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The Dark Night of the Soul–Pain is Followed by Joy, Separation Followed by Reunion, Death Followed by Renewal, Winter Followed by Spring!
I came into a brightly illuminated eighteenth-century Cresleigh Home in Rocklin Trails. The stone walls had been covered in fine rosewood paneling with framed mirrors rising to the ceiling. There were the usual painted chests, upholstered chairs, dark and lush landscapes, porcelain clocks. A small collection of books in the glass-doored bookcases, a newspaper of recent date lying on a small table beside a brocaded wing chair. High narrow French doors opened onto the stone terrace, where banks of white lilies and red roses gave off their powerful perfume. And there, with his back to me, at the stone railing stood an eighteenth-century man. It was Marius, when he turned around and gestured me to come out. Marius told me about this link between despair and joy, and how it is so important that the ancient Greeks, whp devoted one of their central legends to it, that of Persephone and Demeter. Persephone was picking flowers with her friends one day when Hades, god of the Underworld, saw her and was stricken with love. He seized her and carried her off to his underworld. When her mother, Demeter, goddess of fruit and grain and other produce of the fields, heard Persephone’s cries, she rushed around the World trying to find her. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
Learning that Hades had carried Persephone off to the underworld with Zeus’ connivance, Demeter was filled with a terrible and savage grief. Demeter left Olympus and wandered about the Earth incognito. Meeting two young women who sympathized with her story that she had been captured by pirated and had escaped, Demeter was taken to their home to meet their mother, Metaneira. Demeter continued to be so sad that a long time she sat upon the stool without speaking, never smiling, because of her sorrow…tasting neither food nor drink, because she pinned for her deep-bosomed daughter. Metaneria and her daughters proclaimed to Demeter, “Mother, what the gods send us, we mortals bear perforce though we suffer.” What an acknowledgment of destiny, an adjuring of Demeter to accept fate! Its importance is shown in the fact that it is repeated later to make sure we have heard it. Metaneria then asked Demeter to be nurse to her newborn son. Demeter came to life and bestowed love upon the infant, who then grew amazingly. Meanwhile, in her grief and rage Demeter had caused the land to bear no more fruit and grain, and a cruel famine covered the Earth. Zeus finally was moved to command Hades to let Persephone return to Earth, though Hades fed his shy mate a pomegranate seed. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
Persephone returned to Demeter who welcomed her with great joy. When Persephone confessed she had unbeknownst eaten a pomegranate seed, Demeter knew that he daughter would have to return to Hades for one-third of each year—the Winter—but could remain on Earth the rest of the time. However, this small flaw was quickly drowned in their joyousness. “So did they then, with hearts at one, greatly cheer each other’s soul and spirit with many an embrace; their hearts had relief from their griefs while each took and gave back joyousness. And straightway made fruit to spring up from the rich lands, so that the whole Earth was laden with leaves and flowers.” Demeter’s great grief, to the extent of speaking to no one, refusing all comfort and all food and drink, pining with longing for her daughter, amounts to a profound despair. It was a despair which carried over to humankind in the cruel famine on Earth. However, Demeter’s despair soon became a creative state, shown in her love for Metaneria’s infant son and his amazing growth. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
Demeter’s suffering is followed by this intense joy, which is stronger than she would have felt had the sorrow not preceded it. In other words, despair is a prerequisite to the birth of joy. Persephone’s fearful descent into the underworld is followed not only by joyful ascension, but the Earth’s periods of barrenness is followed by an eruption of fruit and flowers. The legend shows pain followed by joy, separation followed by reunion, death followed by renewal, Winter followed by Spring. Winter—the part of the year Persephone must go back to the underground—is often considered the dreaded part of the year, the time when despair would be most prevalent. However, Winter is the purifier, as the Magee Indians call it. The snow and the ice purify the ground. They cover over the myriad creatures from insects to deer who have lived out their span of life; and the ground, being enriched, springs forth with new life after the purification. This is the gestation before creativity. Out of such abyss, from such severe sickness one returns newborn, having shed one’s skin, ore ticklish and malicious, with a more delicate taste for joy, with a more tender tongue for all good things, with merrier senses, with a second dangerous innocence in joy, more childhood and yet a hundred times subtler than one has ever seen before. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
A similar linking despair and joy is the death and resurrection in Christian theology—and all resurrections, seen in the prototype of the resurrection of flowers and leaves on the trees in the Spring. This pattern runs through all of life. It is destiny, the design of the Universe, the form in which all of existence is encompassed. In Europe at Easter time, people turn out en masse for the sacrament of Good Friday, since they want to make sure Jesus is dead. The celebration of his death is a necessary precursor to any rising from the tomb. The renewal requires the death beforehand. Only if he has been really does do the fact that Christ has risen have meaning. In America there is a scant attendance on Good Friday, but the churches are filled to capacity on Easter. This is indicative of our lack of belief in tragedy in this country. It is a demonstration of our endeavor to overlook the death that must occur before the resurrection, the suffering that precedes creativity. Henry Miller refers to the same thing in terms of emotional death the resurrection, when he writes “those who are dead may be restored to life.” For Miller this occurs in the emotional release, after despair, of the creative process. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
