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I Would Gladly Give My Life if it Would Advance the Cause of Truth!

July 16, 2019 12:52 am

Ah, such a circus for the eye—this low-ceilinged cave—chocked-full of every imaginable kind of packageable and preserved foodstuff, toilet article, and hair accoutrement, ninety percent of which existed not at all in any form whatsoever during the century when I was born. We are talking sanitary napkins, medicinal eyedrops, plastic bobby pins, felt-tip markers, creams and ointments for all nameable part of the human body, dishwashing liquid in every color of the rainbow, and cosmetic rinses in some colors never before invented and yet undefined. Imagine Louis XVI opening a noisy crackling plastic sack of such wonders? What would he think of Styrofoam coffee cups, chocolate cookies wrapped in cellophane, or pends that never run out of ink? Well, I am still not entirely used to these items myself, though I have watched the progress of the Industrial Revolution for two centuries with my own eyes. Such drugstores can keep me enthralled for hours on end. Sometimes I become spellbound in the middle of Wal-Mart. And everybody is to everybody else a commodity, always to be treated with certain friendliness, because even if one is not of use now, one may be later. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

There is not much love or hate to be found in human relations of our day. There is, rather, a superficial friendliness, and a more than superficial fairness, but behind that surface is distance and indifference. There is also a good deal of subtle distrust. When one being says to another, “You speak to Louis Pointe du Lac; he is all right,” it is an expression of reassurance against a general distrust. Even love and the relationships between genders has assumed this character. The great the emancipation of the pleasures of the flesh, as it occurred after the First World War, was a desperate attempt to substitute mutual pleasures of the flesh for a deeper feeling of love. When this turned out to be a disappointment the erotic polarity between the genders was reduced to a minimum and replaced by a friendly partnership, a small combine which has amalgamated its forces to hold out better in the daily batter of life, and to relieve the feeling of isolation and aloneness which everybody has. The alienation between being and being results in the loss of those general and social bonds which characterize medieval as well as most other precapitalist socities. Modern society consists of atoms (if we use the Greek equivalent of individual), little particles estranged from each other but held together by selfish interests and by the necessity to make use of each other. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

Yet beings are a social entity with a deep need to share, to help, to feel as a member of a group. What has happened to these social strivings in beings? They manifest themselves in the special sphere of the public realm, which is strictly separated from the private realm. Our private dealings with our fellow beings are governed by the principle of egotism, “each for oneself, God for us all,” in flagrant contradiction to Christian teaching. The individual is motivated by egotistical interest, and bot by solidarity with and love for one’s fellow beings. The latter feelings may assert themselves secondarily as private acts of philanthropy or kindness, but they are not part of the basic structure of our social relations. Separated from our private life as individuals is the realm of our social life as citizens. In this realm the state is the embodiment of our social existence; as citizens we are supposed to, and in fact usually do, exhibit a sense of social obligation and duty. We pay taxes, we vote, we respect the laws, and in the case of war we are willing to sacrifice our lives. What clearer example could there be of the separation between private and public existence than the fact that the same being who would not think of spending one hundred dollars to relieve the need of a stranger does not hesitate to risk one’s life to save the stranger when in war they both happen to be soldiers in uniform? The uniform is the embodiment of our social nature—civilian garb, of our egotistic nature. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

The division between the community and the political state has led to the projection of all social feelings into the state, which thus becomes an idol, a power standing over and above the being. Beings submit to the state as to the embodiment of one’s own social feelings, which one worships as powers alienated from oneself; in one’s private life as an individual one suffers from the isolation and aloneness which are necessary result of this separation. The worship of the state can only disappear if beings take back the social powers into oneself, and builds a community in which one’s social feelings are not something added to one’s private existence, but in which one’s private and social existence are one and the same. What is the relationship of beings toward oneself? I have described elsewhere this relationship as marketing orientation. In this orientation, beings experience themselves as a thing to be employed successfully on the market. One does not experience oneself as an active agent, as the bearer of human powers. One is alienated from these powers. One’s aim is sell oneself successfully on the market. One’s sense of self does not stem from one’s activity as a loving and thinking individual, but from one’s socioeconomic role. Our sense of value depends on ourselves: on whether we can sell ourselves favorably, whether we can make more of ourselves that we started out with, whether we are a success. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

One’s body, one’s mind and one’s soul are one’s capital, and one’s task in life is to invest it favorably, to make a profit of oneself. Human qualities like friendliness, courtesy, kindness, are transformed into commodities, into assets of the personality package, conducive to a higher price on the personality market. If one fails in a profitable investment in oneself, one feels that one is a failure; if one succeeds, one is a success. Clearly, one’s sense of one’s own value always depends on factors extraneous to oneself, on fickle judgment of the market, which decides about one’s value as in decides about the value of commodities. Nevertheless, as people begin their journey, they pause in the vestibule of hell, where they hear the cries of anguish from the opportunists. These souls who in life were neither good nor evil but acted only for themselves. They are the outcasts who took no sides in the rebellion of the Angels. In modern psychology these opportunists are called well adjusted; they know how to keep out of trouble! However, they are guilt of the sin of fence-sitting. Hence they are neither in hell nor out of it. They are eternally unclassified, they race round and round pursuing a wavering banner that runs forever before them through the dirty air; and as they run they are pursued by swarms of wasps and hornets, who sting them and produce a constant flow of blood. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

Hell enacts the law of symbolic retribution: since these opportunists took no sides they are given no place. As their sin was a darkness, so they move in darkness. As their own guilty conscience pursued them, so they are pursued by swarms of wasps and hornets. Any being who is neither good nor evil is simply not living an authentic life. The law tends to take care to punish the evil depicted in society, and they understand profoundly the passion that drives beings away from the moral life. They believe that it takes courage to be a real sinner. Many people learn to cope wit their problems (not to cure them) in part by means of religion or a therapist’s superior familiarity with disordered human types. As one journeys deeper into hell, such as the gluttonous, the hoarders, and wasters, the wrathful and the sullen, the important thing is not the specific evils with which one struggles but the journey itself. In any quest-romance the recognition of negative states leads to a purification of the self, a casting of the dead/diseased self in favor for a new life. Likewise the function of psychoanalysis, from one point of view, is a movement toward healthy by traversing the morbid landscape of one’s own past. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

Dr. Freud remarks that hysterical patients suffer mainly from reminiscence might be extended to include all those who are inwardly compelled to autobiographical narrative. The Inferno—or hell—consists of suffering and endless torment that produces no change in the soul that endures it and is imposed from without. However, in Purgatorio suffering is temporary, a means of purification, and is eagerly embraced by the soul’s own will. Both must be traversed before arriving at the celestial Paradiso. I think of these three stages as simultaneous—three coexisting aspects of all human experience. Leaving aside the manifest picture and looking at the dynamics effective in producing neuroses, and that is anxieties and the defenses built up against them. Intricate as the structure of a neurosis may be, this anxiety is the motor which sets the neurotic process going and keeps it in motion. Anxieties or fears—let us use these terms interchangeably for a while—are ubiquitous, and so are defenses against them. These reactions are not restricted to human beings. If an animal, frightened by some danger, either makes a counter-attack or takes flight, we have exactly the same situation of fear and defenses. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

If we are afraid of being struck by lightning and put a lightning rod on our roof, if we are afraid of the consequences of possible accidents and take out an insurance policy, the factors of fear and defense are like wise present. Fear and defense are present in various specific forms in every culture, and may be institutionalized, as in the wearing of amulets as a defense against the fear of the evil eye, the observation of circumstantial rites against the fear of the dead, the taboos concerning the avoidance of menstruating women as a defense against the fear of evil emanating from them. These similarities present a temptation to make a logical error. If the factors of fear and defense are essential in neuroses, why not call the institutionalized defenses against fear the evidence of cultural neuroses? The fallacy in reasoning this way is possessed in the fact that two phenomena are not necessarily identical when they have one element in common. One would not call a house a rock merely because it is built out of the same mater as the rock. What, then, is the characteristic of neurotic fears and defenses that makes them specifically neurotic? Is it perhaps that the neurotic fears are imaginary? No, for we might also be inclined to call fear of the dead imaginary; and in both cases we should be yielding to an impression based on a lack of understanding. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

No, for neither does the primitive know why one has a fear of the dead. The distinction has nothing to do with gradations of awareness or rationality, but it consists in the following two factors. First, life conditions in every culture give rise to some fears. They may be caused by external dangers (nature, enemies), by the forms of social relationships (incitement to hostility because of suppression, injustice, enforced dependence, frustrations), by cultural traditions (traditional fear of demons, of violation taboos) regardless of how they may have originated. An individual may be subject more or less to these fears, but on the whole it is safe to assume that they are thrust upon every individual living in a given culture, and that no one can avoid them. The neurotic, however, not only shared the fears common to all individuals in a culture, but because of conditions in one’s individual life—which, however, are interwoven with general conditions—one also has fears which in quantity or quality deviate from those of the cultural pattern. Secondly, the fears existing in a given culture are warded off in general by certain protective devices (such as taboos, rites, customs). As a rule these defenses represent a more economical way of dealing with fears than do the neurotic’s defenses built up in a different way. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

Thus the normal person, though having to undergo the fears and defenses of one’s culture, will in general be quite capable of living up to one’s potentialities and of enjoying what life has to offer one. The normal person is capable of making the best of the possibilities given in one’s culture. Expressing it negatively, one does not suffer more than is unavoidable in one’s culture. The neurotic person, on the other hand, suffers invariably more than the average person. The only reason why I did not mention this fact when discussing the characteristics of all neuroses that can be derived from surface observation is that it is not necessarily observable from without. The neurotic oneself may not even be aware of the fact that one is suffering. Reason does not at all mean our contemporary intellectualism, or technical reason, or rationalism. It stands for the brad spectrum of life in which a person reflects on or pauses to question the meaning of experience, especially suffering. In our age reason is taken as logic, as it is mainly channeled through the left hemisphere of the brain. Therefore, if we take it in a broad sense, reason can guide us in our private hells. However, reason even in one’s amplified sense cannot lead us into the celestial paradise. We have the need of other guides on our journey. These guides are revelation and intuition. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

The Real is wholly nothing to the five senses and wholly unthinkable to the human intellect. Therefore and to this extent only it is also called the Unknowable. However, there is a faculty latent in beings which is subtler than the sense, more penetrative than the intellect. If one succeeds in evoking it, the Real, the unknowable, will then come within the range of one’s perception, knowledge, and experience. However, although the Absolute in its passive state is unknowable, the Overself as a representative of its active aspect, of the World-Mind, is knowable. If the pure essence of Godhead is too inaccessible for beings, nevertheless one has not been left bereft of all divine communion. For there is a hidden element within oneself which has emanated from the Godhead. It is really one’s higher, better self, one’s soul. The Infinite Mind is beyond human perception but its presence and operation are not. The point in human consciousness where these become known is the Overself. However, although the Absolute is imperceptible to human powers, It has not left us utterly bereft of all means of communion. We are linked to It by something that is possessed hidden in the very deeps of our own being, by Its deputy to beings, the divine Overself. Human power can penetrate to those deeps and discover the hidden treasure. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

