little differentiation in the use of rooms—kitchen, dining room, living room, and bedroom functions may be combined from necessity into a single use area. Bath and toilet facilities are found in approximately one home in seven. City water is piped near or into 77 percent of the homes within the city limits, except those below the canal. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

Water for these homes is either carried from the town pump, also located in this area, or from the river. Outside the town, wells, springs, and creeks are used for a water supply. Some 4 percent of the homes were equipped with furnace heat; the rest were heated with wood- or coal-burning stoves. The family residence is rented in four cases out of five (81 percent). The few that are owned have either been inherited or built along the canal and in the tannery flats by their present owners. A few Poles have bought homes in Rolling Hills from the English and Scotch who formerly inhabited this area. Although it is popularly believed that these people buy cars rather than homes, only 57 percent own cars, the great majority (83 percent) being more than 7 years old. The family pattern is unique. The husband-wife relationship is more or les an unstable one, even though the marriage is sanctioned either by law or understandings between the partners. Disagreements leading to quarrels and vicious fights, followed by desertion by either the man or the woman, possibly divorce, are not unusual. The evidence indicates that few compulsive factors, such as neighborhood solidarity, religious teachings, or ethical considerations, operate to maintain a stable material relationship. On the contrary, the class culture has established a family pattern were serial monogamy is the rule. Legal marriages are restricted within narrow limits to class equals. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

However, exploitative liaisons of pleasures of the flesh between males from the higher classes frequently occur wit teenage girls, but they are illegal and rarely result in marriage. Marriage occurs in the middle teens for the girls and late teens or early twenties for the boys. Doctors, nurses, and public officials who know these families best estimate that from one-fifth to one-fourth of all births are illegitimate. Irrespective of the degree of error in this estimate, 78 percent of the mothers gave birth to their first child before they were 20 years of age. Another trait that marks the family complex is the large number of children. The mean is 5.6 per mother, the range, 1 to 13. There is little prenatal or postnatal care of either mother or child. The child is generally delivered at home, usually by a local doctor, the county nurse, or a midwife, but in the late 1990’s some expectant mothers entered the local hospital. Hospital deliveries, however, are a recent innovation and not widely diffused. Death, desertion, separation, or divorce has broken more than half the families (56 percent). The burden of child care, as well as support, falls on the mother more often than on the father when the family is broken. The mother-child relation is the strongest and most enduring family tie. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

Formal education experience is limited in large part to the elementary school. Two parents out of three (67 percent) quit school before the eighth grade was reached; the third completed it. Seven fathers and six mothers out of 230 have completed a year or more of high school; only one father and four mothers have graduated. None has attended any type of school after leaving the public school system. Psychologically speaking, there are an infinite number of situations in which people live at subhuman levels, and they find that some violence is life-giving. The overly shy person; the suspicious one who cannot let oneself make relationships; the one unable to love deeply or to give to another; the coward who insulates oneself from experiences that would enrich one—the list becomes endless. These are all individuals in whom some admixtures of violence may help to correct a deficiency. However, it requires a burst of effort that goes beyond rationality, a risking of one’s self, a committing of all, to give the person a sense of fulfillment. When a woman who has been docile all her life finally loses her temper and breaks out in a tirade, we find ourselves smiling and silently cheering; at least she is no longer apathetic. A friend of mine told me recently that his two sons had come home from college and had stepped into a situation where there was a lot of tension because of the illness of two relatives. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

After a coupe of days one of the sons had torn up his iPhone 11 Pro Max in rage, and the other son had crashed his Bentley Flying Spur V8 S into a wall. My friend remarked: “It was a good violence.” A bust of anger seems to clear up the psychological relationship, making for greater honesty. Hence most people feel better after having gotten angry. However, I think he was rationalizing because the items were insured and no one physically got hurt. We have sad that violence united the self on a level below the human one. Now it so happens that many people (in fact most people) do live this way—that is without consciousness in any degree and without personal dignity. Many people spend their lives as only partially formed human beings, and millions living on a substandard in affluent countries. For these people, violence may raise the level of psychological and spiritual existence. Just as it unites the self that has attained consciousness on a level below the human one, it may raise undeveloped persons to a human level. This may take the form of political rebellions, which cause groups to break out of their apathy and succeed in wrenching social reforms from the dominant party. There are few, if any, instances where a dominant group has given up its power willingly and freely; power has a way of burrowing in to stay. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

You do not have to be a semibeast to be accepted. One must live their life with dignity, and develop their potential consciousness, and future freedom. There are people who have suffered centuries of exploitation and have endured the apathy this causes; and to become psychologically and spiritually alive, some forgiveness is necessary. Do not allow colonial powers to take an active role in setting natives against each other because, as a result, they are only consolidating their own interests. Violence is not the only way to throw off the yoke of the colonial powers, education is the most important factor, and education will help to elevate the community and produce unity in the family. Although underdeveloped nations, after being exploited for so long, have turned to violence, this is not the path to integrity, self-esteem, nor awareness of their own powers. The most important thing is for us to have human dignity, the birth and growth of consciousness, integrity of relationships. There have been people who have resisted exploitation by going to school during the day and driving taxis at night. The dignity of humanity will spring from their brains and incorporate their total organism and their collective unconscious, which is an expression of their organism. We are climbing toward a new order, toward new forms, and these are part of the new nationality. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

The old order and old forms will be destroyed in the process, but no sane person would argue that the forms of colonial society, which exploit people are part of humanity. Justice is a perspective that has been conceived as realistic. We ought to uplift the people; we must develop their brains, fill them will ideas, change them and make them into human beings. The living expression of the nation is the moving consciousness of the whole of the people; it is the coherent, enlightened action of men and women. We ought first to give back their dignity to all people. We should not be sticking needles in dolls or pounding on pillows, but should wipe out the rea evils of social and economic oppression. This concept has helped to clarify many neurotic problems which hitherto were beyond the reach of our understanding and hence of our therapy. It also puts two of the neurotic trends which had preciously resisted integration into their proper setting. The need for perfection now appears as an endeavor to measure up to this idealized image; the craving for admiration can be seen as the patient’s need to have outside affirmation that one really is one’s idealized image. And the farther the image is removed from reality the more insatiable this latter would logically be. Of all the attempts at solution the idealized image is probably the most important by reason of its far-reaching effect on the whole personality. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

However, in turn it generates a new inner rift, and hence calls for further patchwork. The next attempt at a solution seeks primarily to do away with this rift, though it helps as well to spirit away all other conflicts. Through what I call externalization, inner processes are experience as going on outside the self. If the idealized image means taking a step away from the actual self, externalization represents a still more radical divorce. It again creates new conflicts, or rather greatly augments the original conflict—that between the self and the outside World. I have called these attempts a solution, partly because they seem to operate regularly in all neuroses—though in varying degree—and partly because they bring about incisive changes in the personality. However, they are by no means the only ones. Others of less general significance include such strategies as arbitrary rightness, whose main function is to quell all inner doubts; rigid self-control, which holds together a torn individual by sheer will power; and cynicism, which, in disparaging all values, eliminates conflicts in regard to ideals. Sometimes being rich is not the answer to your problems, it can actually be a curse. Rich people have all their needs and wants met and it gives them nothing to strive for. This can leave them empty inside, to the point they do not realize how beautiful or talented they are. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

For a wealthy person, if he or she is empty inside a new dress or suit looks like just another pile of rags. They have to develop their spirituality and sometimes it is more difficult for them to do because they have more responsibilities to handle. Being less affluent, you get more joy for just putting food on the table and you see how thankful your kids are, who may have been starving all week. Buying new tires for your car might be a blessing because you know now you can get back and forth to work without hydroplaning with your kids in the back seat. Also, being less affluent allows you to dream more and it may motivate you to think about that house you are trying to purchase so you and your kids can live in a lace curtain suburb where you will no longer be preyed on. Meanwhile the consequences of all these unresolved conflicts have gradually become clearer to me. I see the manifold fears that are generated, the waste of energy, the inevitable impairment of moral integrity, the deep hopelessness that has resulted for the affluent and less affluent from feeling inextricably entangled. It was only after I had grasped the significance of neurotic hopelessness that the meaning of sadistic tends finally came into view. These, I now understand, represent an attempt at restitution through the vicarious living, entered upon by a person who despairs of ever being oneself. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

And the all-consuming passion which can so often be observed in sadistic pursuits grew out of such a person’s insatiable need for vindictive triumph. It becomes clear to me then that the need for destructive exploitation is in fact no separate neurotic trend but only a never-failing expression of that more comprehensive whole which for the lack of a better term we call sadism. Thus a theory of neurosis evolves, whose dynamic center is basic conflict between the attitudes of moving toward, moving again, and moving away from people. Because of one’s fear of being split apart on the one hand and the necessity to function as a unity on the other, the neurotic makes desperate attempts at solution. While one can succeed this way in creating a kind of artificial equilibrium, new conflicts are constantly generated and further remedies are continually required to blot them out. Every step in this struggle for unity makes the neurotic more hostile, more helpless, more fearful, more alienated from oneself and others, with the result that the conflicts become more acute and their real resolution less and less attainable. One finally becomes hopeless and may try to find a kind of restitution in sadistic pursuits, which in turn have the effect of increasing one’s hopelessness and creating new conflict. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

This, then, is a fairly dismal picture of neurotic development and its resulting character structure. Why do I nonetheless call my theory a constructive one? In the first place it does away with the unrealistic optimism that maintains we can cure neuroses by absurdly simple means. However, in involves no equally unrealistic pessimism. I call it constructive because it allows us for the first time to tackle and resolve neurotic hopelessness. I call it constructive most of all because in spite of its recognition of the severity of neurotic entanglements, it permits not only a tempering of the underlying conflicts but their actual resolution, and so enables us to work toward a real integration of personality. Neurotic conflicts cannot be resolved by rational decision. The neurotic’s attempts at solution ae not only futile but harmful. However, these conflicts can be resolved by changing the conditions within the personality that brought them into being. Every piece of analytical work well done changes these conditions in that it makes a person less helpless, less fearful, less hostile, and less alienated from oneself and others. Dr. Freud’s pessimism as regards neuroses and their treatment arouse from the depths of his disbelief in human goodness and human growth. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

Being, Dr. Freud postulated, are doomed to suffer or to destroy. The instincts which drive one can only be controlled or at best sublimated. My own belief is that beings have the capacity as well as the desire to develop one’s potentialities and become a decent being, and that these deteriorate if one’s relationship to others and hence oneself is, and continues to be, disturbed. I believe that a being can change and g on changing as long as one lives. And this belief has grown with deeper understanding. We cannot allow the media or any other puppet show to direct an attack on our very freedom of thought, forcing all minds to think towards the same objective of enslavement which below the surface drives the collective race of humankind into a state of oppression. After all, who is anyone to tell us what to think? Who is anyone to say what thoughts are good? Thoughts stem from our ability to seek knowledge and live according to that knowledge as wise men and women and children and other living beings. They are expressions of our individual spirit of consciousness which has been torn to pieces. When we choose to develop our thought process by actually thinking instead of accumulating supposed facts we are empowered to create lives which are fulfilled according to how we want to shape them in correlation with our own true divine will and level of self-discipline. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

Maybe making money outside of the system of slave labor is your goal. If that is the case, then focus on your talents and contemplate ways of making cash by using those talents to produce prosperity. Your perception of the enslaved will become more apparent and you will essentially stop being able to understand their contentment with such mundane aspirations. Do not fall into the trap of expressing disgust with these people, or exhibiting spite or hatred. They serve as important examples of what not to be. Remember that they are not the target of your spite and hatred. It is the systematic construct of imposed limitation we despise. Not the people who are enslaved by the system. The veil between Worlds will begin to tear from top to bottom and your spiritual and corporal experiences will begin to merge. Your life will become more blessed, and your blessings more grounded. The increasing intensity of your spiritual experiences will make the experiences more malleable through our soul work. This is a major part of this infernal science of becoming. It helps to enforce the process of unifying the dense physical self with the potential of unlimited possibility. Instead of being fearful you should see these visions as opportunities to destroy imposed fate through spirituality. Remember this at all times…the life experience is nothing but a series of opportunities to exercise power. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

Absorb and consume any malign energies that may see your destruction as your personal power develops through alchemical transmutation. The oppositional forces then become fuel for ascent. A miracle will awake and when it does, it will mercilessly encroach upon all enemies which seek to interrupt your ascent with malicious intent. These blessings are extensions of self and the collective being conscious of humankind. These numbers of these blessings is infinite and when they are stirred, legions upon legions will begin to attack the enemy. Destruction of tyrants and liberation of the spirit is our goal. Keep this in mind, as then through application of this work our children may live in a better World of love and peace beyond the slavery of those so called gods who seek and worship adoration as if they were entities of greater power. We are isolated emanations of the void and so we are the Gods of Gods. We created them to serve us. Respect this current for what it is. It is a weapon meant to destroy the God of slaves from the inside out as well as the slave drivers who exalt him and/or her. It is meant to destroy the entire system and usher in something else. “They should come forth even unto the land of promise, which was choice above all other lands, which the Lord God had preserved for a righteous people,” reports Ether 2.7. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

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One May Work Toward Enlightenment and Inner Freedom to the Aspiration which Draws One Most!