Despair before joy is the meaning of the dark night of the soul of which the mystic Saint John of the Cross writes. Or, it could be the slough of despondence must be gone through before we can arrive at the gates of the Celestial City. If one is determined to achieve the Holy Grail, the hero must be willing to endure trial and dismemberment, even a species of death. Those whom claim to live in a perpetual state of ecstasy or in a never-interrupted state of love are either deluding themselves or settling for a mediocre state of existence. In mystic tradition the state of ecstasy is only second state and by no means the goal. Persons of lesser devotion or commitment often want to slide back into this second stage and have to be cautioned against selling the mystic experience short. Gethsemane is not at all an admission of failure on the part of the ministry of Jesus, but a necessary stage that cannot be avoided. It turns out not to be possible to let this cup pass from me. Without the despair, no resurrection. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
One of the mystics of history encourages would-be explorers of the mystic path to endure the pains and the discomfort. For behind this nothingness, behind this dark and formless shape of evil is Jesus hid in his joy. “Like wise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sights too deep for words. And one who searches the hearts of mortals know what is in the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God,” reports Romans 8.26-27. This passage represents a mysterious saying of St. Paul. It expresses the experience of a mortal who knew how to pray and who, because he knew how to pray, said that he did not know how to pray. Perhaps we may draw from this confession of the apostle the conclusion we could find much evidence in our daily experience. Ministers are used to praying publicly on all kinds of occasions, some of which offer themselves naturally to prayer, other only artificially and against good taste. It is not unimportant to know the right how for praying and the right hour for not praying. This is a warning, on the periphery of what Paul wants to say, but a necessary warning, especially to ministers and laymen who are leaders in the Church. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
The next step leads us nearer to the center of Paul’s problem: There are two main types of prayer, the fixed liturgical and the free spontaneous prayer. Both of them show the truth or Paul’s assertion, that we do not know to pray as we ought. The liturgical prayer often become mechanical or incomprehensible or both. The history of the Church has shown that this was the fate even of the Lord’s prayer. Paul certainly knew the “Our Father” when he wrote that we do not know how to pray when we make a liturgical law out of the example of praying which Jesus gave to his disciples. However, if we turn from the formulated to the spontaneous prayer, we are not better off. Very often the spontaneous prayer is an ordinary conversation with somebody who is called God, but who is actually another mortal to whom we tell things, often at great length, to whom we give thanks and of whom we ask favors. This certainly does not prove that we know how to pray. The liturgical Churches which we use classical formulas should ask themselves whether they do not present the people of our time rom praying as they honestly can. And the non-liturgical Churches who give the freedom to make up prayers at any moment, should ask themselves whether they do not profane prayer and deprive it of its mystery. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
And now let us take a third step, int the center of Paul’s thought. Whether at the right time or not, whether a formulated or a spontaneous prayer, the question is decisive whether a prayer is possible at all. According to Paul it is humanly impossible. When we pray, this we should never forget: We do something humanly impossible. We talk to somebody who is not somebody else, but who is nearer to us than we ourselves are. We address somebody who can never become an object of our address because he is always subject, always acting, always creating. We tell something to him who knows not only what we tell him but also all the unconscious tendencies out of which our conscious words grow. This is the reason why prayer is humanly impossible. Out of this insight Paul gives a mysterious solution to the question of the right prayer: When we pray, it is God himself who prays through us. God himself in us: that is what Spirit means. Spirit is another word for God present, with shaking, inspiring, transforming power. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
When we pray something in us, which is not we ourselves, intercedes before God for us. We cannot bridge the gap between God and ourselves even through the most intensive and frequent prayers; the gap between God and ourselves can be bridged only by God. And so Paul gives us the surprising picture of God interceding for us before himself. If taken literally, such symbols—like all symbols concerning God—are absurd. If taken as genuine symbols, they are absurd. They symbol of God interceding before himself for us says that God knows more about us than that of which we are conscious. He searches the hearts of mortals. These are words which anticipate the present-day insight, of which we are rightly proud, that the small light of consciousness rises on a large basis of unconscious drives and images. However, if this is so, who else can bring our whole being before God expect God himself, who alone knows the deep things in our soul? This may help us also to understand the most mysterious part of Paul’s description of prayer, namely, that the Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. Just because prayer is humanly impossible, just because it brings deeper levels of our being before God than the level of consciousness, something happens in it that cannot be expressed in words. Words, created by and used in our conscious life, are not the essence of prayer. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