This higher self is what the successful mystics of all religious have really achieved union with, despite the widely different names of God downwards, which they have given it. One may know that God is here even though one is incapable of know what God is like. If we cannot know the all of God because we do not have the equipment of God, we can at least know something of God and the way we are related through the Overself. Living through other people is a fine way to evade our own problems and it will also make the other person a first-rate candidate for therapy later one. You have as much as a right to live as any other human being. However, there is a common defense of many people overwhelmed by feelings of powerlessness. Some other force must have the power to change things since obviously these people do not; their actions do not really mater. To fill the vacuum left by their failure to act, the powerless frequently rely on the practice of magic rites. Worried about being above average weight, some people ask to be hypnotized to cause them to eat less. However, this only takes away a person own responsibility; and why not learn to be one’s own hypnotist? This dependence on magic stretches back through the centuries of oppression of unrepresented groups, and colonial peoples. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

It is assumed that beings can be made passive, docile, and helpless and can be kept this way by the use of built-in threats and the occasional assignation of a loved or community member. However, in the false calm, we repressed the question we should have been asking: When an individual is rendered unable to stand up for oneself socially or physically, as in slavery, where does one’s power go? No one can accept complete impotence short of death. If one cannot assert oneself overtly, one will do it covertly. Thus magic—a covert, cult force—is an absolute necessity for the powerless. The spread of magic and the reliance on the occult is one symptom of the widespread importance in our transitional age. Sometimes people also lash out at others, paradoxically, against those closet and dearest to one. That is because these individuals represent people in whom one has submerged oneself. In this respect they should be fought (in the individual’s mind) for the sake of one’s own autonomy. It is parallel to the counter-will, the being’s self-assertion in opposition exactly to those upon whom is most dependent. Thus the life-destroying violence becomes also life-giving violence. They are intertwined as the sources of the individual’s self-reliance, responsibility, and freedom. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

Although it is inevitable, beings do not immediately fight everyone in their lives to assert their own freedom. This occurs partly because the people who are still helping them, they have to surrender temporarily some of the autonomy they do have; partly as a counterbalance to the excessive transference that turns the people helping them (financially and or emotionally) into a god. There is thus a self-affirmation precisely in self-destructive violence. Ultimately the affirmation is expressed in the person’s demonstration of one’s right to die by one’s own hand if one chooses. If, as is our tendency in this country, we condemn all violence out of hand and try to eradicate even the possibility of violence from a human being, we take aware from one an element that is essential to one’s full humanity. For the self-respecting human being, violence is always an ultimate possibility—and it will be resorted to less if admitted than if suppressed. For the free beings it remains in imagination an ultimate exit when all other avenues are denied by unbearably tyranny or dictatorship over the spirit as well as the body. To be alive is power, existing in itself, without a further function, omnipotence enough. The persons I have known, or have known of, who have great moral courage have generally abhorred violence. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

We should not allow the crushing of another person, whether physically, psychologically, or spiritually. One’s moral courage stands out more clearly when they become the symbol of a value lost sight of in a confused World. The innate worth of a being must be reversed solely because of one’s humanity and regardless of one’s politics. As long as there exist persons with moral courage, we can be sure that the triumph of the human robot has not yet arrived. Courage often arises not only out of one’s audaciousness, but also out of one’s compassion for the human suffering one witnesses around one. It is highly significant, and indeed almost a rule, that mortal courage has its source in such identification through one’s own sensitivity with the suffering of one’s fellow beings. I am tempted to call this perceptual courage because it depends on one’s capacity to perceive, to let one’s self see the suffering of other beings. If we let ourselves experience the evil, we will be forced to do something about it. It is a truth, recognizable in all of us, that when we do not want to become involved, when we do not want to confront even the issue of whether or not we will come to the assistance of someone who is being unjustly treated, we block off our perception, we blind ourselves to the other’s suffering, we cut off our empathy with the person needing help. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

Hence the most prevalent form of cowardice in our day hides behind the statement, “I did not want to become involved.” When we find our own heart and mind, our own inspiration, our spiritual longings, one senses of being guided by ethereal means, this encounter is compared to the secular resurrection. Resurrection reappears in a radically different landscape in order to restore love and joy to the craving soul. It is as if by helping others, we are coming back for our own salvation. We participate wit the ongoingness of the race. To find out the truth little by little oneself is to make it really one’s own. To be pushed into it with a plunge by a master always entails the likelihood of a return to one’s native and proper level later on. We must find the Overself through our own perceptions, that is, through our own eyes—or never. It will not suffice to believe that we can go on seeing it through the eyes of another being—be one a holy guru, or not. The seeker must elicit these things for oneself, and from within oneself; reading about them is not enough, hearing about them from gurus, or at lectures, is not enough. Something more is needed that what books or even gurus, or not. The seeker must elicit these things for oneself, and from within oneself: reading about them is not enough, hearing about them from gurus, or at lectures, is not enough. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

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

July 12, 2019 12:09 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 9, 2019 11:45 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 7, 2019 11:02 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nor should any temporal limits be set for it. Why exclude the modern Word and remain shut in with the ancient one alone? Enlightened individuals have been born all through history, have contributed their ideas beliefs experiences and revelations, and all through the social scales. This is so, must be so, because Truth, Reality, Goodness, and Beauty, in their best sense, are in the end got from within. God is in your very being. To know him as something apart or far-away in time and distance or as an object outside yourself, separate from you—that is not the Way—impossible. Jesus gave away the secret: he is within you. It is surprising how widely people have ignored Jesus’ message (“The kingdom of Heaven is within you”) when its means is so clear, its phrasing so strong. If a being lives in harmony with the divine World-Idea, one may also live in trust that one will receive that which belongs to one. This will be brought about either by guiding one to it or guiding it to one. “All things whatsoever the Father hath are mine.” That which you need is yours now—if only you could raise yourself to the recognition of your true relation to your Overself. The heart, which abandons itself to the Supreme Mind, finds itself related to all its works, and will travel a royal road to particular knowledges and powers. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

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

July 6, 2019 11:12 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Every Difficulty Slurred Over Will be a Ghost to Disturb Your Repose Later on

July 6, 2019 12:21 am

You are afraid. You do not stand en garde against fear. You do not understand the danger of fear itself. We will know these answers when we find those who can tell us, those who have possessed knowledge for centuries, for however long creatures such as ourselves have walked the Earth. That knowledge was our birthright, and he deprived us. Although mass society is a political as well as a cultural phenomenon, many of its critics, among them Ortega y Gasset and T. S. Eliot, have concentrated their attack chiefly against what they regard as its vulgar values, its sameness, its threat to high culture. While one may share their concern about the danger of standardized tastes, or about the threat which mass behavior in politics or in culture poses for individual expression, there is far more to the problem than this—indeed, far more than many aristocratically inclined critics of mass society (and of democracy) want to see. For it is not only beings of sensibility who feel crushed by the sheer weight of mass society and its values. In short, what is alienating in mass society is not merely the corruption of art, or the power of the multitudes—a power often exaggerated—but more importantly, the atomization of individuals who make up the mass. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

In that society, there is a tendency for the aggregates of individuals [to be] related to one another only by way of their relation to a common authority, especially the state. That is, individuals are not directly related to one another in a variety of independent groups. A population in this condition is not insulated in any way from the ruling group, not yet from elements within itself. In time the many secondary groups, associations and publics which beings had formed in earlier age tend to lose their role as intermediaries between state (or media) and individual. This tendency was particularly notable in Nazi Germany, which set out to build an elaborate system of mass control through terror and bureaucracy but it is also apparent in our own society, despite our reputation for being a nation of joiners (the fact is that most of our citizens are not joiners). Mass society weakens or destroys traditional human groupings, thus leaving the individual at the mercy of impersonal communication, such as newspapers and radio and fake new media broadcasted on the television. In addition, the process of communication itself, presumably a two-way system, tends to become a one-way street with individuals more on the receiving or taking end than on the giving end. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

How does one talk back to a TV screen? Well, with the invention of social media and hashtags, it is now possible, so the TV could become two-way communication with a two-way street in the future. However, I doubt people want the TV watching them, as it would be a huge invasion of privacy because you did not consent to them entering your home and private life. Nonetheless, as things are now, the formation of opinion is facilitated for those who control the channels of communication—whether they be propagandists in a military dictatorship or the advertising industry or even a political party in our society; the stage is set for manipulation of tastes and opinions as obstacles to mass persuasion are removed. A manipulated mass is alienated to the extent that it is powerless to withstand these pressures. Here we can see why it is not the masses, those dumb beasts who threaten individual excellence, but a powerful elite which monopolizes the means of communication, thereby weakening primary human relations and creating obedient multitudes. However, just because they consider themselves elite and powerful, it does not negate the fact that they may be savages or are immune to prosecution. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

In fact, no one, even politicians, is above the law. The United States Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Pennsylvania announced that Scranton Mayor William L. Courtright, age 61, of Scranton, Pennsylvania, plead guilt on 2 July 2019 to a criminal information charging him with three felony public corruption offenses. According to United States Attorney David J. Freed, the criminal information charges Mayor William L. Courtright with engaging in a multi-year conspiracy with unidentified individuals to take bribes from vendors who did business with the City. The information also alleges that other objectives of the conspiracy were to commit the offenses of attempted extortion under color of official right and extortion through use of fear or of economic hard. The undercover investigation by the FBI revealed that the former mayor accepted cash payments from vendors doing business with the city in a pay-to-play scheme. “In this County, in this Commonwealth, in the Country—our elected officials work for us, not the only way around. Using public office for personal financial gain is a crime, plain and simple. All citizens, not just those in law enforcement, should demand that our public officials scrupulously follow the law. And when they do not, no matter how difficult the investigations may be, or how long they may take, the United States Department of Justice and our laws enforcement partners will home them to account,” reports U.S. Attorney Freed. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

“Bill Courtright used the city of Scranton. He traded on his office in exchange for money and other valuable favors. He wielded his official powers for his own benefit, when he should’ve been focused on his community. The FBI will never stop seeking to bring to justice corrupt public officials who so badly betray the public trust. To that end, we and our partners at the Pennsylvania State Police and the IRS have launched a task force specifically to take on public corruption in the northeast Pennsylvania region. We’re working on behalf of the people, who expect—and deserve—honest services from all their elected officials,” reports Michael T. Harpster, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Philadelphia Division. Bill Courtright did plead guilty and faces a maximum penalty under federal law for this offense of 35 years imprisonment, and a term of supervised release following imprisonment, and a fine. Therefore, no one is above the law. Nonetheless, on every side, they [the media audience] feel themselves the object of manipulation. They see themselves as the target for ingenious methods of control, through advertising which cajoles, promises, terrorizes; through propaganda that, utilizing available techniques, guides the unwitting audience into opinions which may or may not coincide with the best interests of themselves or their affiliates; through cumulatively subtle methods of salesmanship which may simulate values common to both salesperson and client for private and self-interested motives. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