October 4, 2019 2:00 am

Angels, or those who call themselves Angels, or would have me conclude that they are Angels come to me in the long years. They come to me as I lay in bed. It seems we have established some link with these beings, and I could tell you a tale of them, but now is not the time. I think it is my eyes which give them the claim on me, the ability to reach down to me, in this realm, and take me—it is the vision, stolen in another dominion and then returned on Earth to its rightful entity. You might say that as they looked down from their lofty Heaven, if Heaven is, they could see, through the mists of Earth, these bright shining eyes. My visions give them their compass to find me, their opening, as it were, between the dominions, and down they come to enlist my spirit against my will. How can I accept a World full of injustice, along with their august designs? As worker and consumer beings are increasingly alienated by the power of machines which regulate their daily life, even determining their values. The technology which produces machines, however, is but the offspring of a science which, as it developed the means to transform our planet or destroy it, has become ever more remote from the lives of ordinary citizens and perhaps the ultimate factor in their alienation. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

To such citizens science appears magical and mysterious in its capacity for and neutrality toward good or evil. Is this entirely due to faults in education which, separate beings of humanistic learning from beings of science? Undoubtedly, Western education has failed to help rising generations of non-scientists to understand science. However, the fault is possessed in beings of science, too. Scientists have enjoyed acting the mysterious stranger, the powerful voice without emotion, the expert and the god. They have failed to make themselves comfortable in the talk of people in the street; no one taught them the knack, of course, but they were not keen to learn. And now they find the distance which they enjoyed has turned to distrust, and the awe has turned to fear; and people who are by no means fools really believe that we should be better off without science. Science and society are out of step. Can their mutual alienation be overcome? We can answer affirmatively, but with proviso that both sides make the necessary effort. Against the guardedly optimistic view is the more pessimistic outlook of philosophers who see beings as unable to live with and control the extraordinary knowledge and power which fertile brains have devised. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

It is not merely the hydrogen bomb itself which threatens our existence, but a bureaucratization of mass destruction and an incapacity for fear. The first of these factors deprives even the participants in mass destruction of any sense of responsibility for their acts. As for the second, the helplessness with which contemporary humankind reacts—or rather fails to react—to the existence of the superbomb bespeaks a lack of freedom the like of which has never before existed in history. This marks the freezing point of human freedom. We all know the story of the sorcerer’s apprentice; or Frankenstein which Mary Shelley wrote in competition with her husband and Byron; or some other story of the same kind out of the macabre invention of the nineteenth century. In these stores, someone who has special powers over nature conjures or creates a stick or a machine to do his work for him; and then finds that he cannot take back the life he has given it. The mindless monster overwhelms him; and what began as an invention to do the housework ends by destroying the master with the house. These stories have become the epitome of our own fears. We have been inventing machines at a growing pace for about four hundred years. This is a short span even in our recorded history, and it is not a thousandth part of our history as beings. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

In that short moment of time we have found a remarkable insight into the workings of nature. We have used it to make ourselves far more flexible in our adaption to the outside World than any other animal has ever been. We can survive in climates which even germs find difficult. We can grow our own food and meat. We can travel overland and we can tunnel and swim and fly, all in one body. More important than any of these, we have come nearest to the dream which Lamarck had, that animals might inherit the skills which their parents learned. We have discovered the means to record our experience so that others may live it again. The history of other animal species shows that the most successful in the struggle for survival have been those which were most adaptable to changes in the World. We have made ourselves by means of our tools beyond all measure more adaptable than any other species, living or extent; and we continue to do so with gathering speed. Yet today we are afraid of our own shadow in the nine o’clock news; and we wonder whether we shall survive so over-specialized a creature as the Pekinese. Everyone likes to blame one’s sense of defeat on someone else; and for some time scientists have been a favorite scapegoat. I want to look at their responsibility, and for that matter at everybody’s, rather more closely. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

They do have special responsibility; do not let us argue that out of existence; but it is a complicated one, and it is not the whole responsibility. For example, science obviously is not responsible for the readiness of people, who do not take their private quarrels beyond the stage of insult, to carry their public quarrels to the point of war. Many animals will fight for their needs, and some for their mere greeds, to the point of death. Bucks fight for females, and birds fight for their territories. The fighting habits of human beings are odd because they display them only in groups. However, they were not supplied by scientists. On the contrary, science has helped to end several kinds of group murder, such as witch hunting and the taboos of the early nineteenth century against disinfecting hospitals. Neither is science responsible for the existence of groups which believe themselves to be in competition: for the existence above all of nations. And the threat of war today is always a national threat. Some bone of contention and competition is identified with a national need: Fiume or the Polis corridor or the dignity of the Austrian Empire; and in the end nations are willing to organize and to invite the death of citizens on both sides in order to reach these collective aims. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

Science did not create the nations; on the contrary, it helped to soften those strong national idiosyncrasies which it seems necessary to exploit if war is to be made with enthusiasm. And wars are not made by any traditional groups: they are made by highly organized societies, they are made by nations. If the day was thirsty, most of us have seen Yorkshiremen invade Old Trafford, and a bloody nose or two. However, if her had been told that Lancashire had the atomic bomb, no Yorkshireman would have grown pale. The sense of doom in us today is not a fear of science; it is a fear of war. And the causes of war were not created by science; they do not differ in kind from known causes of the War of Jenkins’ Ear of the Wars of the Roses, which were carried on with the modest scientific assistance. No, science has not invented war; but it has turned it into a very different thing. The people who distrust it are not wrong. The man in the pub who says, “It will wipe out the World,” the woman in the queue who says “It is not natural”—they do not express themselves very well; but what they are trying to say does make sense. Science has enlarged the mechanisms of war, and it has distorted it. It has done this in at least two ways. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

First, science has obviously multiplied the power of the warmakers. The weapons of the moment can kill more people more secretly and more unpleasantly than those of the past. This progress, as for want of another word I must call it—this progress as been going on for some time; and for some time it has been said, of each new weapon, that it is so destructive or so horrible that it will frighten people into their wits, and force the nations to give up war for the lack of cannon fodder. This hope has never been fulfilled, and I know no one who takes refuge in it today. The acts of men and women are not dictated by such simple compulsions; and they themselves do not stand in any simple relation to the decisions of the nations which they compose. Grapeshot and TNT and gas have not helped to outlaw war; and I see no sign that the hydrogen bomb or a whiff of bacteria or fentanyl will be more successful in making beings wise by compulsion. Secondly, science at the same time has given the nations quite new occasions for falling out. I do not mean such simple objectives as someone else’s uranium mine, or a Pacific Island which happens to be knee-deep in organic fertilizer. I do not even mean merely another nation’s factories and her skilled population. These are all parts of the surplus above our simple needs which they themselves help to create and which gives our civilization its character. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

And war in our World battens on this surplus. This is the object of the greed of nations, and this also gives them the leisure to train and the means to arm for war. At bottom, we have remained individually too greedy to distribute our surplus, and collectively too stupid to pile it up in any more useful form than the traditional mountains of arms. Science can claim to have created the surplus in our societies, and we know from the working day and the working diet how greatly it has increased it in the last two hundred years. Science had created the surplus. Now put this year’s budget beside the budget of 1750, anywhere in the World, and you will see what we are doing with it. There are at least five recognizable kinds of violence. There is, first, simple violence. Some people dream of violence, in which they ward off knives and guns, and this is simple violence. This is characteristic of many student rebellions, and carries with it the muscular freedom, the surging up of pent-up energy, and the freedom from the restrictions of individual conscience and responsibility of which we have spoken. It is the general protest against being placed continuously in an impotent situation, and it typically carries highly moral demands. However, very little violence stays at this first level. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

There is, second, calculated violence. Many, if not most, of the student rebellions were surrounded by calculated violence. He rebellion of French students in Paris was taken over by professional revolutionaries on the second or third day, and the leadership, which began with moral demands, changed as the leaders exploited the profound frustration of the students and their energy. The third type I call fomented violence. This is the work of a Himmler or of the rabble-rousers of the extreme right or left in any country. It is a stimulation of the impotence and frustration felt by the people at large for the purposes of the speaker. Modern history is full of illustrations of how treating people like beasts in the process. Fourth, there is absentee violence (or instrumental violence). Obviously all of us who live in society partake to some extent of the violence of that society, although most of us do it from our own vantage point of moral elevation and hide behind zombie-like unawareness of conscience. The war on our boarder with Mexico cannot continue expect that our taxes are paying to shelter unidentified immigrants who are looking for a new place to live; in this sense we all are part of the war on the boarder, whether we are for or against national security. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

There is a fifth category of violence, different from those above, which occurs when the party in power, threatened with encroachment on its power, strikes out with violence to stave off these threats. This we may call violence from above. Its motive is generally to protect or re-establish the status quo. The police are taken out of their rightful roles as apprehenders and are made punishers. Such violence is said to be regularly more destructive than other violence—partly because the police have the clubs and guns, and partly because they have a large reservoir of inner individual resentment on which they can draw in their rage. The age-old assumption, especially in the American dream, is that the government is instituted for the protection of the weak and less affluent against exploitation, as well as for the strong and the rich. The police officer on the corner, who is everyone’s friend and will direct you when you are lost, is the ideal model, as the law-loving sheriff bringing order to the West. However, in this fifth kind of violence, this is all thrown aside and situations like the death of Stephan Clark by the hands of two police officers in Sacramento, California and the shooting of Michael Brown in Ferguson, Missouri, unfortunately more people are starting to view the police department as the army of Hitler. And the violence becomes the more destructive precisely because it is a perversion of previous protectiveness. Government itself is then reduced to battling on the level of combatants. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

However, keep in mind that a few bad incidents do not spoil the entire law enforcement team and turn them into the type of law enforcement we see in the 2009 film Brooklyn’s Finest. There are still wonderful police officers like Jamie Reagan who we see on the hit television series Blue Bloods. And there are wonderful officers like Oliva Benson and Odafin Tutuola who star on Law and Order SVU. And now, in turning to what religion may have to say to the situation, I come to what is the soul of my discourse. Religion has meant many things in human history; but when from now onward I use the word I mean to use it in the supernaturalist sense, as declaring that the so-called order of nature, which constitutes this World’s experience, is only one portion of the total Universe, and that there stretches beyond this visible World and unseen World of which we now know nothing beneficial, but in its relation to which the true significance of our present mundane life consists. A being’s religious faith (whatever more special item of doctrine it may involve) means for me essentially one’s faith in the existence of an unseen order of some kind in which the riddles of the natural order may be found explained. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

In the more developed religions the natural World has always been regarded as the mere scaffolding or vestibule of a truer, more eternal Word, and affirmed to be a sphere of education, trial, or redemption. In these religions, one must in some fashion die to the natural life before one can enter into life eternal. The notion that this physical World of wind and water, where the Sun rises and the Moon set, is absolutely and ultimately the divinely aimed-at and established thing, is one which we find only in the very early religions, such as that of the most primitive Jewish people. It is this natural religion (primitive still, in spite of the fact that poets and beings of science whose good-will exceeds their perspicacity keep publishing it in new editions tuned to our contemporary ears) that has suffered definitive bankruptcy in the opinion of a circle of persons, among whom I must count myself, and who are growing more numerous every day. For such persons the physical order of nature, taken simply as science know it, cannot be held to reveal any one harmonious spiritual intent. It is mere weather doing and undoing without end. Now, if I can in the short remainder of this hour, I wish to make you feel that we have a right to believe the physical order; if only thereby life may seem to us better worth living again, that we have a right to supplement in by an unseen spiritual order which we assume on trust. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

However, such as a trust will seem to some of you sadly mystical and execrably unscientific, I must first say a word or two to weak the veto which you may consider that science opposes to out act. There is included in human nature an ingrained naturalism and materialism of mind which can only admit facts that are actually tangible. Of this sort of mind the entity called science is the idol. Fondness for the word scientists is one of the notes by which you may know its votaries; and its short way of killing any opinion that it disbelieves in is to call it unscientific. It must be granted that there is no slight excuse for this. Science has made such glorious leaps in the last three hundred years, and extended our knowledge of nature so enormously both in general and in detail; beings of science, moreover, have as a class displayed such admirable virtues,–that it is no wonder if the worshippers of science lose their head. In this very University, accordingly, I have heard more than one teacher say that all the fundamental conceptions of truth have already been found by science, and that the future has only the details of the picture to fill in. However, this slightest reflection on the real conditions will suffice to show how barbaric such notions are. They show such a lack of scientific imagination, that it is hard to see how one who is actively advancing any part of science can make a mistake so crude. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