The essence of prayer is the act of God who is working in us and raises our whole being to himself. The way in which this happens is called by Paul sighing. Sighing is an expression of the weakness of our creaturely existence. Only in terms of wordless sighs can we approach God, and even these sighs are his work in us. This finally answers a question often asked by Christians: Which kind of prayer is most adequate to our relation to God? The prayer in which we thank or the prayer in which we beg, the prayer of intercession or of confession or of praise? Paul does not make these distinctions. They are dependent on words; but the sighing of the Spirit in us is too deep for words and for the distinction of kinds of prayer. The Spiritual prayer is elevation to God in the power of God and it includes all forms of prayer. A last word to those who feel that they cannot find the words of prayer and remain silent towards God. This may be lack of Spirit. It also may be that there is silent prayer, namely, the sighs which are too deep for words. Then God who searches the hearts of mortals, knows and hears. “Wherefore, let us be faithful in keeping the commandments of the Lord; therefore let us go down to the land of our father’s inheritance, for behold he left gold and silver, and all manner of riches. And all this he hath done because of the commandments of the Lord,” reports 1 Nephi 6.17. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
All that one needs for the management of life can be had from within. The eyes of an animal have the capacity of a great language. Independent, without any need of the assistance of sounds and gestures, most eloquent when they rest entirely in their glance, they express the mystery in its natural captivity, that is, in the anxiety of becoming. This state of the mystery is known only to the animal, which alone can open it up to us—for this state can only be opened up and not revealed. The language in which this is accomplished is what it says: anxiety—the stirring of the creature between the realms of plantlike security and spiritual risk. This language is the stammering of nature under the initial grasp of spirit, before language yields to spirit’s cosmic risk which we call mortals. However, no speech will ever repeat what the stammer is able t communicate. I sometimes look into the eyes of a cockatiel or a dog. The domesticated animal has not by any means received the gift of the truly eloquent glance from us, as a human conceit suggests sometimes; what it has from us is only the ability—purchased with the loss of its elementary naturalness—to turn this glance upon us brutes. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
In this process some mixture of surprise and question has come into it, into its dawn and even its rise—and this was surely wholly absent from the original glance, for all its anxiety. Undeniably, this bird or dog began this glance by asking me with a glance that was ignited by the breath of my glance: “Can it be that you mean me?” Do you actually want that I should not merely do tricks for you? Do I concern you? Am I there for you? And I there? What is it about me? What is that?!” (“I” is here a paraphrase of a word of I-less self-reference that we lack. “That” represents the flood of a mortal’s glance in the entire actuality of its power to relate.) There the glance of the animal, the language of anxiety, had risen hugely—and set almost at once. My glance, to be sure, endured longer; but it no longer retained the flood of mortal’s glance. Once own inner self has the capacity of makings its own revelations to one. These got, one will find oneself increasingly independent of those which come from outside, from the hearsay of other mortals or the writings of strict and religious doctrines. What a number of mortals can no longer get from church or temple, they must get from their own selves through mysticism. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
One needs to realize that one’s greatest power will come to one through one’s own God and not through any other source, such as the overshadowing by spirits, and so on. Through this eventual realization, one will attain to greater progress and render much deeper service. Thus one will fulfill one’s owns highest destiny. Let one stand in one’s own place, and not seek to occupy that of another. Let one find a life that is real, and not copied. However, such admonitions are good only so far as one has already come to communion with God. Ultimately, there is only one real Master for every spiritual seeker, and that is one’s own divine God. The human teacher may assist one to the extent of giving one a temporary emotional uplift or a temporary intellectual perception, but one cannot bestow permanent divine consciousness on another individual. All that the teacher can do is to point out the way through the labyrinth; the journey must be made by the seeker oneself. For example, an individual living alone on a desert island could travel through all the stages of the Quest and attain the highest realization even though one had no visible teacher. God will give one all the guidance and help one needs. However, one is likely to mistakenly believe that one’s own ego is making the progress. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
I Will Take Fate By the Throat, it Shall Not Wholly Overcome Me: Oh, it is So Beautiful to Live—to Live a Thousand Times!