In the place a sense of Gemeinschaft—genuine community of values—there intrudes pseudo-Gemeinschaft—the feigning of personal concern with the other fellow in order to manipulate one the better. No wonder that in this most alienated of societies the slogan “togetherness” was first promoted by an advertiser. If many are persuaded to accept the spurious values handed down to them, a dissenting few can always be depended on to reject them. In this rejection can be seen still another major form of alienation, reflected at one extreme in the revolt of artists and intellectuals against what they consider the uncongenial and materialistic standards of bourgeois society. Personifying this revolt in their art, as well as in their lives, are writers like Baudelarie (an internal emigrant who longed to escape anywhere out of this World); Rimbaud (who did escape and whose self-imposed exile became a model for many artistic rebels following him) and Dostoyevsky (who regarded the freedom of the atheistic individual, his loneliness and isolation as the greatest evils; and in whose works the twin themes of the atomization of society and self-alienation receive their supreme expression). #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

We are dealing with more than mere disenchantment. The modern Word debases. It debases the state; it debases men. It debases love; it debases women. It debases the race; it debases the child. It debases the nation; it debases the family. It even has succeeded in debasing what is perhaps most difficult in the World to debase—because this is something which has in itself, as in its texture, a particular kind of dignity, like a singular incapacity for degradation—it debased death. The two attitudes we have toward the clock indicate two ways of timing—the one as being timed, the other as timing for the next hour, for today and tomorrow. What does the clock tell you? Does it point to the hour of rising and working and eating and talking and going to sleep? Does it point to the next appointment and the next project? Or does it show that another day, another week have passed, that we have become older, that better timing is needed to use our last years for the fulfillment of our plans, for planting and building and finishing before it is too late? Or does the clock make us anticipate the moment in which its voice does not speak any more for us? Have we, the beings of the information age, the beings who are timing every hour from day to day, the courage and the imagination of the Preacher who looks back at all his time and all timing and calls it vanity? And if so, what about our timing? Does it not lose meaning? #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

Must we say with the Preacher that it is good for beings to enjoy life as it is given to them from hour to hour, but that it is better not to be born at all? There is another answer to the question of human existence, to the question of timing and being timed. It is summed up in the words of Jesus: “The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand.” In these words, God’s timing breaks into our human timing. Something new appears, answering the question of the Preacher as well as the question of the business person. We ask with all generations of thinking beings: What is the meaning of the flux of time and the passing away of everything in it? When the end of all our work is the same, what is the meaning of our toiling and planning? Vanity? And this is the answer we get: Within this our time something happens that is not of our time but out of eternity, and this times our time! Here the secrets that have endured the passage of time, which many have only dimly begun to understand. When Jesus says that the right hour has come, that the kingdom of God is at hand, he pronounces the victory over the law of vanity. This hour is not subject to the circle of life and death and all the other circles of vanity. When God himself appears in a moment of time, when God subjects himself to the flux of time, the flux of time is conquered. And if this happens in one moment of time, then all moments of time receive another significance. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

When the finger of the clock turns around; not one vain moment is replaced by another vain moment, but each moment says to us: The eternal is at and in this moment. The moment passes, the eternal remains. Whatever in this moment, in this hour, on this day and in this short or long life-time happens has infinite significance. Our timing from moment to moment, our planning today for tomorrow, the toil of our lifetime is not lost. Its deepest meaning lies not ahead where vanity swallows it, but it lies above where eternity affirms it. This is the seriousness of time and timing. “With their wicked words they will try to hold you down. No this is not our fate, the lives in which they are bound. And there is something more we know it has to be found. I know the World will not wait, the tide is turning around, and there is not enough time. And no there is not enough time, In the fallout of the wasted, in the half light I stand before you in the last dance of an old life. Now the cool wind is blowing and we cannot stay, but it is alright. When the night is gone, I will still be here,” reports Emma Hewitt (Not Enough Time). #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

This idea of time stirred my soul as if it were a pool of water longing to be still. I was mesmerized, enchanted. The faces of humans passed me like candle flames in the night dancing on dark waves. I was sinking into darkness. I was weary of longing. I was turning around and around and around in the street, looking at the stars and thinking. Through our timing God times the coming of his kingdom; through out timing God elevates the time of vanity into the time of fulfillment. The activist who is timing with shrewdness and intuition what one has to do in one’s time and for one’s time, and for our whole activististic civilization cannot give us the answer. And the Preacher, who himself once was a most successful activist, knows that this is not an answer; he knows that vanity of our timing. And let us be honest, the spirit of the Preacher is strong today in our minds. His mood fills our philosophy and poetry. The vanity of human existence is described powerfully by those who call themselves philosopher or poets of existence. They are the children of the Preacher, this great existentialist of his period. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

However, neither they nor the Preacher knows an answer. They know more than people of mere acting. They know the vanity of acting and timing. They know that we are timed. However, they do not know the answer either. Certainly we must act; we cannot help it. We have to time our lives from day to day. Let us do it as clearly and successfully as the Preacher when he still followed the example of King Solomon. However, let us follow him also when he saw through all this and realized its vanity. Then, and then alone, are we prepared for the message of the eternal appearing in time and elevating time to eternity. Then we see in the movement of the clock not only passing of one moment after the other, but also the eternal at hand, threatening, demanding, promising. Then we are able to say: “In spite”! In spite of the fact that the Preacher and all his pessimistic followers today and everywhere and at all times are right, I say yes to time and to toil and to acting. I know the infinite significance of every moment. However, again in saying so we should not relapse into the attitude of the activist, not even of the Christian activist—and there are many of them, men and women in Christendom. The message of the fulfillment of time is not a green light for a new, an assumedly Christian activism. However, it makes us say with Paul: “Through our outer nature is wasting away our inner nature is renewed every day—because we look not to the things that are seen but to the things are unseen. For the thing that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

In these words the message of the Preacher and the message of Jesus are untied. All is vanity but through this vanity eternity shines into us, comes near to us, draws us to itself. When eternity calls in time, then activism vanished. When eternity calls in time, then pessimism vanishes. When eternity times us, then time becomes a vessel of eternity. Then we become vessel of that which is eternal. However, who was to make this revelation when the sky and sea become indistinguishable and neither any longer was chaos? God? Or Satan? It struck me suddenly what consolation it would be to know Satan, to look upon his face, no matter how terrible that countenance was, to know that I belonged to him totally, and thus put to rest forever the torment of this ignorance. To step through some veil that would forever separate me from all that I called human nature. However, even in these moments, when all the World was sleeping, neither Heaven nor Hell seemed more than a tormenting fancy. To know, to believe, in one or the other that was perhaps that only salvation for which I could dream. Any psychology that aims to understand the reality underlying all human beings in crisis is bound to be a bewildering one. Part of the problem, however, rests with us existentialist ourselves. Although we have made valiant theoretical and therapeutic contributions, we have yet to cohesively integrate them for practical, clinical use. We have also spent much of our energy in the reactive rather than proactive mode of discourse, especially in the area of psychotherapy. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

Because there would be no rest in damnation, could be no rest; and what was this torment compared to the restless fires of hell? Us living beneath those constant stars—those stars themselves—what has this to do with Satan? And those images which sound so static to us in childhood when we are all so take up with mortal frenzy that we can scarce imagine them desirable: seraphim gazing forever upon the face of God—and the face of God itself—this was rest eternal, of which this gentle, cradling planet was only the faintest promise. The implications of this promise is revolutionary, indeed, for it signals a revised conception of existence. The streets are full of enlightened people. All beings have the possibility of attaining enlightenment because all have the divine self hidden under their narcissism. Each of us is linked with God, the Mover of all this moving Universe. This link must be brought into our field of awareness. There is possessed the highest fulfilment of our lives. The individual consciousness is not alone. It is fathered by a universal consciousness. Between the two there is this link. To awaken one day and discover (in several cases, rediscover) it will be a being’s most satisfying experience. The World-Mind is omnipresent. There is a point where every being touches it. When one attains awareness of this point, one is at last attending the true Holy Communion service. The little centre of consciousness that is myself rests in and lives by the infinite ocean of consciousness that is God. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

The first momentary discovery of this relationship constitutes genuine religious experience, and its expansion into a final, full disclosure constitutes a philosophic one. If God is everywhere, as he must be, then God is in beings too. This fact makes possible one’s discover, under certain conditions, of a diviner element in one’s being which is ordinarily obscured. In the end, no being can miss being in the presence of, or confronted by, the divine power. It is a fact which, whether one accepts or denies the idea of its existence, one must one day reckon with it. This is because one has never really been separated from it, never been aware of any thing or thought expect by virtue of consciousness derived from it. What we know through sense as forms points to the existence of the mind. What we know through the intellect as thoughts points to the mind. What does the individual mind itself point to? We can find the answer by plunging deep into its core, deeper and ever deeper in the practice of contemplation until we come to its ultimate source. There, where the World vanishes and the id is stilled, we become one with the infinite and eternal Mind behind the Universe. Ordinarily beings cannot directly penetrate that layer of the mind which is continuous with, and contiguous to, God. However, during the deepest state of prayer one may do so. The human mind, finite and limited though it be, can become an inlet to the universal Mind. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

Such a happening is attended by blissful yet tranquil feelings. This little being that is me merges into larger consciousness that is pure infinite Being—until the body calls me back. Must beings take formal vows in order to discipline themselves? Can one not be loyal to one’s ideal, which in the end is self-chosen or one would not have turned one’s back upon the World, without making promises and uttering pledges which it may not be possible to redeem? Are the tonsured head and the coarse robe essential to ensure the practice of self-control in act and thought? If one is to persevere in the purification of character, is it not enough that one one’s self wants it? If one chooses to do so, one is free to live in the normal human relationships, to follow a career in the World, to marry and beget children. Of course this will necessarily entail certain disciplinary conditions. However, one will not be obliged to flee from all possessions into jungles, monasteries, or the like. “Therefore repent ye, repent ye, lest by knowing these things and not doing them ye shall suffer yourselves to come under condemnation, and ye are brought down unto this second death,” reports Helaman 14.19. Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

This Whole Person is Architect and Developer, Tenant, and Landlord, Apollo and Dionysus in the House of Human Nature!