Think how many absolutely new scientific conceptions have arisen in our own generation, how many new problems have been formulated that were never thought of before, and then cast an eye upon the brevity of science’s career. It began with Galileo, not three hundred years ago. For thinkers since Galileo, each informing his successor of what discoveries his own lifetime had seen achieved, might have passed the torch of science into our hands as we sit here in this room. Indeed, for the matter of that, an audience much smaller than the present one, and audience of some five or six score people, if each person in it could speak for one’s own generation, would carry us away to the absolute unknown of the human species, to days without a document or monument to tell their tale. Is it credible that such a mushroom knowledge, such a growth overnight as this, can represent more than the minutest glimpse of what the Universe will really prove to be when adequately understood? No! our science is a drop blood and our ignorance a sea of salt water. Whatever else be certain, this at least is certain,–that the World of our present natural knowledge is enveloped in a larger World of some sort of whose residual properties we at present can frame no absolute idea. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

It is a mistake to imagine the sage as a weakling. We can be powerful in our public addresses as well as in private capacity. When hostile critics of our own race slander us behind our backs, we must liken ourselves to an elephant treading down worms in its path. “Not that we are sufficient of ourselves to claim anything coming from us; our sufficiency is from God, how has qualified us to be ministers of a new covenant, not in a written code but in the Spirit; for the written code kills, but the spirit gives life,” reports 2 Corinthians 3.5-6. Nobody can look into the innermost center of another being, nor fully into one’s own heart. Therefore, nobody can say with certainty that anyone else shares in the new state of things, and one can scarcely say it of oneself. However, even less can one say of another, however distorted the being’s life may be, that one does not participate at all in the new reality, and that one is not qualified to serve its cause. Certainly, nobody can say this of oneself. Perhaps it is more important in our time to emphasize this last—namely, the qualification of ourselves and those around us to serve the new creation, our ability to be priests in mutual help towards achieving it. Not long ago, many people, especially members of the church, felt qualified to judge others and to tell them what to believe and how to act. Today we feel deeply the arrogance of this attitude. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

Instead, there is a general awareness of our lack of qualification, especially among the middle-aged and younger generations. We are inclined to disqualify ourselves, and to withdraw from the service of the new creation. We feel that we do not participate in it, and that we cannot bring others into such participation. We decline the honor and the burden of mutual priesthood. Often this is caused by unconcern for our highest human vocation. However, it is equally caused by despair about ourselves, by doubt, guilt and emptiness. We feel infinitely removed from a new state of things, and totally unable to help others towards it. However, then the other words of our text must become effective, that our qualification is from God and not from ourselves, and the all-consoling word that God is greater than our heart. If we look beyond ourselves at that which is greater than we, then we can feel called to help others in just the moment when we ourselves need help most urgently—and, astonishingly, we can help. A power works through us which is not of us. We may remember situations when words rose out of a depth of our being, perhaps in the midst of our own great anxiety, that struck another in the depth of one’s being and one’s great anxiety so strongly that they helped one to a new state of things. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

Perhaps we remember other situations when an action of a person, whose life we knew was disrupted, had a priestly, awakening, and healing effect upon us. It did not come from one, but was in one, as it did not come from us, but was in us. Let us not assume the task of being mediators of the new creation to others arrogantly, but it personal or ecclesiastical terms. Yet, let us not reject the task of being priest for each other because of despair about ourselves or unconcern about what should be our highest concern. Against both arrogance and despair stands the word that our qualification does not come from us, nor from any being or any institution, not even from the church, but from God. And if it comes from God it is His Spiritual Presence in our spirit. “Yea, and that same God did establish his church among them; yes, and that same God hath called me by a holy calling, to preach the word unto this people, and hath given me much success, in which joy is full,” reports Alma 29.13. There is no single path to enlightenment. Life itself is the great enlightener. I met a man once who, after the shock of hearing his wife tell hm that she had ceased to love him, that she had for some time had a secret lover, and that she requested a divorce so as to be able to marry him, felt a collapse of all his hitherto confidently held values and beliefs. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

For some days he was so affected the he could not eat. However, his mind by then had become so extraordinarily lucid concerning these matters and himself, that he experiences moments of truth. Through them he came into a great peace and understanding, an inner change. What was the morning Sun which awakened him? He did not pray, entered no churches, was too intent on his Worldly business to read the Bible. This brings me back to the theme: do not submit to the pressure of those who say there is only a single way to salvation (the way they follow or teach), do not let the mind be trammeled or narrowed. The truth is that the ways are many, are spread out in all directions, are individual. From the clues, hints, and indications which search and experience give us, we learn in the end what is the true way to God within us. The quest is too individual a matter to fit everyone in the same way, like a ready-made suit of clothes. Each being has one’s own life-problems to consider and surmount. In trying to do so wisely nobly and honestly one does precisely what the quest calls for from one at the time. Each quest thus has its own character and its own personality. This it shapes by the act of dedicating itself to the incorruptible integrity of the higher life. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

Not Only is Everything Subject to Change but Everything Also Exists in Relation to Something Else—Thus Change and Relativity Dominate the World Scene!

September 26, 2019 11:57 pm

Like Nature, the World, I myself, all existence is subject to change. It is inevitable. What can we do except accommodate ourselves to this inexorable law? Of course I want to lay eyes upon you. I want to talk to you. I want to be received, if such a thing is possible, into the Coven of the Articulate. I want you, the great breaker of rules, to forgive me that I have broke yours. “My days have passed away, my thoughts are dissipated, tormenting my heart. They have turned night into day, and after darkness I hope for light again. If I wait hell is my house, and I have made my bed in darkness. I have said to rottenness: thou art my father; to worms, my mother and my sister. Where is now then my expectation, and who considereth my patience? All that I have shall go down into the deepest pit: thinkest thou that there at least I shall have rest?” reports Job 17.16. A remarkable example of the creative encounter is given in the small book written by James Lord in recounting his experience of posing for Alberto Giacometti. Having been friends for some time, these two men could be entirely open with each other. Lord often made notes directly after the posing session of what Giacometti had said and done, and out of them he has put together this valuable monograph about the experience of encounter occurs in creativity. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

He reveals, first, the great degree of anxiety and agony that the encounter generated in Giacometti. When Lord would arrive at the studio for his sitting, Giacometti would often disconsolately occupy himself half an hour or more doing odds and ends with his sculpture, literally afraid to start on the painting. When he did bring himself to get into painting, the anxiety became overt. At one point, writes Lord, Giacometti started gasping and stamping his foot: “Your head is going away!” he exclaimed. “It’s going away completely!” “It will come back again,” I said. He shook his head. “Not necessarily. Maybe the canvas will become completely empty. And then what will become of me? I’ll die of it!” He reached into his pocket, pulled out his handkerchief, stared at it for a moment, as though he did not know what it was, then with a moan threw it onto the floor. Suddenly he shouted very loudly, “I shriek! I Scream!” Lord goes on at another point: To talk to his model while he is working distracts him, I think, from the constant anxiety which is a result of his conviction that he cannot hope to represent on the canvas what he sees before him. This anxiety often bursts forth in the form of melancholy gasps, furious expletives, and occasional loud cries of rage and/or distress. He suffers. There is no doubt about it. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

Giacometti is committed to his work in a particularly intense and total way. The creative compulsion is never wholly absent from him, never leaves him a moment of complete peace. So intense is the encounter that he often identifies the painting on the easel with the actual flesh-and-blood person posing. One day his foot accidentally struck the catch that holds the easel shelf at the proper level, which caused the canvas to fall abruptly for a foot or two. “Oh, excuse me!” he said. I laughed and observed that he had excused himself as though he had not caused me to fall instead of the painting. “That’s exactly what I did feel,” he answered. In Giacometti this anxiety was associated, as it was in his revered Cezanne, with a great deal of self-doubt. In order to go on, to hope, to believe that there is some chance of his actually creating what he ideally visualized, he is obliged to feel that it is necessary to start his entire career over again every day, as it were, from scratch….he often feels that the particular sculpture or painting on which he happened to be working at the moment is that one which will for the very first time express what he subjectively experiences in response to an objective reality. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Lord correctly assumes that the anxiety is related to the gap between the ideal vision that the artist is trying to paint and the objective results. Here he discusses the contradiction that every artist experiences: This fundamental contradiction, arising from the hopeless discrepancy between conception and realization, is at the root of all artistic creation, and it helps explain the anguish which seems to be an unavoidable component of that experience. Even as “happy” an artist as Renior was not immune to it. What meant something, what alone existed with a life of its own was his [Giacometti’s] indefatigable, interminable struggle via the act of painting to express in visual terms a perception of reality that had happened to coincide momentarily with my head [which Giacometti was then trying to paint]. To achieve this was of course impossible, because what is essentially abstract can never be made concrete without altering its essence. However, he was committed, he was, in fact condemned to the attempt, which at times seemed rather like the task of Sisyphus. One day Lord happened to see Giacometti in a café. And, indeed, miserable was he did seem to be. This, I thought, was the true Giacometti, sitting alone at the back of a café, oblivious to the admiration and recognition of the World, staring into a void from which no solace could come, tormented by the hopeless dichotomy of his ideal yet condemned by that helplessness to struggle as long as he lived to try to overcome it. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

What consolation was it that the newspapers of many countries spoke of him, that museums everywhere exhibited his work, that people he would never know knew and admired him. None. None at all. When we see the intimate feelings and inner experiences of an eminent artist like Giacometti, we smile at the absurd talk in some psychotherapeutic circles of “adjusting” people, making people “happy,” or training out of them by simple behavior modification techniques all pain and grief and conflict and anxiety. How hard for humankind to absorb the deeper meaning of the myth of Sisyphus!—to see that “success” and “applause” are the (expletive) goddess we always secretly knew they were. Too see that the purpose of human existence in a man like Giacometti has nothing whatever to do with reassurance or conflict-free adjustment. Giacometti was rather devoted—“condemned,” to use Lord’s fitting term—to the struggle to perceive and reproduce the World around him through his own vision of being human. He knew there was no others alternative for him. His challenge gave his life meaning. He and his kind seek to bring their own visions of what it means to be human, and to see through that vision to a World of reality, however ephemeral, however consistently that reality vanishes each time you concentrate on it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

How absurd are the rationalistic assumptions that all one has to do is to remove from the World its curtains of superstition and ignorance and there suddenly will be reality, pristine and pure! Giacometti sought to see reality through his ideal vision. He sought to find the ground forms, the basic structure of reality, below the strewn surface of the arena where (expletive) goddesses cavort. He could not escape devoting himself unstintingly to the question: Is there some place where reality speaks our language, where it answers us if we but understand the hieroglyphics? He knew the rest of us would be no more successful than he was in finding the answer; but we have his contribution to work with, and this we are helped. Each being is unique so each quest must be too. Everyone must find, in the end, one’s own path through one’s own life. All attempts to copy someone else, however reputed, will fail to lead one to self-realization although they may advance one to a certain point. Each seeker must find out one’s own path, one’s own technique for one’s self. Who else has the right or the capacity to do this for an individual? We prefer to follow the creative rather than the compulsive way, to help beings find their own way rather than force them to travel our way. And this can only be done by starting with the roots, with the ideas they hold, and the attitudes which dominate them. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

There are too many differences in individual aspirants to allow a broad general technique to suit them all. A guide who can give a personal prescription is helpful, but even in one’s absence the aspirant can intelligently put together the fragments which will best help one. Let one walk forward slowly or quickly, as suits one best, and also in one’s own way, again as suits one’s individuality which one has fashioned through the reincarnations to its present image and from which one has to begin and proceed farther. There are not only widely different stages of evolutionary growth for every human being but also widely different types of human beings within each stage. Hence a single technique cannot possibly cover the spiritual needs of all humanity. The seeker should find the one that suits one’s natural aptitude as one should find the teacher who is most in inward affinity with one. Let one take up whatever path is most convenient to one’s personal circumstances and individual character and not force one’s self into one utterly unsuited to both, merely because it has proven right for other people. There is no single universal rule for all beings: their outer circumstances and inner conditions, their historical background and geographical locality, their karmic destiny and evolutionary need, their differences in competence, render it unwise, unfair, and impracticable to write a single prescription for them. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