When I awoke, I was on board a ship. I could hear the creak of the boards, smell the sea. I could smell the scent of those who manned the ship. And I knew that it was the galley because I could hear the rhythm of the oars under the low rumbling of the giant canvas sails. I could not open my eyes, could not make my limbs move. Yet I was calm. I did not thirst. In fact, I experienced an extraordinary sense of peace. My body was warm as if I had only just fed, and it was pleasant to lie there, to dream waking dreams on the gentle undulation of the sea. The mind began to clear. I knew that we were slipping very fast through rather still waters. And that the Sun had just gone down. The early evening sky was darkening, the wind was dying away. And the sound of the oars dipping and rising was as soothing as it was clear. My eyes were open now. I did not turn away from life toward some mystical Nirvana. I forgot none of the joy, the effort, or the pain. I abandoned nothing. What I achieved was something much more wonderful than an old man’s serenity. I will take fate by the throat. It shall not wholly overcome me. Oh, it is so beautiful to live—to live a thousand times! #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
God is the only true sense of the World: he does not have to copy others, only to express one’s own individuality, most his higher spirituality. God takes care to remain what he is, he is true to himself, high holy self. However, insofar as we let our happiness depend on another person and lose our independence, one becomes weakened. Even if the other gives one knowledge or love or support, one should still not cease to look within as deeply as one can for the idyllic Peace. In the end a mortal must come to oneself, one’s diviner self, one’s essential being. And where shall one look for it if not there where Jesus pointed within? Not outside, not to some other mortal, however high one’s repute as guru, not to some book, however sacrosanct its scriptural authority. Both mortal and book must, if loyal to the highest, also direct one inward. The Kingdom is within you, not somewhere else, not in an ashram, not even at the feet of a guru: Jesus’ declaration is literally accurate. One of the reasons we are so reluctant to confront the aspects of destiny called fate is that we are afraid it will lead us into despair. We Americans are taught always to wear a garment of optimism, and we believe that with despair all hope is lost. So we cling to any false hope we can conjure up to serve as a bulwark against despair, unaware that a hope that has to be striven for is no hope at all. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong things. This beginning for some hope opens us to exploitation by any psychoreligious charlatan who appears on the horizon. All to escape the demon of despair! However, suppose that despair were basically a constructive emotion? Suppose despair is often a necessary prelude to the greatest achievement? Not all seeing has this character of union. If we look at things and observe them merely to control and to use them, no real union takes place. We keep them at a distance. We try to bring them into our power, to use them for our purposes, as means for our ends. There is no long in this kind of seeing. We glimpse the beings that shall serve us coldly; we have for those which we use a look, curious or indifferent, sensational or aggressive, hostile or cruel. There is abuse in the looking at those which we use. It is a seeing that violates and separates. This is the look of masses who in medieval paintings are looking at the Crucified. However, even this kind of seeing creates some union, though union through separation. However, it is the seeing that really unites is different. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Our language has a word for seeing that really unites: Intuition. This means seeing into. It is an intimate seeing, a grasping and being grasped. It is a seeing shaped by love. Plato, the teacher of the centuries, whose visions and words have deeply influenced the Fourth Gospel and the Church, knew about the seeing which unites. He called the love which drives us to a genuine intuition the child of poverty and abundance. It is the love which fills our want with the abundance of our World. However, it fills us in such a way that the disrupted multitude is not the last we see—a view which disrupts ourselves. The last we see lies in that which unites, which is eternal in and above the transitory things. Into this view Plato wanted to initiate his followers. The individual seeker should take one’s own soul—one’s higher self—as one’s guide. By prayer and reading of the holy scriptures, one may attain glimpses of it occasionally and receive the needed guidance. This is safer than bonding oneself to any institution or a so-called master. If one can put as much faith in the existence and power of one’s soul as most seekers put into their blind following of these masters, one’s efforts should prove sufficiently effective. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