July 1, 2019 11:42 pm

If the aged are increasingly isolated from community life, theirs is a fate which many groups share in an urban civilization. Not only does the city weaken the traditional kinship group; it also tends to atomize the individual by freeing one from old bonds. The anonymity and hence the alienation of the city dweller have never been more graphically described than by the following words: The restless and noisy activity of the crowded streets is highly distasteful, and it is surely abhorrent to human nature itself. Hundreds of thousands of men and women drawn from all classes and ranks of society pack the streets of most major cities. Are they not all human beings with the same innate characteristics and potentialities? And do they not all aim at happiness by following similar methods? Yet they rush past each other as if they had nothing in common. They are tacitly agreed on one thing only—that everyone should keep to the right of the pavement so as not to collide with the stream of people moving in the opposite direction. No one even thinks of sparing a glace for one’s neighbors in the streets. The more that city folk are packed into a tiny space, the more repulsive and disgraceful becomes the brutal indifference with which they ignore their neighbors selfishly concentrate upon their private affairs. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

We know well enough that this isolation of the individual—this narrow-minded egotism—is everywhere the fundamental principle of modern society. However, nowhere is this selfish egotism so blatantly evident as in the frantic bustle of the great cities of New York, London, Tokyo, Shanghai, and San Francisco. The disintegration of society into individuals, each guided by one’s private principles and each pursuing one’s own aims has been pushed to its furthest limits in many of these World Class Cities and others. Here indeed human society has been split into its component atoms. And although some of these cities features have softened, they are still basically the same: mechanical, atomistic, impersonal, predatory. The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of one’s existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, notably life in a great city where one has become a mere cog in a machine. Today in an increasingly citified World, these pressures have mounted and mortals find it difficult to preserve their identity. “I fear lest the Spirit of the Lord hath ceased striving with them. For so exceedingly do they anger that it seemeth me that they have no fear of death; and they have lost their love, one towards another; and they thirst after blood and revenge continually,” reports Moroni 9.4-5. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

With the rise of corporate America and the financial districts came another historical development in the breakdown of traditional community bonds: the antagonism of social classes. The globalization caused a social dislocation of stupendous proportions, and the problem of poverty is merely the economic aspect of this event. Those at the bottom were not the only ones affected, although in the early industrial period huge masses of the laboring population resembled more the specters that might haunt a nightmare than human beings. However, if the workers were physically dehumanized, the owning classes were morally degraded. The traditional unity of a Christian society was giving place to a denial of responsibility on the part of the well-to-do for the conditions of their fellows. The Two Nations were taking shape. To the bewilderment of thinking minds, unheard-of wealth turned out to be inseparable from unheard-of poverty. Scholar proclaimed in unison that a science had been discovered which put the laws governing mortal’s World beyond any doubt. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

It was at the behest of these laws that compassion was removed from the hearts, and a stoic determination to renounce human solidarity in the name of the greatest happiness of the greatest number gained the dignity of secular religion. “Pray for them, my children, that repentance may come unto them. However, behold, I fear lest the Spirit hath ceased striving with them; and in this part of the land they are also seeking to put down all power and authority which cometh from God; and they are denying the Holy Ghost,” reports Moroni 8.28. The class struggles that have raged in Europe, Asia, Africa, Mexico, Australia and North America may then be regarded, at least from the point of view of those at the bottom, as not just an effort to secure a larger slice of the economic pie but also as a desperate attempt to restore a lost community. If this struggle is less violent today than in the past and if the workers of Europe and America have made considerable material progress, it would be naïve to assume that they have found that community. The two nations may not be far apart as in the nineteenth century, but the gap between them still exits. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

There is a sharp division between “them” (those on top: bosses, lawyers, doctors, judges, police, professors, civil servants) and “us” in the working class. “They” are the people at the top, the higher-ups, the people who give you your dole, call you up, tell you to go to war, fine you, made you split the family up, control your legal status and health and safety and education. The rapid inflation in the economy has intensified working class solidarity because of severe distress. However, if working people have a keen sense of them and us they also have strong commitments as members of a group with common interest and needs. That is, if alienated from the larger society, least they felt they belonged to their own class, which was not necessarily a matter of class consciousness, but rather a sense of sharing problems with kin and neighbors whose work and living arrangements were similar. The class conscious political parties and labor movements that grew up in these World Class Cities are products, not the cause, of these common experiences. Many members of the new generation are discovering for themselves that impulses of spirit are more precious than the Worldly goods they inherit from their parents. Their discover is of tremendous value indeed, and no one would argue with it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

However, here, again, a kind of trading on innocence comes in to confuse the picture. To a greater or lesser extent, youths of today, like the rest of us, use and enjoy the benefits of technology, no matter how simplified their lives may be. Our culture’s affluence, often to be found in the life styles of parents of the more radical young people, is what makes it possible for them to indulge in their radicalism and, many times, form communities. Here they get scattering wheat on unploughed, hard, dry ground, insisting: “It will grow.” All one proves is that without some knowledge of the agriculture, all the good intentions in the World cannot prevent the members of the community from starving when Winter comes. The fact, of course, that many of these communities fail and all have a difficult time does not lighten their moral value as a testimony to the voice of nature; and they are a sharp reminder to all our consciences of the divisive baggage of Worldly possession. However, the high purpose is not enough. One observer of a number of communities says that those doomed to failure are the ones with no other purpose than the self-improvement of the group, whereas those that succeed have some goal or value—a special religious commitment, for example—that transcends the members themselves. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

This saves them from the innocence of believing that what they want will come out of their wanting it, that nature will renounce its age-old neutrality and fit their mortality (as it was in the Garden of Eden), and that somehow one escapes the tragedies and complexities of life simply by being simple. We have seen that innocence cuts across generations. Faced with the multitude of choices and sensing our essential impotence, we cry for some shield, for some protection from this insoluble dilemma, for someone or some technique to take the impossible responsibility from us. One defense is innocence. Innocence is real and loveable in the child; but as we grow we are required by the fact of growth not to close ourselves off, either in awareness or experience, to the realities that confront us. Innocence as a perpetuation of earlier attitudes—the innocence of the flower children, of the too easy program of loving everyone, of wearing one’s birthday suit without anxiety or guilt, of oversimplification of honesty and sincerity as though one were still a child—all these may be charming but they are also radically nonadaptive in our contemporary World. It is an innocence that shows itself in the clear, open, pure visage of a Larry, an innocence that expects nature to hear our need and forsake her ancient condition of neutrality in order to protect us from harm. It is an innocence without responsibility. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

This type of innocence is a defense against having to confront the realities of power, including such external forms of power as war machine or such inner forms of power as status and prestige. The fact that innocence is used for such extrainnocent purposes is what makes it suspect. Innocence as a shield from responsibility is also a shield from growth. It protects us from new awareness and from identifying with the sufferings of humankind as well as with the joys, both of which are shut off from the pseudo innocent person. The person of independent temperament cannot fit easily into monastic existence with its formal patterns and clock-timed bell-signalled regularity. The solution of the World’s problems does not lie in renouncing the Worldly life itself. If every man became a priest or every woman a nun, they would merely exchange one set of problems—Worldly ones—for another set—monastical ones. It is probably correct to say that the first kind are harsher and grimmer than the second kind. However, whatever type of life is adopted, problems will inescapably be there. Whether the ideal is a hermit’s existence or a householder’s the same qualities have to be developed. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

How can a person escape from the World-Mind since one is indissolubly united with it? Through the Overself one is a very part of it, one’s consciousness could not work without it. The Godlike deepest Self in us knows and feels on its own level; therefore the intellect’s reasoning and the aesthetic feeling are reflections on a lower level of spiritual activities. So many human sufferings are the consequences of human errors, and so many of these errors arise from human ignorance. The supreme ignorance of all which leads to the greatest sins and sufferings is that one does not know one is an individualized part of a greater consciousness. Although this consciousness shines through one’s ego it is apart from the ego, for it stands in its own right and exists as an entity by itself. It is this consciousness which enables a mortal to act and think in the physical body and it is one’s diviner part. Blinded by the error of materialism, one identifies with the body itself. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

The self of every create is divine Being, the ultimate Consciousness, but only when evolution brings it to the human level does it have the possibility of discovering this fact. It is true that the human mind makes it own World of experience, but it is not true that it makes it by itself; for behind the individual mind is the Cosmic Mind. If the World is but an idea there must be a mind which conceived it. Although my individual mind has so largely contributed to its making, it has not contributed to its original conception. Such a mind must be an undivided universal one in which my own is rooted. It must indeed be what mortals commonly call God. Thus the World-mind originates our experience for us but we ourselves mold it. It supplies the karmic-forces material and we as individuals supply the space-time shape which this material takes. Thus there is a union of the individual with the universal. Whether we think of this mysterious origin as manifesting itself in waves of energy or in particles of the same force, it is and must be there for the deeply reflective atomic scientist. Whether we think of it as God the Creative Universal Mind or as God the inaccessible all-transcending Mind remote from human communion, it is and must be there for the intuitive. However, in both cases his entire Universe is but a thought in the Universal Mind. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

Every object and every creature is simultaneously included in this thought: therefore every human being too. Through this relationship it is possible for a mortal to attain some kind of communion with IT. This is what the quest is all about. Let us consider once more what has here been said about encounters with what is natural and with what is spiritual. The question may be asked at this point whether we have any right to speak of a reply or address that comes from outside the sphere to which in our consideration of the orders of being we ascribe spontaneity and consciousness as if they were like a reply or address in the human World in which we live. Is what has here been said valid except as a personalizing metaphor? Are we not threatened by the dangers of a problematic mysticism that blurs the borderlines that are drawn, and necessarily have to be drawn, by all rational knowledge? The clear and firm structure of the I-You relationship, familiar to anyone with a candid heart and the courage to stake it, is not mystical. To understand it we must sometimes step out of our habits of thought, but not out of the primal norms that determine mortal’s thoughts about what is actual. Both in the realm of nature and in the realm of spirit—the spirit that lives on in sayings and works and the spirit that strives to become sayings and works—what acts onus may be understood as the action of what has being. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

Human existence is challenged and charged by the perils and prices of everyday existence. “Every thing has it appointed hour, there is a time for all things under Heaven: a time for birth, a time for death, a time to plant, and a time to uproot, a time to terminate, and a time to heal, a time to break down, and a time to build, a time to cry, a time to laugh, a time to mourn, a time to dance, a time to scatter and a time to gather, a time to embrace, a time to refrain, a time to embrace, a time to refrain, a time to see, a time to lose, a time to keep, a time to throw away, a time to tear, a time to sew, a time for silence and a time for speech, a time for love, a time for hate, a time for war, a time for peace,” reports Ecclesiastes 3.1-8. You have read words of a man who lived about 200 yeas before the birth of Jesus; a man nurtured in Jewish piety and educated in Greek wisdom; a child of his period—a period of catastrophes and despair. He expresses this despair in words of a pessimism that surpasses most pessimistic writings in World literature. Everything is in vain, he repeats many times. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