Many European existentialist are largely reacting to Nietzsche’s conclusion that God is dead, and perhaps to the fact that Marx also is dead. The Americans have learned that political democracy and economic prosperity do not in themselves solve any of the basic value problems. There is no pace else to turn but inward, to the self, as the locus of values. Paradoxically, even some of the religious existentialist will go along with this conclusion part of the way. It is extremely important for psychologist that the existentialists may supply psychology with the underlying philosophy which it now lacks. Logical positivism has been a failure, especially for clinical and personality psychologists. At any rate, the basic philosophical problems will surely be opened up for discussion again and perhaps psychologists will stop relying on pseudo-solutions or on unconscious, unexamined philosophies they picked up as children. An alternative phrasing of the core (for us Americans) of European existentialism is that it deals radically with that human predicament presented by the gaps between human aspirations and human limitations (between what the human being is, and what one would like to be, and what one could be). This is not so far off from the identity problem as it might sound at first. A person is both actuality and potentiality. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

That serious concern with this discrepancy could revolutionize psychology, there is no doubt in my mind. Various literatures already support such a conclusion, for example, projective testing, self-actualization, the various peak-experiences (in which this gap is bridged), the Jungian psychologies, various theological thinkers, and so forth. Not only this, but they raise also the problems and techniques of integration of this twofold nature of beings, one’s lower and one’s higher, one’s creatureliness and one’s Godlikeness. On the whole, most philosophies and religions, Eastern as well as Western, have dichotomized them, teaching that the way to become “higher” is to renounce and master “the lower.” The existentialists, however, teach that both are simultaneously defining characteristics of human nature. Neither can be repudiated; they can only be integrated. However, we already know something of these integration techniques—of insight, of intellect in the broader sense, of love, of creativeness, of humor and tragedy, of play, of art. I suspect we will focus our studies on these integrative techniques more than we have in the past. Another consequence for my think of this stress on the twofold nature of beings is the realization that some problems must remain eternally insoluble. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

From this flows naturally a concern with the ideal, authentic, or perfect or Godlike human being, a study of human potentialities as now existing in certain sense, as current knowable reality. This, too, may sound merely literary but it is not. I remind you that this is just a fancy way of asking the old, unanswered questions, “What are the goals of therapy, of education, of bringing up children?” It also implies another truth and another problem which calls urgently for attention. Practically every serious description of the “authentic person” extant implies that such a person, by virtue of what one has become, assumes a new relation to one’s society and indeed, to society in general. One not only transcends oneself in various ways; one also transcends one’s culture. One resists enculturation. One becomes more detached from one’s culture and from one’s society. One becomes a little more a member of one’s species and a little less a member of one’s local group. My feeling is that most sociologists and anthropologists will take this hard. I therefore confidently expect controversy in this area. However, this is clearly a basis for “universalism.” From the European writers, we can and should pick up their greater emphasis on what they call “philosophical anthropology,” that is, the attempt to define beings, and the differences between beings and any other species, between human beings and objects, and between human beings and robots. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

What are human being’s unique and defining characteristics? What is so essential to beings that without it one would no longer be defined as a human being? On the whole this is a task from which American psychology has abdicated. The various behaviorisms do not generate any such definition, at least none that can be taken seriously (what would an S-R (Stimulus-response) human being be like? And who would like to be one? S-R model of human behavior suggest that the behavior is caused by certain reasons. A particular stimulus triggers a particular response. Dr. Freud’s picture of human beings was clearly unsuitable, leaving out as it did one’s aspirations, one’s realizable hopes, one’s Godlike qualities. The fact that Dr. Freud suppled us with most comprehensive systems of psychopathology and psychotherapy is beside the point as the contemporary ego-psychologist are finding out. Aggression and violence are rightly linked in the public mind—one speaks of aggression and violence. Aggression is to violence as anxiety is to panic. When aggression builds up in us, it feels, at a certain point, as though a switch has been thrown, and we become violent. The aggression is object-related—that is, we know at whom and what we are angry. However, in violence, the object-relation disintegrates, and we wing wildly, hitting whoever is within range. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

One’s mind becomes foggy, and perception of the enemy becomes unclear; one loses awareness of the environment and wants to act out this inner compulsion to do violence, come what it may. Humans are the creatures who can think in abstraction and who can transcend the concrete situation. The violence being’s capacity to abstract has disintegrated, and this accounts for one’s crazy behavior. The suddenness with which most violent episodes erupt suggest some questions. In violence, is there a direct connection between the input stimuli and the output muscles (for instance, the muscle that suddenly tend to strike back)? And is this connection subcortical, which would be related to the fact that it happens so quickly that the person does not think until after the episode has passed? Such discussions of the pathways by which the excitation travels are only analogies to the experience itself, but as analogies they may be useful in our understanding the process. Specifically, they may help us see why a person is possessed by violence rather than possessing it. Every since Walter B. Cannon’s classical work in the Harvard psychology laboratory, it has been generally agreed that there are three responses of the organism to threat: fight, flight, and delay response. Cannon demonstrated for example, that when somebody suddenly shoves me roughly on the lightrail, adrenalin is poured into my bloodstream, my blood pressure rises to give my muscles more strength, my heartbeat becomes more rapid—all ofwhich prepares me to fight the offending person or to flee out of range. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

The “flight” is what occurs in anxiety and fear; the “fight” in aggression and violence. With these physiological changes, the experience of violence gives great energy to the person. One feels a kind of transcendent power that one did not realize one had; and one may fight much more effectively in this mood. This fact can act like a drug, tempting the person to give oneself over again and again to violence. The third possibility is that I can delay my response. This is what most people actually do. The lower down the scale of education and status a person is, the more apt one is to react directly; the higher on the scale, the more apt one is to delay reaction until one has had a chance to think and assess the prospects of fighting or fleeing. The capacity for delayed response is a gift—or burden—of civilization: we wait to absorb the event into consciousness and then decide what is the best response. This gives us culture, but it also gives us neurosis. The typical neurotic may spend one’s whole life trying to fight with new acquaintances the old battles that never got worked out in one’s childhood. However, is it not true that on the crowded lightrail I am in a “readiness” to respond hostilely? I am much more apt to have a counterurge of the violet type in that situation than, say, when someone jostles me on a dance floor. So there must be some symbolic scanning process going on. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

How I interpret the situation will determine my readiness to strike back in hostility, making it causa belli, or to simply smile and accept an apology, if one is offered. Interpretation takes in unconscious as well as conscious factors: I give a certain meaning to it; I see the World as being hostile or friendly. Here enters the symbol, the means we have as human beings of uniting conscious and unconscious, historical and present, individual and group. This is why the organic processes are subsumed under the symbolic process. It is the symbolic process that determines the individual’s intentionality. How a person sees and interprets the World about one is thus crucial to one’s violence. This is what gives the readiness to fight to a man or woman quietly sitting in one’s car who becomes enraged when a police officer asks one for one’s identification. This also underlies the “machismo” of a police officer who is driven by one’s own power needs to humiliate an innocent individual. Whether the interpretation is pathological or merely imagined, illusory or downright false, it does not change the situation: it is one’s interpretation that will be decisive as to how one reacts. Trouble is easy to get into, but hard to get out of. The paranoid shoots other persons because one believes they exercise a magic power and will kill one; thus one’s shooting in self-defense. Calling this “paranoid” does not help unless we are able thereby to get behind the symbolic interpretation and see the World, at least temporarily, as the murderer see it. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

Even in international relations symbolic interpretation of the movements of other nations is crucial to the understanding of violence and war. Violence has its roots in impotence, we have said. This is true in individuals and in ethic groups. However, in nations violence comes from the threat of impotence. Nations seem to find it necessary to protect themselves n a periphery father out; they must be aware, precariously balanced as they are on the seesaw of armaments, of whether another country is building up power to gain an advantage over them. If a nation becomes genuinely impotent, it is no longer a nation. Senator J. William Fulbright has pointed out how important out interpretation of the behavior of other nations is. Ever since Yalta, American administrations have interpreted Russia’s behavior—for instance, the Cuban missile episode and the USSR’s reaction to the U-2 flight—as motivated by Russian aggression toward the United States of America. These events Fulbright indicates, could as well have been interpreted as motivated by fear on the part of Russia. More specifically, he proposes that the bellicose posture of these events were sops thrown to the Russian generals, who needed to be placated by Khrushchev if the latter were to succeed in his hope of establishing more amicable relations with the United States of America. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

Interpreting Russia’s moves as aggressive, we oppose them with a vehemence that helped the counterparty in Russia, the army, to depose Khrushchev and institute a less friendly government. Nations, in their misreading of the motives of other nations, can do what the paranoid patient does: they can work against their own interests because of their projection of hostility and aggression. No one, I am sure, wishes to develop new master-slave relationships or bend the will of the people to despotic rulers in new ways. These are patterns of control appropriate to a World without science. Are there no systems that do indeed want to bend the will of the people to dictators? And are these systems only to be found in cultures without Science? I still believe in an old-fashioned ideology of progress: the Middle Ages were dark because they had no science and science necessarily leads to the freedom of beings. The fact is that no leader or government explicitly states one’s intention of bending the will of the people any more; they are apt to use new words which sound like the opposite of the old ones. No dictator calls one’s self a dictator, and every system claims that it expressed the will of the people. In the countries of the free World, on the other hand, anonymous authority and manipulation have replaced overt authority in education, work, and politics. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

If we are worthy of our democratic heritage we shall, of course, be ready to resist any tyrannical use of science for immediate or selfish purposes. However, it we value the achievements and goals of democracy we must not refuse to apply science to the design and construction of cultural patterns, even though we may then find ourselves in some sense in the position of controllers. What is the basis of this value in neobehavioristic theory? All humans control and all humans are controlled. This is reassuring for a democratically minded person. In noticing how the master controls the slave or the employer the worker, we commonly overlook reciprocal effects and, by considering action in one direction only, are led to regard control as exploitation, or at least the gaining of a one-sided advantage; but the control is actually mutual. The slave controls the master as completely as the master controls the slave, in the sense that the techniques of punishment employed by the master have been selected by the slave’s behavior in submitting to them. This does not mean that the notion of exploitation is meaningless or that we may not appropriately ask, cui bono? In doing so, however, we go beyond the account of the social episode itself and consider the long-term effects which are clearly related to the question of value judgments. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

We are looking at the relationship between master and slave as reciprocal, and being remained the exploitation is not meaningless. However, in this social episode, only the techniques of control are important. We are looking at social life as if it were an episode in a laboratory, where all that matters is the techniques—and not the episodes themselves. Exploitation by the master is clearly related to the question of value judgments. Slave and slaveowner are in a reciprocal relationship only by the ambiguous use we are making of the word control. In the sense in which the word is used in real life, there can be no question that the slaveowner controls the slave, and that the reciprocal part of the relationship is that the slave may have a minimum of counter control—for instance, by threat of rebellion. “And it shall come to pass that the Lord God shall commence one’s work among all nations, kindreds, tongues, and people, to bring about the restoration of his people upon the Earth. And with righteousness shall the Lord God judge the poor, and reprove with equity for the meek of the Earth. And he shall smite the Earth with the rod of his mouth; and with the breath of his lips shall slay the wicked. For time speedily cometh that the Lord God shall cause a great division among the people, and the wicked will he destroy; and he will spare his people, yea, even if it so be that he must destroy the wicked by fire,” reports 2 Nephi 30.8-10. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

Many Take to an Imperfect, Half-Competent or Half-Satisfactory Teaching Because No Better One is Available!

September 25, 2019 12:49 am

I am a reader of strange books. I have studied some of those texts which have come out of Italy pertaining to magic and astrology and thins which are often called forbidden. I have a belief that there are Angels cast out of Heaven, and that they do not know what they are any longer. They wander in a state of confusion. And allow me to warn you on another account which may surprise you. Throughout Europe now there are those who are willing to persecute others for witchcraft on slender reasons; that is, a superstition regarding witches reigns in villages and towns, which even one hundred years ago would have been dismissed as ridiculous. You cannot allow yourself to travel overland through such places. Writings as to wizards, Sabbats and Devil worship cloud human philosophy. An interesting affective identification of leader and masses in the relation of Cola di Rienzo to the Roman people. I assume that his story is familiar—the rise of the hack lawyer, son of a Roman people and dictator of Rome, his expulsion and return with the assistance of the Church, and his assassination by the Colonna family in the year 1354. The view of history of Cola and of the Roman people was quite simple: Rome has been ruined by feudal lords; their destruction will permit Rome to rise again to its ancient greatness. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

This is how Petrarca formulates it in his famous latter of congratulations to Cola: “These barons in whose defense you (the Romans) have so often shed your blood, whom you have nourished with your own substance…these barons have judged you unworthy of liberty. They have gathered the mangled remnants of the state in the caverns and abominable retreats of bandits. They have been restrained neither by pity for their unhappy country, nor by love for it. Do not suffer any of the rapacious wolves whom you have driven from the fold to rush again into your midst. Even now they are prowling restlessly around, endeavoring through fraud and deceit to regain an entrance to the city whence they were violently expelled.” It cannot be denied that the feudal lords, above all the Colonna and Orsini, has pursued a criminal policy. Without this element of truth Cola’s propaganda and policy would never have been successful. However, fundamentally this was a false concreteness—for even if he had succeeded in liquidating the barons, what would have been decisively improved in Rome? The historical facts—the residence of the Papal Court in Avignon; the economic decay of Rome; the regrouping class relations through the rise of the bourgeois cavalerotti—all that Cola could not change. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

It can hardly be doubted that anxiety, even purely physical fear of the arbitrariness of the barons, drove the people to Cola. Cola succeeded in strengthening this anxiety by extremely skillful propaganda and achieved victory. However, the leader himself must feel no anxiety or at least must not show it. He must stand above the masses. However, in this Cola was deficient. In all other matters his relation corresponded exactly to that of the libido-charged identification leader-masses, and it is regrettable that time does not permit me to describe and analyze his propaganda themes, his ceremonial, and his ritual. It was Cola’s fundamental mistake that he was not enough of a Caesar. To be sure, he publicly humiliated the barons, but he did not liquidate them—whether out of cowardice, decency, or tactical considerations. However, the masses of Rome expected that he would act in accordance with their view of history. He did not do this. Thus he had to fall. I have mentioned Cola di Rienzo because it is a marginal case in which it is doubtful whether we are dealing with a regressive or progressive movement, that is, a movement which really has the realization of the freedom of beings as its goal. The eight French religious wars of the sixteenth century furnish excellent material for the illumination of the character of caesaristic as well as organizational identifications. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

All three parties—Huguenots, Catholics, and Politiques—were faces with grave problems: the disintegration of the old society through silver inflation, loss of wealth on the one hand, enrichment on the other, the beginnings of radical changes in class relations and the dissolution of the absolute monarchy after the death of Francis I. It is against this background that the religious wars must be understood. Their course is doubtless familiar to you. Catholics and Protestants alike saw the problem of France only as a religious problem, and therefore ascribed the distress of France exclusively to their religious opponents, conjectured (partly justifiably) that these opponents represented a great and sinister conspiracy, developed or employed theories of caesaristic identification, and consistently proceeded to extirpate the opponent wherever opportunity offered. The Huguenot pamphleteer Francois Hotman in his Tiger saw in the Cardinal Guise “a detestable monster,” whose aim it was to ruin France, to assassinate the King, and to conspire with the assistance of the women near the King and the High Constable of France against “the crown of France, the good of widows and orphans, the blood of the poor and innocent.” Calvin’s theory of the secular redeemer sent by God to overthrow tyrants—in the seventeenth century the basis of Cromwell’s leadership—became the Protestant theory of Caesarism. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

The Catholics—with a longer tradition of tyrannicide—developed a pseudo-democratic theory of identification, above all in the writings of the Leaguist preachers and Jesuits. In these inflammatory pamphlets whose demagogy even surpasses that of the Huguenots, the theory of democracy is fitted out with theocratic traits, the masses of the people are integrated through the social contract, in order to be identified with Henry of Guise with the assistance of the theocratic element. Whoever takes the trouble to study the eighth religious war (the War of the 3 Henrys) and the Parisian uprising, will find there all the elements which I consider decisive: appeal to anxiety, personification of evils, first with Henry III, then with Henry of Navarre, identification of the masses with Henry of Guise. Both positions, the Catholic and the Huguenot, are similarly regressive, while that of the Politiques, Jean Bodin, consists in this: he saw the economic problems of France clearly; he understood the false concreteness of the view of history of both parties. If he championed absolute monarchy—that is, the identification of the people with the monarch—he did so because he was to place himself above the religions that were fighting each other and to ally himself with the households of the third estate in order to save France. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

Despite the absolute submission to the prince which is demanded of the people, this identification contains the two rational elements which I mentioned before: loyalty becomes transferable, for instance, the office is separated from the officeholder; and the relation between citizen and the state becomes rational. Thus Bodin has a certain justification in calling his theory a theory f the constitutional state (droit gouvernement) despite his absolutionism. I believe that the French religious wars of the sixteenth century make my thesis a little clearer: that the non-affective identification with an institution (state) is less regressive than identification with a leader. Naturally I cannot here discuss all similar situation. The religious struggles of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries are full of such historical constructions. One need only read, for example, the terrible Calvinist fanatic John Knox in his famous First Blast of the Trumpet against the Monstrous Regiment of Women and we will find there: “We se our countrie set further for a pra to foreine nations, we heare the blood of our breathren, the members of Christ Iesus most cruell women…we knowe to be the onlie occasions of all these miseries.” The rule of the Catholic Catherine de Medici, of Marie of Lorraine (the predecessor of Mary Stuart), and of Mary Tudor appears here not only as a violation of divine commandment (because God has subjected women to men) but as a genuine conspiracy against the true religion. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

Unfortunately, John Knox had the ill luck of seeing Prtestantism restored in England by a woman, and he apologized to Elizabeth in a Second Blast for his first attack. Instead of continuing with this survey, it may perhaps be more useful to discuss five fundamental models of conspiracy theories, all of which show this sequence: intensification of anxiety through manipulation, identification, false concreteness. They are: the Jesuit conspiracy, the Freemason conspiracy, the Communist conspiracy, the Capitalist conspiracy, and the Jewish conspiracy. The Jesuit order is indeed defined by many as a conspiracy, the Monita Secreta of 1614, composed by a Polish ex-Jesuit, fulfills the need for a secret plan of operations with the help of which one can hold the order responsible for every crime and every misfortune and can stir up the masses. This has always been relatively simple in times of crisis. St. Bartholomew’s Night, the assassination of Henry III by Jacques Clement, the attempt on the life of Henry IV by Barriere and Chastel as well as his assassination by Ravaignac, the English Gunpowerder plot of 1605, the outbreak of the Thirty Years’ War, to say nothing of innumerable less important crimes and misfortunes, were ascribed to the Jesuits. That these tales should have been believed, is naturally connected with the significance of false concreteness in politics. There is some truth in many of these accusations. It is precisely in this element of truth that the danger of these views of history is possessed. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

The denunciation of the freemasons is similar matter. Thus, the English believed the Jacobite conspiracies to be the work of freemasons; the French Revolution was ascribed to a mysterious group of Bavarian Illuminati ha been founded by Adam Weishaupt in 1776 in order to combat the influence of the Jesuits. Again these assertions have some truth in them. Most of the Encyclopedists were freemasons and more than half of the members of the Estates General belonged to freemasonic lodges. However, surely no detailed discussion is needed to show that the conspiracy theory represents a blurring of history. The theory of the Communist conspiracy follows the same model and serves the same purposes. Thus the Russian October Revolution is explained solely as a Blanquist conspiracy, embodied in Trotsky’s military revolutionary committee; the German Revolution of 1918 is laid to the charge of the devilish Lenin; the seizure of power by the Bolsheviks in the satellite states is traced back to the sinister conspiracies in the Kremlin, and generally the relation of Bolsheviks to the World is equated with that of a conspiracy of a small group against the welfare of humanity. Again, this is partly true. The October Revolution was a conspiracy—but in a definite historical situation and with an ideology. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

The Bolsheviks would gladly have manipulated the German Revolution of 1918—but they had neither the means nor the intelligence to do it, nor could they, even if cleverer, have prevailed in the concrete situation. The Communists in the satellite states naturally conspired—but they could come to power only because the Red Army stood behind them and because the objective situation favored them. No conspiracy, no matter how clever, would have been of any use and was of any use in Western Europe. Nevertheless, the conspiracy theory is believed not only by the masses, but even by serious writers who, strongly under the influence of Pareto’s simplistic antithesis between elite and masses, generally tend to see in politics nothing but the manipulation of the masses by the elites, and for whom psychology and political science are nothing but techniques of manipulation. The purpose of the theory is clear: potential anxiety—whose concrete significance still needs to be clarified—is actualized by reference to the devilish conspirators: family, property, morality, religion are threatened by the conspiracy. Anxiety easily becomes neurotic persecutory anxiety, which in turn can, under certain circumstances, lead to a totalitarian mass movement. We could cite a great many more cases in which history was viewed with false concreteness. Especially American history is full of examples of such movements. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

There is, for instance, the Know-Nothing Party of 1854-55 with its hatred of the Irish Catholics and the German immigrants. It originate in the secret “Order of the Star-Spangled-Banner” which was founded by native-born Protestants; they mistreated Catholics and when asked about the Order they would answer, “I know nothing.” The Ku Klux Klan (KKK) is better known. Fear of status loss on the parts of the Whites, especially of the poor Whites, vis-à-vis the Blacks and fear of the Pope and the Catholics were the basic factors which made this secret society into a terroristic organization, from its foundation in 1867 to the present day. The Populist Party (1892), on the other hand, was born out of an agrarian depression, as a protest against the rule of the railway, industrial, and credit monopolies, and against the gold standard. One of its leaders developed a genuine theory of conspiracy: According to my views of the subject the conspiracy which seems to have been formed here and in Europe to destroy from three-sevenths to one-half of the metallic money of the World, is the most gigantic crimes of this or any other age. The democratic conspiracy is to reduce boarder security and push the green initiative to raise taxes and sale electric cars, but doing nothing to protect the people or provide homes for the homeless is another movement that is being fueled by media propaganda. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

Violence and suffering are critical in a democratic society, in heightening antipathy for violations of democratic values and in heightening sympathy for the victims of such violations. Violence is like the sudden chemical change that occurs when, following a relatively placid period, water break into a boil. If we do not see the burner underneath that has been heating the water, we mistake the violence for a discrete happenstance. We fail to see that violence is an entirely understandable outcome of personalities fighting against odds in a repressive culture that does not help them. Violence often follows quiet periods, like that of the silent generation of students of the fifties. Only later were we to see, to our sorrow, how explosive were the forces underlying this apathy. In its typical simple form, violence is an eruption of pent-up passion. When a person (or a group of people) has been denied over a period of time what one feels are one’s legitimate rights, when one is continuously burdened with feelings of impotence which corrode any remaining self-esteem, violence is the predicable end result. Violence is an explosion of the drive go destroy that which is interpreted as the barrier to one’s self-esteem, movement, and growth. This desire to destroy may so completely take over the person that any object that gets in the way is destroyed. Hence the person strikes out blindly, often destroying those for whom one cares and even one’s self in the process. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

Violence is largely a physical event. However, this physical event occurs in a psychological context. Either because of the period of unseen build-up or the suddenness of the stimulus, the impulse to strike out comes so fast we are unable to think, and we control it only with effort. If someone suddenly gives one a hard shove on the lightrail, one “see red” and have an immediate urge to punch him or her in return, while some others may take that person who assaulted them to small claims court. However, one knows, when one calms down, that if one makes a practice of punching men or women on the lightrail, their early doom is assured, and that is why small claims court may be a better option. A football player may control his or her urges to wreak violence by reminding one’s self that he or she will have a chance to express one’s power in the next play; but for the rest of us, bystanders in most activities in our civilized life with muscular expressions prohibited us, the control and direction of our violent urges are much more difficult. Most people would subscribe to the proposition that there is no value judgment involved in deciding how to build an atomic bomb, but would reject the proposition that there is none involved in deciding to build one. The most significant difference here may be that the scientific practices which guide the designer of the bomb are clear, while those which guide the designer of the culture which builds the bomb are not. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

We cannot predict the success or failure of a cultural invention with the same accuracy as we do that of a physical invention. It is for this reason that we are said to resort to value judgments in the second case. What we resort to is guessing. It is only in this sense that value judgments take up where science leaves off. When we can design small social interactions and, possibly, whole cultures with confidence we bring to physical technology, the question of value will be raised. According to Skinner, the main point is that there is really no essential difference between the lack of value judgment in the technical problem of designing the bomb and the decision to build one. The only difference is that the motives for building the bomb are not clear. Maybe they are not clear to Professor Skinner, but they are clear to many students of history. In fact there as more than one reason for the decision to build the atomic bomb (and similarly for the hydrogen bomb): the fear of Hitler’s building the bomb; perhaps the wish to have a superior weapon against the Soviet Union for possible later conflicts (this holds true especially for the hydrogen bomb); the logic of a system that is forced to increase its armaments to support its struggle with competing systems. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

Quite aside from these military, strategic, and political reasons, there is, I believe, another one which is equally important. I refer to the maxim that is one of the axiomatic norms of cybernetic society: “something ought to be done because it is technically possible to do it.” Even if they might destroy us all, if it is possible to build nuclear weapons, they must be built. If it is possible to travel to the Moon or to the planets, it must be done, even if at the expense of many unfulfilled needs here on Earth. This principle means the negation of all humanistic values, but it nevertheless represents a value, maybe the supreme norm of technotronic society. Dr, Michael Maccoby has drawn my attention to some results of his study of the management of highly developed industries, which indicate that the principle “can implies ought” is more valid in industries which produce for the military establishment than for the remaining, more competitive industry. However, even if this argument is correct, two factors must be considered: first, the size of the industry which works directly or indirectly for the armed forced; second, that the principle had taken hold of the minds of many people who are not directly related to industrial production. A good example was the initial enthusiasm for space flights; another example is the tendency in medicine to construct and use gadgets regardless of their real importance for a specific case. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