It is vanity, even if you were King Solomon who not only controlled the means for any humanly possible satisfaction but who also could use them with wisdom. However, even such a man must say: All is in vain! We do not know the name of the writer of this book who is usually called the Preacher, although he is much more a teacher of wisdom, a practical philosopher. Perhaps we wonder how his dark considerations of mortal’s destiny could become a Biblical book. It took indeed a long time and the overcoming of much protect before it was accepted. However, finally synagogue and church accepted it; and now this book is in the Bible besides Isaiah and Matthew and Paul and John. This “all is in vain” has received Biblical authority. I believe that this authority is deserved, that it is not an authority produced by a mistake, but that it is the authority of truth. His description of the human situation is truer than any poetry glorifying mortals and their destiny. His honesty opens our eyes for those things which are overlooked or covered up by optimist of all kinds. So if you meet people who attack Christianity for having too many illusions tell them that their attacks would be much stronger if they allied themselves with the Preacher. The very fact that this book is a part of the Bible shows clearly that the Bible is a most realistic book. And cannot be otherwise. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

For only on this background the message of Jesus as the Christ has meaning. Only if we accept an honest view of the human situation, of mortal’s old reality, can we understand the message that in Christ a new reality has appeared. One who never has said one’s life vanity of vanities, all is vanity cannot honestly say with Paul, “In all these things we are more than conquerors through one who loved us.” This view would enrich psychology by embracing literary sources, humanistic values, and the power of myth. Clinicians can utilize existential principles to empower clients in a wealth of ways: to cope more effectively and respond to life’s demands, to achieve a deeper understanding of the situational forces operating on them, and to gain a sense of how the individual’s interpretation of life creates new possibilities and realities of existence. Existential-integrative psychology and religion aspires us to guide others toward personal liberation, an inner sense of freedom one that absorbs and transforms experiential challenges. Rather than retreat from the onslaught of traumatic experiences or exploit them for personal gains, the client, and all of us, can live most fully, be optimally functional, by developing the mental flexibility to be on the moment, meaningfully rooted in the past, with viable options for the future. This whole person is architect, developer, tenant and landlord, Apollo and Dionysus in the House of Human Nature. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14

Manifest Destiny—We Have Eaten from the Tree of Knowledge and the United World of America is Our Future!

June 28, 2019 12:51 am

I will see a splendid city where great ideas are born in the minds of the populace, ideas that go forth to illuminate the darkened corners of the World. And I will know people like you, people who have thoughts in their heads and quick tongues with which to voice them, and we will sit in cafes and we will drink together and we will clash with each other violently in words, and we will talk for the rest of our lives in divine excitement. In America, pseudoinnocence has a history as long as the country’s. A “Chosen People” set sail from England, turning its back on a Europe that, for it, stood for sin, injustice, aristocratic exploitation, and religious persecution. These people sought to establish in America a land that would embody the opposites: righteousness, justice, democracy, and freedom of conscience. The very founding of the new nation was an enactment of the myth of the New Jerusalem, not in some distant future but already an actuality before the eyes of the “Chosen.” America began with a belief in perfection, and then it became devoted to progress. However, how do you progress beyond perfection? What about the religious persecution that soon sprang up even in New England? What about the beginning genocide of the Indians? #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

Necessarily, then, there began the long struggle between ideals and reality, a battle in which the idealistic America, which was the approximate of the perfect state, the new Garden of Eden with no snakes in the grass, was pitted against the reality of persecution and extermination of the Indians. An ethical dilemma, indeed! The confusion and hypocrisy to which this led is shown ironically in Benjamin Franklin’s writings: “If it be the design of Providence to extirpate these savages in order to make room for the cultivators of the Earth, it seems not improbable that run may be the appointed means. It has already annihilated all the tribes who formerly inhabited the seacoasts.” Mr. Franklin shows how the citizens identify the design of Providence, the will of God, with their own and their countrymen’s self-interest. Americans are the “cultivators of the Earth,” and genocide of the Indians—an enterprise the guilt for which we have not yet confronted—is the will of God. This is the hallmark of pseudoinnocence: always identify your self-interest with the design of Providence. Probably all nations are given to a kind of historical amnesia or selective recollection that makes unpleasant traumas of the past. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

Certainly Americans since the Puritans have historically regarded themselves as a latter-day “Chosen People” sent on a holy errand to the wilderness, there to create a New Jerusalem. The framers of the Constitution were, furthermore, deathly afraid of exploitative power, as Americans have always been. They formulated their Articles with the intention that no group would ever gain this power; so afraid were they of being exploited that, in the Articles, they stretched its meaning to include all power. Americans now had the difficult ethical task of believing overtly that they did not want power, that their capacity for moral thinking and for serving their fellow mortals obviated their need for power. They saw themselves as the saviors of the needy from Europe. The Statue of Liberty still promises, through the inscription on its base: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore, send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. I life my lamp beside the golden door. However, since America is no longer a population building nation, some believe the statuette of limitations on the invitation from the Statue of Liberty has expired. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

In this country the Garden of Eden myth, along with the open denial of power, has continuously coexisted with a great amount of violence. The homicide rate here is three to ten times that of European countries; we have had one of the bloodiest labor histories of any of the large powers; the majority of Americas in the large cities seem to be afraid nowadays to walk on the streets at night or hand the cashier a one hundred dollar bill. The essential American soul is hard, isolated, stoic and a killer. This violence exists, oddly enough, side by side with a remarkable tenderness and warmth in the American character. We cannot escape the conclusion that some special conflicts must be present in the consciousness of Americans to account for the simultaneous existence of violence and tenderness. I propose that, primarily, the violence and, second, the tenderness are connected with our conscious denial of power and the pseudoinnocence that accompanies this denial. Violence comes from the powerlessness; it is the explosion of impotence. The denial of our desires for power, when it occurs in the endeavor to cover up an actually high degree of power, sets up an inner contradiction: power then does not allay our feelings of powerlessness. It does not lead to the sense of responsibility that actual power ought to entail. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

We cannot act upon our power directly, for we always carry an element of guilt at having it. If we were to admit it, we would have to confront our guilt. That is why power is customarily translated into money in America. At least money is external. Cold cash we give to other people and nations; we share it profusely with charities, indicating out guilt in possessing it. So we behave like a nation of wolves in rabbits’ skins. As a nation America has also failed to develop a viable sense of tragedy, which would serve, through making for empathy with our enemies, to mitigate our cruelty. One has only to read the reports of the men who fly the bombers over Indochina (“I do not think of the women and children below,) the fliers say. “I think only I have a job to do, and I get a joy out of doing it well.”) to find proof of our insulation of the evil of the World. “Two World wars have not induced in [Americans] either a sense of sin or that awareness of evil almost instinctive with Old World peoples.” Lacking this sense of our own complicity, most Americas also lack the element of mercy, which may well turn out to be a sine qua non of living in the World with an attitude of humanity. We tend to have sympathy with the aims and the spirits of people who are driven by success for the corporate state is rich and important. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

Many rightly see the American dream and even the problem of innocence in the first centuries of America’s history. We can appreciate the manner in which the sense of powerlessness eats away at the confidence of our people and their capacity to act, the willful ignorance in American life, and our tendency to try to get rid of evil by forbidding it. However, ironically, the promise to the young people and to all of us in the second half is pseudoinnocence writ large. “There are no enemies…There is nothing on the other side…Nobody wants war except the machine…And even business people, once liberated, would like to roll in the grass and lie in the Sun. There is no need, then, to fight any group of people in American.” Woodstock is cited as a myth of the new age now realized in all its ease and splendor, with no recognition at all of its aftermath, namely Altamont, where Hell’s Angels, brought in as bodyguards for singers, committed murder. It is an impressionistic painting of the Garden of Eden, with all of the glow of innocence and the ease and delight of children romping in the fields to rock music, the age before the fall, before the sense of anxiety or guilt intruded. However, alas! It is for children and not for adults. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

Far from Consciousness III being an answer, it would be no consciousness at all, for it lacks the dialectic movement between “yes” and “no,” good and evil, which gives birth to consciousness of any sort. The hard questions—if by that it meant political and economic organizations—are insignificant, even irrelevant. All will be done by Consciousness III, which will not require violence. We are then lulled into a blissful ease that is remarkably similar to those pictures on ancient Greek vases of gods lolling on Mount Olympus. Are there really no enemies? Can we call to mind the Berrigan bothers and think of that? Or the Soledad brothers? Or Angela Davis? Or the convicts at Attica, who, after the slaughter, were forced to run the gantlet naked? Or Vietnam—yes, the defoliation and dehumanized cruelty of Vietnam? Some have no understanding of the creeping fascism already discernible in our country: the turning of youth against their fathers, the anti-intellectualism, the growth of violence coupled with the sense of powerlessness of the mass of people, the tendencies of bureaucracies to make decision on the basis of what works mechanically with all human sense drowned in opportunism. It could be that some lack an understanding of the isolation, the loneliness, the despair that motivates many young people, especially in the drug scenes. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

At Coachella I once went to a hipster wedding; everybody was colorfully dressed as a stage set for the Beyonce Black Greek life step show along with strolling by pledges. However, I could not escape seeing the isolation in practically everyone’s eyes, each young person seeming alienated and lonely even in the crowd devoted to innocence and joy. With alienation we must be careful to prohibit and reduce violence so that people do not become apathetic. Once I was sitting at breakfast with a young man, one of a group of flower children, perhaps nineteen or twenty, with a clear, open face and guileless blue eyes. In the course of our talk he showed me a letter he had written and was sending to his chancellor at his college. In this confident letter that he composed, Klaus would be thereby excused from the final exams. Addressing the chancellor by his first name, the letter stated: “I do not believe in taking tests”; then several more sentences to the same effect; and finally the signature, “Klaus.” I asked Klaus if he had made a copy of the letter. “No, I don’t think it is necessary—the chancellor will read this one.” As I looked at him now, his eyes and face seemed too clear and too open—I felt the doom toward which he and his comrades were marching; I felt the heavy books under which they felt their brains were being crushed by, crushed like flowers indeed, with the students feeling no more than books could feel. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

I saw how much importance these youngster placed on their academic performance, and although it is for their own good, I felt like crying out: “Harmless as doves you are, but where is your wisdom of serpents?” Some people always equate power to the corporate state, the power of the military; totalitarianism is defined as pure power. They never look at the good power. In their minds it always corrupts. However, it is the misuse of power that is the evil; the very existence of power is a good thing. You need power to get out of bed and use the restroom. You need power to control your own life and get an education. You need power to have control over your own behavior. You need power to have self-esteem to accept yourself and not bother others. Innocence in our day is the hope that there are no enemies, that we can move into a new Garden of Eden, a community characterized by freedom from all want, guilt, and anxiety. However, this also means freedom from responsibility; it means going back prior to the birth f consciousness, for guilt is the only other side of moral consciousness—we have eaten of the tree of knowledge. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

We valiantly try to persuade ourselves that if we only find the key, we can easily create a society in which vulnerability, guilt, anxiety will all be things of the unmourned past. Unmourned and unstudied—here is possessed the contemporary uninterest in history and the refusal to study it. To hang to this picture of innocence, you must deny this history. For history is the record, among other things, of mortal’s sins and evils, of wars and confrontations of power, and all the other manifestations of mortal’s struggle toward an enlarged and deepened consciousness. Hence so many of the new generation turn their backs on history as irrelevant; they do not like it, they are not part of it, they insist we are in a brand-new ball game with new rules. And they are completely unaware that this is the ultimate act of hubris. Such innocence is particularly tempting in America because we actually ack a long history. We have very little sense of the sacredness of place, of roots, of homeland. In the Untied States of American, many people build houses in which to spend their old age, and they sell them before the roof is on. They settle in a place, which they soon afterwards leave to carry their changeable longings elsewhere. One will travel fifteen hundred miles to shake off one’s happiness. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

This, in contrast to Europeans who have lived in the same city for a thousand years, and whose very walls around the city bespeak the centuries of struggle by which they earned their convictions and their culture. However, the United States is waking up again. Many people want to come to the United States of America because we are a nation of Law and Order and protect our citizen. The cry not to build a wall to protect our boards is only enflaming the nation to make the realize we need one. People are drowning to sneak into the Untied State of America. There are also others who are legally waiting in line to get here and not being allowed entrance because a quota has been met. There are also security concerns when we do not know who is coming into America or where they are living. Why do so many people want to be American? Because they also believe in Manifest Destiny. That Americans are ordained by God to expand their boarders. If some many people want to be American and want Americans to take care of them, it means that they also want our government to expand, so we can institute Law and Order in their countries, create jobs and safe housing for their people so they do not have to flee. Many people would love to go back to their home country, the land they love, the land of their ancestors, but it is not safe for them. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

It is important to also understand that it is what we expect from ourselves that will be more effective than what someone else expects from one. Rules and regulations thrust upon them from outside which one is unwilling or unable to enforce will be of much less use. As human beings, one of the things that we do to understand our World is to create systems of meaning that help us organize the sensations, experience, and objects we encounter. However, too often we use these seemingly descriptive systems to determine the worth of others. These human-made hierarchies of value can cause division, contention, and skewed understanding of self-worth. Conversely, God’s system of valuing us promotes connection, compassion, and love. We are God’s children. He loves us unconditionally, eternally, and unchangingly. Our worth is infinite because are his sons and daughters. No one spirit is more valuable then others. There are some people who still use an intricate set of codes, such as the very wealthy, to dictate behavior and measure worth. However, as the children of God we are also expected to abide by certain standards—to be loving, honest, show respect, and be slow to anger. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

We are also supposed to have joy in our lives. Even though we cannot yet control those external forces that impact our lives here on Earth, as we strive to become father disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ, we can find peace, joy, and happiness despite the Worldly troubles that swirl around us. The scriptures teach us that Satan desires to lead people into darkness. His every effort is to shut out the light and truth of Jesus Christ and his gospel. The Devil seeks that all people might be miserable like unto himself. If Heavenly Father’s work and glory is to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of men and women, Lucifer’s work is to bring to pass the misery and endless woe of God’s children. Sin and transgression dim the Light of Christ in our lives. That is why our quest is to bask in the Light of Christ, which brings peace, joy, and happiness. The way to full realization of God may be possessed through a monastery or a nunnery for one person and through a family home or a career in the World for another. If any mortal assets that it must be possessed solely through a particular one of these two, one is mistaken. If one insists on forcing this idea on all aspirants, one is sinning. If one claims illumination as authority, it could be only a partial, limited, and incomplete illumination. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13

I Never Promised You a Rose Garden—At Night He Opens the Window and Looks Out into the Infinite Dark!

June 22, 2019 1:59 am

The World is full of abiding beauty, no soul here is really alone. It did not matter to me. I was getting out of old Egypt, and I had the source of all our power with me. And I was young and foolish and enflamed. There has never been a just place for evil in the Western World. There has never been an easy accommodation of death. No matter how violent have been the centuries since the fall of Rome, no matter how terrible the wars, the persecutions, the injustices, the value placed upon human life has only increase. When we see the effect one person can have, it perhaps is no wonder that the Lord reminded us, “Remember the worth of souls.” It is the belief in the value of human life that has caused the torture chambers and the stake and the more ghastly means of execution to be abandoned all over Europe in this time. And it is the belief in the value of human life that carries mortals now out of the monarchy into the republics of America and France. All the stories I have told you are finally as useless as all ancient knowledge is to mortals and to us. Its images and its poetry can be beautiful; it can make us shiver with the recognition of things we have always suspected or felt. It can draw us back to times when the Earth was new to mortals, and wondrous. However, we can always come back to the way the Earth is now. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

When I started work as a psychotherapist, the relationship of powerlessness and psychosis was impressed upon me a number of years ago. In the mentally troubled person psychotherapists are able to see the extremes of the behavior and the experience of us all. All weakness tends to corrupt, and impotence corrupts absolutely. A young musician, Treasure, was one of my first patients. According to the person who administered her Rorschach, she has “one foot in schizophrenia and other on a banana peel.” In her session with me she would give long, involved comparisons of the colors of the musical notes made by the train from Newark in contrast to those made by the train from New Brunswick. I had not the slightest idea about what she was talking much of the time—and she knew it. However, she seemed to need me as a person who listened, wanting and trying to understand her whether I succeeded or not. She was also a woman with considerable dignity and a sense of humor, which helped us immeasurably. However, she could not get angry. Not at me or her parents or anyone else. Her self-esteem was so shaky and vague as to be almost nonexistent. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

Once a young man in a chorus in a chorus to which Treasure belonged asked her to go to a concert with him. Se accepted. However, the next day, in a surge of self-doubt, she phoned him to say: “If you do not want to, you do not have to take me.” She could not affirm or assert herself enough to conceive that someone might like to go to a concert with her. When, at the age of eight or nine, she would play football with a boy slightly older than she, he would run into her hard enough to hurt her. Another child might have yelled at the boy, or started a fight, or cried, or abandoned the game; these are all, good or bad, ways of coping. However, Treasure could utilize none of these methods; she could only sit there on the ground, looking at him silently thinking that he should not hit her so hard. When she was exploited, as she often was, sexually or financially, she had no defenses, no way of drawing a line beyond which she could firmly say “no,” no anger to support her. (One gets a feeling that such persons almost invite exploitation—it at least gives them some relationship and significance.) Along with her inability to get angry, there went, as a necessary corollary, a deep experience of powerlessness and an almost complete lack of capacity to influence or affect other people in interpersonal relations. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

However, such a person has another aide which, as I have confirmed in working with many borderline patients since, is completely different. Treasure’s dreams were of cut-up bodies put in bags, of blood and battles—in short, as violent as her conscious life was docile. Since that time and partly due to this young woman, I have frequently reflected on the relationship between powerlessness and madness. I am purposely stressing both meanings of the word mad: its personal sense of enragedness to the point of violence; and its historical psychiatric sense of psychosis. There is a relationship between the two, and this double use of the term may lead us to the center of the problem. We know that a common characteristic of all mental patients is their powerlessness, and with it goes a constant anxiety which is both cause and effect of the impotence. The patients’ insignificance is so firmly assumed by them that they accept it as a given, often going through life making sad and pitiful gestures to get whatever bit of significance they can. An adolescent girl came to consult me in the middle of the day wearing a crinoline evening dress, possibly one of the prettiest things she had, as a gesture of how much she needed my attention and concern, unaware that it was likely to be regarded as out of place. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

When a person like Treasure can no longer support this way of life, something cracks within her and she may then move into a state in which she is nothing but mad. The person then seems to be the exact opposite of what she had been. The violence of dreams like Treasure’s then becomes the content of her waking life. The person seems all madness, which is surely why psychosis through the centuries was called madness. Mad now at everybody, including herself, the person threatens or attempts to experience death by suicide, cuts her wrists, smears blood over the doors in hospitals to dramatize her need of the attendants and interns. She does overt violence to herself and whoever gets in the range of her projections. We see the same movement in other patients. In the autobiographical novel on her own schizophrenia I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, Hannah Green was admitted to Chestnut Lodge at sixteen. She was the epitome of docility and placidity, never showing any anger at all. Whenever she needed to, she withdrew into the mythology of her private spirit World and talked with mythical figures. Dr. Frieda Fromm-Reichman, the psychiatrist at Chestnut Lodge who treated her, dealt with this mythology with respect, assuring Hannah that she would not take it away as long as the girl needed it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

However, when Dr. Fromm-Reichman went to Europe one Summer, another, younger doctor was assigned to the girl. He charged in, blithely courageous, to break up her mythological World. The results were disastrous. In her explosion of violence, the patient set fire to herself and to her belongings at the Lodge, scarring herself for life. The error of the young doctor was that he did not appreciate that the mythology was what gave significance to Hannah’s existence. The question was not whether it was theoretically right or wrong, but its function for her. This placid patient, who seemed incapable of any aggressive act, swung from docility into outright violence. This may seem and feel like power to the hospital attendants, but it is a pseudopower, an expression of impotence. The patient may now be spoken of as “mad,” which means that she does not fit the accepted criteria in our society which, like all societies, prefer docile, placid “face.” It is important to see that the violence is the end result of repressed anger and rage, combined with constant fear based on the patient’s powerlessness. Behind the pseudopower of the madness we can often find a person struggling for some sense of significance, some way of making a difference and establishing some self-esteem. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

When Treasure was in treatment with me, she received a newspaper from her home town in which it was reported that a certain man in her village had experienced death by suicide. She said to me: “If only one other person in that town had known him, he would not have experienced death by suicide.” Note that she did not say, “If he had known someone,” but “if someone had known him.” She was telling me, I believed, that she would not put a violent end to her life so long as I was related to her. However, she was also describing something critically important for a human being—the necessity of having somebody listen, recognize, know him. It gives a person the conviction that one counts, that one exists as a part of the human race. It also gives one some orientation, point where one can find meaning in an otherwise meaningless World. It would be a red-letter day when Treasure could get angry with me, for I knew that she could then begin to protect herself in her contacts with other people in the wide World. And what is more, she could dare to live out her considerable capacities as an original and loveable as well as loving human being. “And now, my beloved brethren, behold, I declare unto you that except ye shall repent your houses shall be left unto you desolate,” reports Helaman 15.1. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

Yet in all these relations the questions arise: Is our way of having these pleasures right or wrong? Do we use them for pleasure’s sake or because we want to unite in love with all that to which we belong? We never know with certainty. And those of us together with those in the past history of Christianity who have an anxious conscience, prefer to renounce pleasures although they are established as good by creation itself. They hide their anxiety behind parental or social or ecclesiastical prohibitions, calling these prohibitions Divine commands. They justify their fear to affirm the joy of life by appealing to their conscience, calling then the “imitation of Christ.” However Jesus, in contrast to John the Baptist, was called a glutton and a drunkard by his critics. In all these warnings against pleasure, truth is mixed with untruth. Insofar as they strengthen our responsibility, they are true; insofar as they undercut our joy, they are wrong. Therefore let me give another criterion for accepting or rejecting pleasures, the criterion indicted in our text: Those pleasures are good which go together wit joy; those are bad which prevent joy. In the light of this norm we should risk the affirmation of pleasures, even if our risk may prove to have been an error. It is not more Christian to reject than to accept pleasure. Let us not forget that the rejection implies a rejection of creation, or as the Church Fathers called it, a blasphemy of the Creator-God. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