Skinner does not care to examine the reasons for building the bomb, and he asks us to wait for further development of behaviorism to solve the mystery. In his views on social processes he shows the same inability to understand hidden, nonverbalized motives as he does in his treatment of psychical processes. Since most of what people say about their motivation in political as well as in personal life is notoriously fictitious, the reliance on what is verbalized blocks the understanding of social and psychical processes. In every individual there is an original, mysterious, and incalculable element, because one’s past history and one’s prenatal ancestry in other lives on Earth have inevitably been different at certain points from those of other individuals. One’s World-outlook may seem the same as theirs, but there will always be subtle variations. There is no single path which can be presented to suit the multitudinous members of the human species. There is no one unalterable approach to this experience for all beings. Each as to find one’s own way, to travel forward by the guidance of one’s own present understanding and past experience—and each in the end really does so despite all appearances to the contrary. For each being passes through a different set of life-experiences. One’s past history and present circumstances have constituted an individual being who is unique, who possesses something entirely one’s own. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

It is partly through the lessons, reflections, institutions, traits, characteristics, and capacities engendered by such experiences that one is able to find one’s way to truth. Therefore one is forced not only to work out one’s own salvation but also to work it out in one’s own unique way. Every description of a mystical path must consequently be understood in a general sense. If its expounder delimits it to constitute a precise path for all alike, one exaggerates. Although there is so much in life which the aspirant shares with other beings, there is always a residue which imparts a stamp of individuality that is different from and unshareable with the individualities of all others. Consequently, the inner path which one must follow cannot be precisely the same as theirs. In the end, after profiting by all the help which one may gain from advanced guides and fellow-pilgrims, after all one’s attempts to imitate or follow them, one is forced to find or make a way for one’s self, a way which will be peculiarly one’s own. In the end one must work out one’s own unique means to salvation and depend on one’s self for further enlightenment and strength. Taught by one’s own intelligence and instructed by one’s own intuition, one must find one’s own unique path toward enlightenment. Each case is different, because each person is different heredity, temperament, character, environment, and living habits. Therefore, these general principles must be adapted to, and fitted in with, that person’s particular condition. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

Just as there is not a single radius only from the centre of a circle to its circumference but countless ones, so there is not a single path only from beings to God but as many paths as there are beings. Each has to find the way most appropriate to one, to the meaning and experience of truth. There are as many ways to union with the Overself as there are human beings. The orthodox, the conventional, and the traditional ways can claim exclusive or monopoly only by imperiling truth. I think it oftener happens that a meal brings forth a cold than that Nature produces a sage. The existence of the sage as a type is hard to prove simply because the existence of the sage as an individual is hard to confirm. One is always unique on this planet. One is, for practical purposes, an Ideal rather than an ACTUALITY. It is an unnecessary self-limitation to believe that there is only a single path to enlightenment, only a single teaching worth following. Persons who believe or feel themselves to be unable to understand subtle metaphysic can turn to a simple devotional path. “Behold, O Lord, thou canst do this. We know that thou art able to show forth great power, which looks small unto the understanding of beings.” Reports Ether 3.5. There is no one particular type of aspirant to mystical or philosophical enlightment. Taken as a whole, aspirants are a mixed and varied lot in their starting points, personalities, motives, and allegiances. They vary in individuality very widely, have different needs, circumstances, opportunities, outlooks, and possibilities. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

The Miracles of Genius Breed Doubt as Well as Faith so that We Feel Uplifted from the World!

September 23, 2019 12:56 am

At first reality appears mere sensuous indulgence, a kind of poetic luxury—ripe strawberries, almond blossoms, and white-shouldered nymphs still more or less imaginary. However, we must bid these joys farewell for a nobler life, a more heroic kind of story, involving the agonies, the strife of human hearts. One becomes a lonely voyager across a perilous sea—it is an inescapable part of every being’s soul-making. Through feeling and suffering in a thousand diverse ways, the merely intelligent or sentient being is fortified and altered, and the spirit becomes aware of its own nature and part in the World, and thus achieves an identity or soul. If I should die, said I to myself, I have left no immortal work behind me—nothing to make my friends proud of my memory—but I have loved the principle of beauty in all things, and if I had time I would have made myself remembered. The life of self-creation, of soul-making, is not complete. I have no identity because I have not made up my mind about everything. To show beauty in the face of death, with eternal lids apart with planetary eyes, in the age-long suffering of humankind grants one passage to part the veils, a face—a scene which strangely evokes the terror of this boy. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

When I awake, I lay quiet for an hour, weak and keenly in pain, I had been sleeping like a fallen angel on the red taffeta. So bad was the pain, in fact, that sleep seem preferable to wakefulness, and I dreamt of things long ago, times when Meghan and I had been together and when it had not seemed possible that we would ever part. What finally jarred me from my uneasy slumber was the sounds of Aaliyah screaming. Over and over in terror she screamed. I rose, somewhat stronger than the night before, and then once I was certain that I had my gloves and mask in place, I crouched beside her body and called out to her. At first she could not hear me, so loud were her frantic screams. However, at last, she grew quiet in her desperation. And there it was, an open face of Heaven, returning home at evening with an ear catching the notes of “Rock the Boat,”—and eye watching the sailing cloudlet’s bright career. We mourned that day so soon as it was glided by evening with the passage of an angel’s tear that falls through the clear ether silently. I gazed awhile, and felt as light, and free as though the fanning wing of Mercury had played upon my heels: I was light-hearted, and many pleasures to my vision started. “And behold, the Holy Spirit of God did come down from Heaven, and did enter into their hearts, and they were filled as if with the fire, and they could speak forth marvelous words,” reports Helaman 5.45. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

The air was cooling, and so very still, and caught from the early sobbing of the morn with solemn sound—“Aaliyah,” I said, “You will be remembered for making pleasing music, and not wild uproar.” She replied, “It is my soul’s pleasure; and it must be almost the highest bliss of human-kind, when to thy haunts two kindred spirits flee.” What then has the Christian message to say about human’s predicament in this World? The eighth Psalm, written hundreds of years before the beginning of the Christian era, raises the same question with full clarity and great beauty. It points, on the one hand, to the infinite smallness of beings as compared to the Universe of Heavens and stars, and, on the other hand, to the astonishing greatness of beings, one’s glory and honor, one’s power over all created things, and one’s likeness to God Himself. Such thoughts are not frequently in the Bible. However, when we come across them, they sound as though they had been written today. Ever since the opening of the Universe by modern science, and the reduction of the great Earth to a small planet in an ocean of Heavenly bodies, beings have felt real vertigo in relation to infinite space. One has felt as though one had been pushed out of the center of the Universe into an insignificant corner in it, and has asked anxiously—what about the high destiny claimed by beings in past ages? #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

What about the idea that the divine image is impressed in one’s nature? What about one’s history that Christianity always considered to be the point at which salvation for all beings took place? What about the Christ, who in the New Testament, is called the Lord of the Universe? What about the end of history, described in Biblical language as a cosmic catastrophe, in which the Sun, the Moon, and the Stars are perhaps soon to fall down upon the Earth? What remains, in our present view of reality, of the importance of the Earth and the glory of beings? Further, since it seems possible that other beings exist on other Heavenly bodies, in whom the divine image is also manifest, and of whom God is mindful, and also whom He has crowned with glory and honor, what is the meaning of the Christian view of human history and its center, the appearance of the Christ? These questions are not merely theoretical. They are crucial to every being’s understanding of one’s self as a being placed upon this star, in an unimaginably vast Universe of stars. And they are disturbing not only to people who feel grasped by the Christian message, but also to those who reject it but who share with Christianity a belief in the meaning of history and the ultimate significance of human life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

Again, the eighth Psalm spears as though it had been conceived today—“Thou hast made him little less than God; thou hast given him dominion over the works of thy hands.” It gives, as an example, being’s dominion over the animals; but only since modern technology subjected all the spheres of nature to being’s control has the phrase “little less than God” revealed its full meaning. The conquest of time and space has loosened the ties that kept beings in bondage to one’s finitude. What was once imagined as a prerogative of the gods has become a reality of daily life, accessible to human technical power. No wonder that we of today feel with the psalmist that beings are little less than God, and that some of us feel even equal with God, and further that others would not hesitate to state publicly that humankind, as a collective mind, has replaced God. We therefore have to deal with an astonishing fact: the same events that pushed beings from their place in the center of the World, and reduced one to insignificance, also elevated one to a God-like position both on Earth and beyond! It there an answer to this contradiction? Listen to the psalmist: one foes not say that humans have dominion over all things or that beings are little less than God; he says—“Thou hast given one dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast made one a little less than God.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

This means that neither being’s smallness nor one’s greatness emanates from oneself, but that there is something above this contrast. Being, together with all things, comes from God Who has put all things under being’s feet. Beings are rooted in the same Ground in which the Universe with all its galaxies is rooted. It is this Ground that gives greatness to everything, however small it may be, to atoms as well as planets and animals; and it is this that makes all things small, however great—the Stars as well as beings. It gives significance to the apparently insignificant. It gives significance to each individual being, and to humankind as a whole. This answer quiets our anxiety about our smallness, and it quells the pride of our greatness. It is not a Biblical answer only, nor Christian only, nor only religious. Its truth is felt by all of us, as we become conscious of our predicament—namely, that we are not of ourselves, that our presence upon the Earth is not of our own doing. We are brought into existence and formed by the same power that bears up the Universe and the Earth and everything upon it, a power compared to which we are infinitely small, but also one which, because we are conscious of it, makes us great among creatures. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

Primitives were frank about power, and in a spiritual cosmology power is relatively undisguised: it comes from the pool of ancestors and spirits. In our society power resides in technology, and we live and use the artifacts of technology so effortlessly and thoughtlessly that it almost seems we are not beholden to power—until, as said earlier, something goes wrong with an airplane, a generator, a telephone line. Then you see our religious anxiety come out. Power is the life pulse that sustains beings in every epoch, and unless the student understands power figures and power sources one can understand nothing vital about social history. The history of man’s fall into stratified society can be traced around the figures of one’s heroes, to whom one is beholden for the power one wants most—to persevere as an organism, to continue experiencing. Again we pick up the thread from the very beginning of our argument and see how intricately it is interwoven in being’s career on this planet. If primitive being was not in bondage to the authority of living persons, one at least had some heroes somewhere, and these—as said—were the spirit powers, usually of the departed dead, the ancestors. The idea seems very strange to most of us today, but for the primitive it was often the dead who has the most power. In life the individual goes through ritualistic passages to states of higher power and greater importance as a helper of life. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

For many primitives death is the final promotion to the highest power of all, the passage into the invisible World from their new abode. This, however, is not universal among primitives by any means. Some tribes fear the dead for only a little while immediately after death, and then they are thought to become weak. Some tribes fear especially those spirits who represent unfinished and unfulfilled life, spirits of persons who died prematurely and would be envious of the living, and so on. The dead are feared because they cannot be controlled as well as when they are alive. Many people have argued that primitives do not fear death as much as we do; but we know that this equanimity is due to the fact that the primitive was usually securely immersed in one’s particular cultural ideology, which was in essence an ideology of life, of how to continue on and to triumph over death. It is easy to see the significance of power for the human animal; it is really the basic category of one’s existence, as the organism’s whole World is structed in terms of power. No wonder that that Thomas Hobbes could say that man was characterized by “a general inclination, a perpetual and restless desire of power after power, that ceaseth only in death.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

One of the first things a child has to learn is how much power one has and how much exits in others and in the World. Only if one learns this can one be sure of surviving; one has to learn very minutely what powers one can count on to facilitate one’s life and what powers one has to fear and avoid in order to protect it. So power becomes the basic category of being for which one has, so to speak, a natural respect: if you are wrong about power, you do not get a chance to be right about anything else; and the things that happen when the organism loses its powers are a decrease of vitality and death. Little wonder, then, that primitive beings had a right away to conceptualize and live according to hierarchies of power and give them one’s most intense respect. Anthropology discovered that the basic categories of primitive thought are the ideas of mana and taboo, which we can translate simply as power and danger or watch out (because of power). The study of life, people, and the World, then, broke down into an alertness for distributions of power. The more mana you could find to tap, the more taboo you could avoid, the better. However, power is an invisible mystery. It erupts out of nature in storms, volcanoes, meteors, in springtime and newborn babies; and it returns into nature as ashes, winter, and death. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