And every Christian should be aware of a fact of which many non-Christians are keenly aware: the suppression of the joy of life produces hatred of life, hidden or open. It can lead to a self-destruction, as many physical and mental diseases prove. Such sweeping statements not only need qualification but also translation into recognizable and verifiable terms. Who are the alienated? Is the phenomenon of alienation new in history, or is it age-old? If age-old, are its present-day manifestations more widespread? And if so, how can measure the differences? Should mention alienation par excellence and point to the prevalence of experiencing death by suicide today? Old Testament princes and Roman soldiers, defeated or disgraced, ran upon their spears or hanged themselves from trees. Shall we cite modern rates of homicide? The cave man too could be homicidal. Shall we refer to the numbers of insane, unknown as well as institutionalized? However, mortals have always been mad. So it is not to gross statistics that we look, but to the untold lives of quiet desperation that mark our age—the multitudes of factory and white-collar workers who find their jobs monotonous and degrading; the voters and non-voters who feel hopeless or do not care. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

There are also the juveniles who commit senseless acts of violence; the growing army of idle and lonely old people; the African Americas who want to be treated like human beings; the women who want equal pay; the stupefied audiences of mass media; the people who reject the prevailing values of our culture but cannot—or may not—find any alternatives, the escapists, the retreatists, the nihilists, and the desperate citizens who would solve all major political problems by moving our society underground and blowing up the planet. There are few statistics to tell us about them, especially as many continue to function with the appearance of normality. Yet even with indirect evidence it seems safe to assume that there is something in common between them, something that touches the very roots of our social order. There are particular conditions in modern industrial society (especially under capitalism) that have led to mortal’s estrangement, and there are some ways both creative and destructive in which men and women have responded to that estrangement. What is it in our technological and social environment that leads to alienation? How can we so order society and integrate people that they do not merely exchange their unbearable sense of powerlessness and isolation for spurious togetherness or for new forms of coercion? #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

What does alienation mean? The word has an ancient history, being used in common discourse to identify feelings of estrangement, or of detachment from self and others; and in law to describe the act of transferring property or ownership to another. An illustration of the second usage is the alienation of church property which, after the Reformation, meant a transfer from religious to secular ownership. The two meanings converge in cases of law, now rare, when one sues some third party for alienating the affections of one’s spouse, the affectionate feelings being regarded as property which has been diverted to the third person’s use. In another common usage, alienation has long meant insanity; and in Europe to this day an alienist is one who treats persons suffering from mental disorders. In modern terms, however, alienation has been used by philosophers, psychologists and sociologists to refer to an extraordinary variety of psycho-social disorders, including loss of self, anxiety states, anomie, despair, depersonalization, rootlessness, apathy, social disorganization, loneliness, atomization, powerlessness, meaninglessness, isolation, pessimism, and the loss of beliefs or values. Obviously when we speak of alienation, we are dealing with a word that lends itself to many different meanings. To deal with all of them we would truly need an encyclopedia of the social sciences. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

The prestige of institutional mysticism, like that of official religion, mesmerizes nearly everyone interested in the subject. The independent mystic, who refuses all affiliation with any sect, school, ashram, monastery, group or society, is suspect and finds oneself left almost in isolation. However, although this may seem unfortunate, it is so only in some ways. In other ways, it leaves one entirely free from the bonds of strict and rigid doctrine, free to remain faithful to truth irrespective of all other considerations, free to speak in a voice whose authority comes not from Worldly power but from spiritual status. One should not change one’s chains by going from one master or one sect to another. Rather should one drop all chains. One is entitled to be set free from one’s former dependence on the church so that one may live one’s own individual inner life. How can one bring oneself to join any group, cult, or sect when one believes all of them to be right, only some are more right than others, and all of them to be wrong, only some are more wrong than others? There is not one whose limitations one does not see. One prefers the truthfulness of being uncommitted to any “ism,” and the freedom of being unjoined to any group. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

One is not likely to be a member of any organized movement because one’s mind is too large to be exclusive. One is outside all organized groups because, in spirit, one is inside all of them. Far from the din and disparagements of jarring sects, one lives unlabeled and free. One belongs to no particular named, classified, and indoctrinated group, and this keeps one’s own freedom while excluding none from one’s general goodwill. At the same time one stays open to truth and avoid the closed mind, fixed only on its own strict and rigid doctrine opinions and beliefs. The only group one is likely to be a member of is the human race! One is unwilling to be tired to any sect or coterie, established orthodoxy or organizational unorthodoxy. One may even refuse to fit into any of the any of the accepted patterns. One has to follow a light of one’s own. Such an anarchistic attitude is likely to provoke hostility and create detractors. It is said further that the religious mortal steps before God as one who is single, solitary, and detached insofar as one has also transcended the stage of the ethical mortal who still dwells in duty and obligation to the World. The latter is said to be still burdened with responsibility for the actions of agents because one is and ought, and into the unbridgeable gap between both one throws, full of grotesquely hopeless sacrificial courage, piece upon piece of one’s heart. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

This religious person is supposed to have transcended this tension between World and God; the commandment for one is to leave behind the restlessness of responsibility and of making demands on oneself; for one there is no longer any room for a will of one’s own, one accepts one’s place in the Plan; any ought is dissolved in unconditional being, and the World, while still persisting, has lost its validity; one still has to do one’s share in it but, as it were, without obligation, in the perspective of the nullity of all activity. Thus mortals fancy that God has created his World to be an illusion and one’s mortal to reel. Of course, whoever steps before the countenance has soared way beyond duty and obligation—but not because one has moved away from the World; rather because one has come truly close to it. Duties and obligations one has only toward the stranger: toward one’s intimates one is kind and loving. When mortal steps before the countenance, the World becomes wholly presented to one for the first time in the fullness of the presence, illuminated by eternity, and one can say You in on word to the being of all beings. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

There is no longer any tensions between World and God but only the one actuality. One is not rid of responsibility: for the pains of the finite version that explores effects one as exchanged the momentum of the infinite kind, the power of loving responsibility for the whole unexplorable course of the World, the deep inclusion in the World before the countenance of God. Ethical judgments, to be sure, one as left behind forever: evil people are for one merely those commended to one for a deeper responsibility, those more in need of love; but decisions one must continue to make in the depths of spontaneity unto death—calmly deciding ever again in favor of right action. Thus action is not null: it is intended, it is commanded, it is needed, it belongs to the creation; but this action no longer imposes itself upon the World, it grows upon it as if it were non-action. “For the Lord worketh not in secret combination, neither doth he will that mortals should shed blood, but in all things hath forbidden it, from the beginning of humanity,” reports Ether 8.19. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

If the Infinite Power is Everywhere Present, it Can Surely Make itself Known to its Ardent Seeker in Any Place

June 17, 2019 1:45 am

I was awakened from this irrelevant thought, this obviating thought, by the fact that he was now beside me. He was closing his arm round me, and pressing his forehead against my face. He gave that summons again, not the rich, thudding seduction of that moment in the Palais Royal, but the voice that had sung to me over the miles, and he told me there were things that two of us would know and understand as mortals never could. He told me that if I opened to him and gave him my strength and my secrets that he would give me his. He had been driven to try to destroy me, and he loved me all the more that he could not. That was a tantalizing thought. Yet I felt danger. The word that came unbidden to me was Beware. Still I wondered what could be the difference between joy and happiness? Happiness is a fulfillment of the past patterns, hopes, aims; but those are exactly what many people have to give us. Happiness is mediated, so far as we can tell, by the parasympathetic nervous system, which has to do with eating, contentment, resting, placidity. Joy is mediated by the opposing system, the sympathetic, which does not make one want to eat, but stimulates one for exploration. #RandolpHarris 1 of 16

If a mortal is to remain forever the mere appendage of another mortal, if one’s minds is to echo back only that another mortal’s idea, the question arises: When will one come to oneself? For this is not the final purpose of our life here? One who has reached this stage when one must cease being the shadow of others, will not fall into proud deceptive self-assertion if one humbly yields and follows the inner voice. Happiness relaxes one; joy challenges one with new levels of experience. Joy is a release, an opening up; it is what comes when one is able genuinely to let go. All efforts that take one outside of one’s self are only halting and temporary concessions to human weakness. The soul being inside of the person’s being, one must in the end turn within. Happiness is associated with contentment; joy with freedom and an abundance of human spirit. In joy that is derived from pleasures of the flesh, the thrill of the two persons moving together toward in a climax, is the goal. Welcome truth on whatever horizon it appears, look for it in all four directions, and do not leave any of them unvisited. In short, do not become narrow-minded or fanatical. Let one not be intimidated by history and believe that truth has appeared only in the past, or by geography and look for it only in an Eastern location. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

Joy is new possibilities; it points toward the future. Joy is living on the most advanced stage in the development of life; happiness promises satisfaction of one’s present state, a fulfillment of old longings. Joy is the three of new continents to explore; it is an unfolding of life. In whatever place you find truth, with whatever name it may be labelled, take it. Happiness is related to security, to being reassured, to doing things as one is used to and as our father did them. In one’s endeavours after a better life, one should welcome the help that could come to one from every right source. Joy is a revelation of what was unknown. One should always be receptive to ideas and practices which might enrich those one already knows. Happiness often ends up in a placidity on the edge of boredom. No single path will lead of itself to the full truth. Happiness is success. However, joy is stimulating, it is the discovery of new continents emerging within oneself. There is no one group which has captured the monopoly of truth, for its recognition is a universal experience. Let us refuse to listen to those who insists upon our travelling one way and one way alone. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

Truth is not confined to any sect but fragments of it may be found scattered here and there. Happiness is the absence of discord; joy is the welcoming of discord as the basis of higher happiness. We may learn from everything and everyone, from every event and happening something that is new or a confirmation of something that is old, something affirmative or something negative. Happiness is finding a system of rules which solve our problems; joy is taking the risk that is necessary break new frontiers. Tennyson portrays Ulysses from the point of view of joy; he sees the antiquated man scorning to rust unburnished, not to shine in use! When a teacher of a teaching, a book or mystical exercise is itself being used as the indirection expression of God’s own movements to shed grace, then it is sheer blindness to denounce it as useless. Why limit the help you are willing to receive to a single quarter? All mortals are your teachers. Truth, being infinite, has an infinite number of aspects. Each spiritual guide is inclined to emphasize some only and to neglect the others. The good life, obviously, includes both joy and happiness at different times. What I am emphasizing is the joy that follows rightly confronted despair. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