The only way we know is it there is to see it in action. And so the idea of mana, or special power erupting from the realm of the invisible and the supernatural, can only by spotted in the usual, the surpassing, the excellent, that which transcends what is necessary or expected. From the very beginning, the child experiences the awesomeness of life and one’s problems of survival and well-being in other people; and so persons comes to be the most intimate place where one looks to be delighted by the specialness of mysterious life, or where one fears to be overwhelmed by powers that one cannot understand or cope with. It is natural, then, that the most immediate place to look for the eruptions of special power is in the activities and qualities of persons; and so, as we saw, eminence in hunting, extra skill and strength, and special fearlessness in warfare right away marked those who were thought to have an extra charge of power or mana. They earned respect and special privileges and had to be handled gently because they were both an asset and a danger: in their very persons they were an open fount between two Worlds, the visible and invisible, and power passed through them as through an electric circuit. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

Now, I do not hesitate frankly and sincerely to confess to you that this real and genuine discord seems to me to carry with it the inevitable bankruptcy of natural religion naively and simply taken. There were times when Leibnitzes with their heads buried in monstrous wig could compose Theodicies, and when stall-fed officials of an established church could prove by the valves in the heart and the round ligament of the hip-joint the existence of a “Moral and Intelligent Contriver of the World.” However, those times are past; and we of the twenty first century, with our evolutionary theories and our mechanical philosophies, already know nature too impartially and too well to worship unreservedly any God of whose character one can be an adequate expression. Truly, all we know of good and duty proceeds from nature; but none the less so all we know of evil. Visible nature is all plasticity and indifferences,–a moral multiverse, as one might call it, and not a moral Universe. To such a harlot we own no allegiance; with one as a whole we can establish no moral communion; and we are free in our dealing with one several parts to obey or destroy, and to follow no law but that of the prudence in coming to terms with such of one particular features as will help us to our private ends. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

If there be a divine Spirit of the Universe, nature, such as we know her, cannot possibly be its ultimate word to beings. Either there is no Spirit revealed in nature, or else it is inadequately revealed there; and (as all the higher religions have assumed) what we call visible nature, or this World, must be but a veil and surface-show whose full meaning resides in a supplementary unseen or other World. I cannot help, therefore, accounting it on the whole a gain (though it may seem for certain poetic constitutions a very sad loss) that the naturalistic superstition, the worship of the God of nature, simply taken as such, should have begun to loosen its hold upon the educated mind. In fact, if I am to express my personal unreservedly, I should say (in spite of its sounding blasphemous at first to certain ears) that the initial step towards getting into healthy ultimate relations with the Universe is the act of rebellion against the idea that such a God exists. Such a rebellion essentially, like a coward, dost thou forever pip and whimper, and go cowering and trembling? Despicable biped! Hast thou not a heart; canst thou not suffer whatsoever it be; and, as a Child of Freedom, though outcast, trample Tophet itself under thy feet, while it consumes thee? Let it come, then; I will meet it and defy it! And as I so thought, there rushed like a stream of fire over my whole soul; and I shook base fear away from me forever. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

Thus had the Everlasting No pealed authoritatively through all the recesses of my being, of my Me; and then was it that my whole Me stood up, in native God-created majesty, and recorded its Protest. Such a Protest, the most important transaction in life, may that same Indignation and Defiance, in a psychological point of view, be fitly called. The Everlasting No has said: “Behold, thou art fatherless, outcast, and the Universe is mine;” to which my whole Me now made answer: “I am not thine, but Free, and forever hate thee!” From that hour I began to be a man. Who is most wretched in this dolorous place? I think myself; yet I would rather be my miserable self than He, than He who formed such creatures to his own disgrace. The vilest thing must be less vile than Thou from whom it had its being, God and Lord! Creator of all woe and sin! Abhorred, malignant and implacable! I vow that not for all Thy power furled and unfurled, for all the temples to Thy glory built, would I assume the ignominious guilt of having made such beings in such a World. There is no democratic equality here. If such a being speaks, others are entitled only to whisper! There never yet has been a time, however thinned out their ranks may be, when those who know have faded out from this World—and there never will be such a time. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

For it is an inexorable duty laid upon them to hand down to us from the light to posterity. And thus a chain of teacher and taught has been flung down to us from the dimmest epochs of antiquity right into this noisy, muddled twenty first century of ours. Through such illumined beings there has been constant expression of truth, and through this individual expression it has been able to survive socially. Those who are out of centre, eccentric and different from others because they are unbalanced mentally and uncontrolled emotionally, will not heed what conventional society demands from them. However, there exists a second group of persons who are likewise different and heedless of conventions, although often in other ways. This group is what it is by reason of its being a pioneer one which has advanced farther along the road of evolution than the herd behind. From it are drawn the great reformers and their followers, those who stand firmly by moral principle and factual truth. It is they who try to lift up society and put right its abuses and cruelties, its wrongs and superstitions. They are daring champions who do not stop to count the cost of their service but, enduring ridicule, persecution, or even crucifixion, go ahead unfalteringly where others draw back. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

Whoever will take the trouble to search for them, as I once did, may find that several records have been left behind for posterity by beings who successfully penetrated to the inside of Truth and made themselves at home there. The lands in which they lived were wide apart and included continents all over the globe. For such beings Truth was not a theory but a living experience. There has not yet manifested itself one outstanding personality who merges the simple mystic in the wise sage, who speaks the mind of truth for our time, and who is willing to enlighten or lead us without reference to local or traditional beliefs. Such a being will certainly be heard; one may even be heeded. If the fullest degree of perfection seems so far off as to depress one, the first degree is often so near that it should cheer one. Few imagine their capacity extends to such a lofty attainment and so few seek it. Most of those who engage on this quest have a modest desire—to get somewhere along the way where they have more control over their mind and life than their unsatisfactory present condition affords. If one knew at the beginning that it was so far and so long, and so troubled a journey, would one have embarked on a quest at all? That depends on the nature of the being oneself, on the nature of one’s impelling motive, and on the strength behind it. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

The attitude of greediness, with all its variations and subsequent inhibitions, is called an oral attitude and as such has been well described in analytical literature. While the theoretical preconceptions underlying this terminology have been valuable, in so far as they have permitted the integration of hitherto isolated trends into syndromes, the preconception that all these trends originate in oral sensations and wishes is dubitable. It is based on the valid observation that greediness frequently finds its expression in demands for food and in manners of eating, as well as in dreams, which may express the same tendencies in a more primitive way, as for example in cannibalistic dreams. These phenomena do not prove, however, that we have here to do with originally and essentially oral desires. It seems therefore a more tenable assumption that as a rule eating is merely the most accessible means of satisfying the feeling of greediness, whatever its source, just as in dreams eating is the most concrete and primitive symbol for expressing insatiable desires. The assumption that the oral desires or attitudes are libidinal in character also needs substantiation. There is no doubt that an attitude of greediness may appear in the sphere of pleasures of the flesh, in actual instability of pleasures of the flesh as well as in dreams that identify pleasures of the flesh with swallowing or biting. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

However, it appears just as well in acquisitiveness concerning money or clothes, or in the pursuit of ambition and prestige. All that can be said in favor of the libidinal assumption is that the passionate intensity of greediness is similar to that of drives in the pleasures of the flesh. Unless one assumes, however, that every passionate drive is libidinal, it still remains necessary to prove that greediness as such is a pleasure of the flesh—pregenital—drive. The problem of greediness is complex and still unsolved. Like compulsiveness it is definitely promoted by anxiety. The fact that greediness is conditioned by anxiety may be fairly evident, as is frequently the case, for example, in excessive masturbation or excessive eating. The connection between the two may also be shown by the fact that greediness may diminish or vanish as soon as the person feels reassured in some way: feeling loved, having a success, doing constructive work. A feeling of being loved, for instance, may suddenly reduce the strength of a compulsive wish to buy. A girl who had been looking forward to each meal with undisguised greediness forgot hunger and mealtime altogether as soon as she started designing dresses, an occupation which she greatly enjoyed. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

On the other hand, greediness may appear or become reinforced as soon as hostility or anxiety is heightened; a person may feel compelled to go shopping before a dreaded performance, or compelled to eat greedily after feeling rejected. There are many persons, however, who have anxiety and yet do not develop greediness, a fact which indicates that there are still some special factors involved. Of these factors all that can be said with a fair degree of certainty is that greedy persons distrust their capacity to create anything of their own, and thus have to rely on the outside World for the fulfillment of the needs; but they believe that no one is willing to grant them anything. Those neurotic persons who are insatiable in their need for affection usually show the same greediness in reference to material things, such as sacrifices of time or money, factual advice in concrete situations, factual help in difficulties, presents, information, and gratifications of pleasures of the flesh. In some cases these desires definitely reveal a wish for proofs of affection; in others, however, that explanation is not convincing. In the latter case one has the impression that the neurotic person merely wants to get something, affection or no affection, and that a craving for affection, if present at all, is only a camouflage for the extortion of certain tangible favors or profits. “Peace, peace by unto you, because of your faith in my Well Beloved, who was from the foundation of the World,” Helaman 5.47. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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The Great Mystery Remains Where it Always Has Been—Untouched by Being’s Feelings and Undefined by One’s Thoughts!

September 19, 2019 2:12 am

And once again, I saw a clear image of the boy lying on a stone floor. And I heard the boy’s prayers: “Deliver me.” And I saw the Face of Christ in gleaming egg tempera. I saw the jewels set into the halo. I saw the egg and pigment mixing. “Deliver me.” “Can’t you understand me?” I asked. “I told you what I wanted. I want that boy, the one who won’t do wat you try to force him to do.” Heaven had cast down upon this stone floor an abandoned angel, of auburn curls and perfectly formed limbs, of fair and mysterious face. I reached down to take him by the arms and I lifted him, and I looked into his half-opened eyes. His soft reddish hair was loose and tangled. His flesh was pale and the bones of his face only faintly sharpened by his Slavic blood. “Amadeo,” I said, the name springing to my lips as though the angels willed it, the very angels whom he resembled in his purity and in his seeming innocence, starved as he was. It is perhaps an irony of history that one of the very first and most influential tracts of modern revolutionaries, a tract that gave the antistatists their clarion call to end the abuses of expropriation and inequality, itself rests on the personal, psychological reasons for the very first step in the origin of inequality. Social imbalances occur because of differences in personal merit and the recognition of that merit by others. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

Social inequality was relatively absent on primitive levels because property was comparatively absent. In the most egalitarian primitive societies, those whose economy is based on hunting and gathering, there is no distinction of rank, little or no authority of one individual over another. Possessions are simple and there is no real difference in wealth; property is distributed equally. Yet even on this level individual differences are recognized and already make for real social differentiation. If there is little or no authority to coerce others, there is much room for influence, and influence always stems from personal qualities: extra skill in hunting and warfare, in dealing with spirits in the invisible World, or simply physical strength and endurance. Being a senior citizen can often have an influence. If a person has outlived others, especially when so many die prematurely, one is often thought to have special powers. Skilled hunters and warriors could actually display these special powers in the form of trophies and ornamental badges of merit. The scalps of the slain enemies and teeth, feathers, and other ornaments were often loaded with magical power and served as protection. If a being wore a large number of trophies and badges showing how much power one had and how great were one’s exploits, one became a great mana figure who literally struck terror into the heats of one’s enemies. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

Today, many people use the media and their political authority to strike terror into the hearts of their enemies, or the general public. The conspiratorial theory is particularly appealing to individuals who have feelings of powerlessness and normlessness because it accounts for the absence of power and the lowering of values in a simple and easily understood fashion. The individual who projects sees one’s self as powerless because sinister forces have successfully conspired to destroy the traditional political rules in such a way that one is excluded from exercising one’s rights. This kind of thinking frequently occurs when political and social antagonisms are sharp. Certain audiences are especially susceptible to it—particularly, those who have obtained a low level of education, whose access to information is poor, and who are so completely shut out from access to the centers of power that they feel deprived of self-defense and subjected to unlimited manipulation by those who wield power. In primitive culture, the elaborate decorations of the warrior and hunter were not aimed to make one beautiful, but to show off one’s skill and courage and so inspired fear and respect. This gave one automatic social distinction; by wearing the tokens of one’s achievements, the visible memories of one’s bravery and excellence, one could flaunt one’s superiority in the eyes of everyone who could not make similar displays. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

The Sioux could announce by certain decorations on one’s moccasins how many horses one had captured, enemies killed, whether the warrior oneself had been wounded, and so forth; similar things were conveyed by the feathers one wore and the color they were dyed. Among other tribes, war exploits entitled the warrior to mark oneself with certain scarifications and tattoos. Each warrior was literally a walking record of one’s military campaigns: the “fruit salad” on the chest of today’s military beings is a direct descendant of those public announcement of “see who I am because of where I have been and what I have done; look how accomplished I am as a death dealer and death defier.” It is of course less concrete and living than actual facial and shoulder scars or the carrying of scalps which included the forehead and eyes. However, it gives the right to the same kind of proud strutting and social honor and the typical question that the primitive warrior asks: “Who are you that you should talk? Where are your tattoo marks? Whom have you killed that you should speak to me?” These people, then, are honored and respected or feared, and this is what gives them influence and power. Not only that, it also gives them actual benefits and privileges. Remember that as children we not only deferred to the outstanding boy in the neighborhood but also gave him large chunks of our candy. Primitives who distinguished themselves by personal exploits got the thing that grown men want most—wives. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

They got these wives more easily than did others, and often, especially if they were skilled hunters, they took more than one wife. In some cases, too, a noted hunter would claim as his special hunting preserve a piece of land that was common property of the tribe. And so on. I do not intend to even try to sum up the theoretical details from the vast literature on the growth of hereditary privilege and private accumulation. Besides, there is little agreement on how exactly class society came into existence. There is general agreement on what preclass society was, but the process of transformation is shrouded in mystery. Many different factors contributed, and it is impossible to pull them apart and give them their proper weight. Also, the process would not have been uniform or unilinear—the same for all societies in all areas. If we add psychological factors to materialist ones, we must also now add ecological and demographic factors such as population density and scarcity of resources. I do not want to pop my head into the argument among authorities lest it get neatly sliced off. So I would like to sidestep the argument while still remaining focused on what is essential, which, I think must be possessed in human nature and motives. Another mechanism for deal with feelings of political alienation is identification with a charismatic leader. This is the attempt of an individual to feel powerful by incorporating within one’s self the attitudes, beliefs, and actions held by a leader whom one perceives as powerful. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

Charismatic refers to an extraordinary quality of a person regardless of whether this quality is actual, alleged, or presumed. In taking over the attributes of a charismatic leader, the individual may enter into activity one would otherwise abhor. German bourgeoisie who identified with Hitler approved of and too part in behavior their consciences would otherwise not allow them to do. Rational activism is behavior based on logical reasoning and an undistorted perception of political realities. Withdrawal may be a rational response in some situations and an irrational, affective response in other circumstances. The mechanisms of projection resulting in conspiratorial thinking and identification with a charismatic leader are irrational, affective responses. They are also regressive, in that they are more characteristic of a child’s than of an adult’s handline of a problem. When feelings of political alienation are widespread, individuals will adopt one or more of the mechanisms we have described to handle the frustration and anxiety associated with them. The political behavior or each individual will be affected by the particular mechanism or mechanisms one selects. The most sensitive students of the past 200 years would agree that rank and stratified societies came into being without anyone really noticing; it just happened, gradually and ineluctably. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

The vital question, then, it seems to me, is not exactly how it happened but why it was allowed to happen, what there was in human nature that went along so willingly with the process. The answers to this question seems to me remarkably straightforward. I have said that primitive beings recognized differences in talent and merit and already deferred to them somewhat granted them special privileges. Why? Because obviously these qualities helped to secure life, to assure the perpetuation of the tribe. Exploits in the danger of hunting and war were especially crucial. Why? Because in these activities certain individuals could single themselves out as adept at defying death; the tokens and trophies that they displayed were indications of immortality power or durability power, which is the same thing. If you identified with these persons and followed them, then you got the same immunities they had. This is the basic role and function of the hero in history: one is the one who gambles with one’s very life and successfully defies death, and beings follow one and eventually worship one’s memory because one embodies the triumph over what they fear most, extinction and death. One becomes the focus of the peculiarly human passion play of the victory over death. We can now see how fanciful the idea is that in the state of nature humans are free and only becomes unfree later on. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

Humans never were free and cannot be free from one’s own nature. One carries within one the bondage that one needs in order to continue to live. Some do not understand human nature in the round, they are not able to see that every human being is also equally unfree, that is, we are born in need of authority and we even create out of freedom, a prison. This insight is the fruit of the outcome of modern psychoanalysis. It penetrates to the heart of the human condition and to the principal dynamic of the emergence of historical inequality. We have to say that primitive religion starts the first class distinction. That is, the individual gives over the aegis of one’s own life and death to the spirit World; one is already a second-class citizen. The first class distinction, then, was between mortal and immortal, between feeble human powers and special superhuman beings. Once things started off on this footing, it was only natural that class distinction should continue to develop from this first impetus: those individuals who embodied supernatural powers, or could somehow plug into them or otherwise use them when the occasion demanded, came to have the same ability to dominate others that was associated with the spirits themselves. The anthropologist Robert Lowie was a specialist on those most egalitarian of all primitives peoples, the Plains Indian tribes. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

Even these fiercely independent Indians, he tells us, gave up their equalitarian attitudes of everyday life on raiding parties. A Crow Indian would organize a raid only when prompted by one’s supernatural guardian spirit, and so all those who followed one deferred to one and to one’s spirit. Again, the overlordship of the invisible World as embodied in certain human personages made temporary slaves of their fellows. I suggest that the awe which surrounded the protégé of supernatural powers formed the psychological basis for more complex political developments. The very same beings who flout the pretensions of a fellow-brave grovel before a darling of the gods, render him implicit and obedience and respect. We have described the forms of political alienation and the mechanisms by which they may be expressed. When political alienation is widespread, it may be a major factor in determining the outcome of an election. The astute politician is aware of this; consequently one’s strategy takes these factors into account. The election we have analyzed took place in a community where feelings of political alienation, frustration, and disillusionment with the political process are widespread. When this situation exists, the voting behavior of the electorate is less predictable than otherwise, since a decision is likely to arise from negative rather than from beneficial convictions and may change on the basis of minor issues, fleeting incidents, or gut reactions. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

The analysis of the statements of the individuals we interviewed shows that they hold an image of the political structure which is similar to that developed by modern political science. They perceive the hierarchical arrangements of power and influence, and they relate various power groupings to each other. They are aware of the uses and abuses of political office; and they know that their role is not one that the grammar-school version of democratic theory taught them. They have, however, greatly exaggerated their lack of power and, perhaps, the extent of corruption. The election, after all, resulted in the downfall of the group associated with one candidate and the elevation to power of another group which probably did not believe it had a serious chance of winning. All the money that was given to the group which lost the election and all the promises that may have been made to the contributors have been to no avail, for the personnel now in power are different. The antagonisms built up during the campaign may mean that the outs are really out of City Hall in the near future. The election upset was to a large extent a response to feelings of political alienation. Senator Powers followed the time-honored rules of campaigning. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

One spent large amounts of money on advertising which portrayed one as a devoted public servant and friend of the people, shook as many hands as possible, attended numerous house parties, recounted one’s experience, contributed to charities of all faiths, was photographed with prominent religious leaders, attacked one’s opponent, and emphasized the support of the municipal, state, and national politicians; but although one may have 54 percent more votes the primary, an individual can still fail to win. This has shaken politicians’ faith in the traditional vote-getting techniques. Although there can be many more reasons why some lost elections, it is clear that one of the most important was the fact that one presented one’s self as a powerful professional politician—a serious mistake in a community where a considerable amount of political alienation exists. The alienated are not absolutely disposed toward those whom they identify as powerful. Under these circumstances, the candidate must reevaluate antiquated methods, reformulate one’s strategy, and experiment with new techniques. A number of countervailing strategies are available to one. The candidate may create a strong sense of identity with the electorate by presenting one’s self as the underrepresented in a struggle against a power elite. Whether one does this or not, one certainly should not emphasize a background of power to the massive support of other political figures who may also be associated with the powerful. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

Since an elaborate campaign is viewed as collusion with the powerful, the candidate must avoid the appearance of an opulent campaign. Of course, a candidate may appeal to regressive mechanisms of projection and identification with a charismatic leader. For instance, President Trump successfully appealed to those who tend to think in conspiratorial terms (a form of projection) via his slogan, “Stop power politics, elect a hands-free president, Make American Great Again,” and such techniques as his essay contest on a definition of “power politics.” The electorate, however, did not view Trump as a charismatic leader. He came off more like a saucy demon and holds for like a dictator with a mannish voice, which makes people fear and respect him. As a result the nation feels safe that they are being lead by someone who is not soft nor afraid to hold his ground and the economy is booming. The professional politicians may court popular esteem by throwing the support of the organization behind a clean amateur; that is, some well-know citizen who has not had contact with the politicians and therefore does not share their stigma. The stigma which is attached to the politician by the alienated is not likely to rub off on such an individual, at least during the beginning of the campaign. The difficulty with procedure, from the point of view of the organization, is that such a candidate may be unreliable. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

Therefore, it is important to grow slowly into the discovery and realization of what one really is deep, deep, inside. Coming to know it is hard enough but impregnating the moment-to-moment daily life with this knowledge is harder still. The aspirant of today may be the adept of tomorrow, but the course is interminably long, the goal reached only through innumerable experiences and efforts. After the optimists have had their say and the Advaitins have preached, the hard fact will be echoed back by experience: the goal is set so far, one’s powers so limited, that one has to call on the quality of patience and make it one’s own. So far as history tells us, full enlightenment cannot be got in the span of a single lifetimes, except among the notable few. Yet history has too many undiscovered secrets, and enlightenment is too subtle a matter to correct judgment upon. The attainment of realization of the Overself is extremely rare, and the aspirant should not expect to do so in one limited lifetime. However, since its Grace is unpredictable, no one can say that it is impossible in a particular case. If the recent scientific computation of the Earth’s age as four thousand million years be correct, we get some idea how long it take to make a human. How much longer then to make a superhuman? That which is cheaply bought is often lightly esteemed. We shall rate Truth more highly when we pay a high price for it. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

Even a lifetime is not too long a period to devote toward gaining such a great objective. What we give must be commensurate with what we want to receive. Moreover the effort required, being worthy in itself and necessary to attain the full development of adulthood, is its own reward whether there is any other or nor. Why then should anyone relax one’s efforts or fall into despair because one has been able to make only little or limited progress toward the goal? The illumination is possible for all beings because they are incarnate in human and not animal forms. However, all beings are not willing to pay its price in mental control and emotional subjugation. If the reader finds such a task too fatiguing one should remember that the reward is nothing less than enlightenment. How few are those who have realized their aspiration to merge into the higher self. How rare an event is. It is obvious from the rarity of its historic realization that this ideal was always too ice-mantled a peak of perfection to be climbable by most beings. Nevertheless we gain nothing by ignoring it, and it is at least well to know towards what goal humankind is so slowly and so unconsciously moving. This truth may seem unsympathetic to natural human feelings, far too impersonal. It is not for the multitude who demand from religions satisfaction of desires, consolation and comfort, answer to prayers. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

Thee adepts seems so immeasurably aloof from us, their attainments so superhuman, that we may well ask of what use to most beings is the offering of such a quest. One feels intuitively that there is, or ought to be, some elusive element, principle, purpose, or Deity behind all life and all Nature—but is it possible for a human being to become acquainted with IT? Such a goal may be unappealing to many, held by their attachments as they are; but it is fascinating and alluring to a few old souls, much experiences after a long series of Earthly lives, whose values have been altered, whose glamours and illusions have been eliminated. They feel like wanderers returning home. The goal set up by this teaching may seem too foolish and perhaps even too fatuous for persons who pride themselves on their reasonability and practicality. This judgement may be the result of a slight acquaintance with the subject; it could not be the result of a full and satisfactory knowledge of it. The outside observer will not be able to see what is happening to one, and to that extent will not be able to share in it. However, if the latter is associated with one in some way and is at all sensitive, one will be able secretly to affect the subconscious mind of the observer. The name “Rishee” was bestowed in ancient, as well as modern, Indian on the being who had reached the peak of spiritual knowledge; literally it means “seer.” What is it that one sees? One is a see-er of reality, and though illusion. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

People form quaint and queer notions of what constitutes an illuminate. They would divest one of all human attributes, makes one a being who never even sneezes or yawns! In one the high power manifests itself and through one it follows for the inspiring of others. If people tell that the path is a mere figment of the imagination, they are welcome to their belief. I, who have seen many beings enter it and a few finish it, declare that the difference between the beginning and the end of the path is the difference between a slave and a master. If the quest is presented as too difficult for everyone but the superhuman, an inferiority complex is created and those who could get some help from some of its practices are frightened away. Jesus said that they way to eternal life is straight and narrow. One could have added that it is also long and difficult. Yet the beginner should not let these things discourage one. There is help within and without. If the standard is set too high, love for it may not be strong enough to assist its attainment. If the ideal is too rigorous, its would-be followers will be too few. The achievement may seem too hard but it is not impossible. The best guarantee of that is the ever-presence within one of the divine soul itself. “And the people began to repent of their iniquity; and inasmuch as they did the Lord did have mercy on them,” reports Ether 11.8. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

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Randolph Harris II International Institute

Category Archives: Jesus Christ

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