Inspiration has manifested itself in many lands and in different forms, through widely spaced centuries and various kinds of channels. Why limit culture to one contribution, one land, one form, one century, and one channel alone? This applies not only to intellectual and artistic culture, but also to its religious aspect. We may go even farther in this matter and apply the same idea to personal gurus. Must we always be moored to a single guru? Cannot we respect, appreciate, honor, venerate and receive light from other ones in addition? Joy is the experience of possibility, the consciousness of one’s freedom as one confronts one’s identity. In this sense despair, when it is directly faced, can lead to joy. During his Egyptian studies Pythagoras visited every mortal celebrated for wisdom, so eager was he to learn. He did not follow the Indian custom of sitting sown only at one man’s feet. We all stand on the edge of life, each moment comprising that edge. Before us is only possibility. This means the future is open—as open as it was for Adam and Eve. In the beginning of human consciousness and all of the joys that open to us. Some natural tear they dropped, but wiped them soon; the World was all before them, where to choose their place of rest, and Providence their guide. They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, through Eden took their solitary way. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

Study everything but join nothing is the best counsel. But alas! naïve enthusiasts seldom heed it. One must make a stubborn reservation of one’s ground and run the flag of independence in the quest of truth, of nonattachment in the relationships with the teachers of truth. One will humbly and gladly accept whatsoever good one can find in their teachings, but one will not do so under a contact of pledged discipleship. In this matter one must be eclectic, taking the best from every available source and not shutting out any source that as something worthwhile to offer. It may not be the way for most people, for they cannot walk alone, but it is the only way for one. Self-guidance also leads to the goal. “When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream. Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy; then they said among the nations, ‘The Lord has done great things for them.’ The Lord had done great things for us; we are glad. Restore our Fortunes, O Lord, like the water courses in the Negeb! May those who sow in tears reap with shouts of joy! One that foes forth weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, bringing one’s sheaves with one,” reports Psalm 126. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

It is only through free, independent, truth-seeking research tat there is any hope of success in this Quest for ultimate truth. Naturally each vested interest tries to limit the search to its own fold for obvious reason, but one should refuse to limit one’s studies to any single school. If one keeps one’s intellectual liberty, one is less likely to fall into narrow sectarianism. Today, as in ancient Alexandria, one can study the World’s teachings, taking truth eclectically, but not making oneself a disciple. “Truly, truly, I say to you, you will weep and lament, but the World will rejoice; you will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn into joy. When a woman is in travail she has sorrow, because her hour has come; but when she is delivered of the child, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a child is born into the World. So you have sorrow now, but I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and one will take your joy from you,” reports John 16.20-22. Learn some of the basic truths each system contains without identifying with the system itself. Keep the mind open and free to acquire worthwhile ideas and practices from other cultures and avoid the closed-in sectarian attitude. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

Such an isolated position, outside groups and without labels, offers this advantage, that one is able to take from all, to accept and reconcile fragments of widely different and apparently contradictory teachings. “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full,” reports John 15.11. Take whatever is of value to you personally, in your present mental condition, from all these teachings and discard the rest. This is the eclectic way, and better than the commoner one of entering a single doctrinal cage and staying there. Hesitate well before committing yourself to join this or that organization. Remember that there are more aspects to truth than one, and it may well be worth keeping yourself free to learn something of these others. The Bible abounds in admonitions to rejoice. Paul’s word to the Philippians, “again I will say, Rejoice,” represents an ever-present element in Testaments the lack of joy is a consequence of mortal’s separation from God, and the presence of joy is a consequence of the reunion with God. Joy is demanded, and it can be given. It is not a ting one simply has. It is not easy to attain. It is and always was a rare and precious thing. And it has always been a difficult problem among Christians. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Christians are accused of destroying the joy of life, this natural endowment of every creature. The greatest of the modern foes of Christianity, Friedrich Nietzsche, himself the son of a Protestant minister, has expressed his judgment about Jesus in the words, “His disciples should look more redeemed.” We should subject ourselves to the piercing force of those words and should ask ourselves, “Is our lack of joy due to the fact that we are Christian?” Perhaps we can defend ourselves convincingly against the criticism that we are people who despise life, whose behavior is a permanent accusation of life. Perhaps we can show that this is a distortion of the truth. However, let us be honest. Is there not enough foundation for criticism? Are not many Christians—ministers, students of theology, evangelists, missionaries, Christian educators and social workers, pious laymen and laywomen, even the children of such parents—surrounded by an air of heaviness, of oppressive sternness, of lack of humor and irony about themselves? #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

We cannot deny this. Our Critics outside the Church are right. And we ourselves should be even more critical than they, but critical on a deeper level. I have always recommended to those who feel strong enough to be able to do so, to refrain from joining any organization, to keep their freedom, while at the same time studying the doctrines of whatever organization interests them, whatever religions engage some of their attention. This freedom enables them to look anywhere, to study everything, to question courageously, to keep breadth of view, depth of thought. Only such independence can reach out to the new without losing what is worthwhile in the old; all others are committed, fettered, captive. By remaining open to truths from different sources, and fitting them together like mosaics, we get eventually some sort of pattern. That rotation of the World’s axis which introduces the relational process has been succeeded almost immediately by the nest, which concludes it. Just now the It-World has surrounded the terrestrial being in me, then the You-World radiates from the ground for the length of one glance, and now its light has died back into the It-World. It is for the sake of language of this barely perceptible rising and setting of the spirit Sun that I relate this minute occurrence that happened to me more than once. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

No other event has made so deeply aware of the evanescent actuality in all relationships to other beings, the sublime melancholy in all relationships to other beings, the sublime melancholy of our lot, the fated lapse into It of every single You. For usually a day, albeit brief, separated from the morning and evening of the event; but here morning and evening merged cruelly, the bright You appeared and vanished: had the burden of the It-World really been taken from the terrestrial being and me for the length of one glance? At least I could still remember it, while the terrestrial being had sunk again from its stammering glance into speechless anxiety, almost devoid of memory. How powerful is he continuum of the It-World, and how tender the manifestation of the You! There is so much that can never break through the crust of thinghood! O fragment of mica, it was while contemplating you that I first understood that I is not something in me—yet I was associated wit you only in myself; it was only in me, not between you and me that it happened that time. However, when something does emerge from among things, something living, and become a being for me, and comes to me, near an eloquent, how unavoidably briefly it is for me nothing but You! #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

It is not the relationship that necessarily wanes, but the actuality of its directness. Love itself cannot abide in a direct relation; it endures, but in the alternation of actuality and latency. Every You in the World is compelled by its nature to become a thing for us or at least to enter again and again into thinghood. Think about the morning I walked on the road one dim morning, saw a piece of mica lying there, picked it up, and looked at it for a long time. The day was no longer dim: so much light was caught by the stone. And suddenly, as I looked away, I realized that while looking at it I had known nothing of the object and subject; as unity. I looked at it again, but unity did not return. Then something concentrated my strength, I entered into an association with my object, I raised the piece of mica into the realm of that which has being. And then, Lucas, only then did I feel: I; only then was I. He that had looked had not yet been I; only this, this being in association bore the name like a crown. Now I felt about this former unity as a marble image might feel about the block from which it has been carved: it was the undifferentiated, while I was the unification. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

As yet, I did not understand myself. True unity cannot be found, it can only be done. Can the low tide say I? Or the high tide? However, attribute a spirit to the sea and include in it the unity of low tide and high tide: that could say I. The piece of mica could not; the man looking at it could not; and the undifferentiated state of the initial look was mere material. However, once their tension had taken form, that which had become associated could. What we ordinarily call I is a point of departure and makeshift—a grammatical fact. However, the I of the tension is a work and actuality. Only in one relationship, the all-embracing one, is even latency actuality. Only one You never ceases, in accordance with its nature to be You for us. To be sure, whoever knows God also knows God’s remoteness and the agony of drought upon a frightened heart, but not the loss of presence. Only we are not always there. The love of the Vita Nuova is right in usually saying Ella and only occasionally Voi. The visionary of the Paradiso speaks inauthentically, from poetic constraint, wen he says Colui, and he knows it. Whether one speaks of God as He or It, this is never more than allegory. However, when we say You to him, the unbroken truth of the World has been made word by mortal sense. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

Every actual relationship in the World is exclusive; the other breaks into it to avenge its exclusion. Solely in the relation to God are unconditional exclusiveness and unconditional inclusiveness one in which the Universe is comprehended. Every actual relationship in the World rests upon individuation: that is its delight, for only thus is mutual recognition of those who are different granted—and that is its boundary, for thus is perfect recognition and being recognized denied. However, in the perfect relationship my You embraces myself without being it; my limited recognition is merged into a boundless being-recognized. Every actual relationship in the World alternates between actuality and latency; every individual You must disappear into the chrysalis of the It in order to grow wings again. In the pure relationship, however, latency is merely actuality drawing a deep breath during which the You remains present. The eternal You is You by its very nature; only our nature forces us to draw it into the It-World and It-speech. The It-World coheres in space and time. The You-World does not cohere in either. It coheres in the center in which the extended lines of relationships intersect: in the eternal You. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

In the great privilege of the pure relationship the privileges of the It-World are annulled. By virtue of it the You-World is continuous: the isolated moments of relationships join for a World life of association. By virtue of it the You-World has the power to give form: the spirit can permeate the It-World and change it. By virtue of it we are not abandoned to the alienation of the World and the deactualization of the I, nor are we overpowered by phantoms. Return signifies the re-cognition of center, turning back to it again. In this essential deed mortal’s buried power to relate is resurrected, the wave of all relational spheres surges up a living flood and renews our World. Perhaps not only ours. Dimly we apprehended this double movement—that turning away from the primal ground by virtue of which the Universe redeems itself in being—as the metacosmic primal form of duality that inheres in the World as a whole relation to that which is not World, and whose human form is the duality of attitudes, of basic words, and of the two aspects of the World. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

Both movements are unfolded fatefully in time and enclosed, as by grace, in the timeless creation that, incomprehensibly, is at once release and preservation, at once bound and liberation. Our knowledge of duality is reduced to silence by paradox of the primal mystery. No mortal comes to the knowledge of one’s divinity through a crowd of other mortals. No human entity can discover its own relation to God through any group method. The way to spiritual awareness is entirely individual, essentially lonely, inescapably within oneself. That is to say, it is mystical. Insofar as religion succeeds in showing the way, it ceases to be religion and becomes, or rather, consummates itself in, mysticism. Nothing is final and absolute. All is relative. Nobody need obey any mandate to bind oneself forever to any single group of ideas, need follow any sectarian flag. If one is to surrender one’s allegiance at all, it can only be reasonably done to the perfect synthesis of all that is needed for human living in all its departments. “And behold, it is wisdom in God that we should obtain these records, that we may preserve unto our children the language of our fathers,” reports I Nephi 3.19. If the mortal of letters is to hear and pronounce the word of truth, one must be independent of groups, organizations, parties, and institutions. One must be at liberty to play with many different points of view without committing oneself forever and finally to any of them. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

Randolph Harris II International Institute