When we annul suffering, it is a way of saying we are becoming and passing away—the salvation from the wheel of rebirth. Henceforth there is no recurrence is to be the formula for those who had liberated themselves from the desire for existence and thus from the compulsion to become again ceaselessly. We do not know whether there is a recurrence; the line of this dimension of time in which we live we do not extend beyond this life; and we do not try to uncover what will reveal itself to us in its own time and law. However, if we do not know that there is recurrence, then we should not seek to escape from it: we should desire not crude existence but the chance to speak in every existence, in its appropriate manner and language, the eternal I of the destructible and the eternal You of the indestructible. Whether people will obtain the goal of redemption from having to recur, we do not know. Certainly one leads to an intermediate goal that concerns us, too: the unification of the soul. However, one leads there not only, as is necessary, away from the jungle of opinions, but also away from the deception of forms—which for us is no deception but (in spite of all the paradoxes of intuition that make for subjectivity but for us simply belong to it) the reliable World. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
One’s path, too, is a way of ignoring something, and when one bids us become aware of the processes in our body, what one means is almost the opposite of our sense-assured insight into the body. Nor does one lead the unified being further to that supreme You-saying that is open to it. One’s inmost decision seems to aim at the annulment of the ability to say You. Saying You to a mortal—that is clear from one’s greatly superior, but also greatly direct, intercourse with one’s disciples—but one does not teach it: to this love, which means boundless inclusion in the heart of all that has become, the simple confrontation of being by being remains alien. In the depths of one’s silence one certainly knows, too, the You-saying to the primal ground, transcending all the gods whom one treats like disciples; it was from a relation process the became substance the one’s deed came, clearly as an answer to the You; but of this one remains silent. One’s following among the nations, however, the great vehicle, denied one gloriously. They addressed the eternal You of mortals—using the name of God. And they expect as the coming of God, the last one of his eon, him, that shall fulfill love. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
All doctrines of immersion are based on the gigantic delusion of human spirit bent back into itself—the delusion that spirit occurs in mortals. In truth it occurs from mortal—between mortal and what one is not. As the spirit bent back into itself renounces this sense, this sense of relation, one must draw into mortal that which is not mortal, one must psychologize World and God. This is the psychical delusion of the spirit. In this fathom-sized, feeling-afflicted ascetic’s body dwell the World and the origin of the World and the annulment of the World and the path that leads to the annulment of the World. That is true, but ultimately it is no longer true. Certainly, the World dwells in me as a notion, just as I dwell in it as a thing. However, that does not mean that it is in me, just I am not in it. The World and I include each other reciprocally. This contradiction for thought, which inheres in the It-relation, is annulled by the You-relation which detaches me from the World in order to relate me to it. The self-sense, that which cannot be included in the World, I carry in myself. The being-sense, that which cannot be included in any notion, the World carries in itself. However, this is not a thinkable will but the whole Worldliness of the World, just as the former is not a knowing subject but the whole I-likeness of the I. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
No further reduction is valid here: whoever does not honor the ultimate unities thwarts the sense that is only comprehensible but not conceptual. The origin of the World and the annulment of the World are not in me; neither are they outside me; they simply are not—they always occur, and their occurrence is also connected with me, with my life, my decision, my work, my service, and also depends on me, on my life, my decision, my work, and my service. However, what it depends on is not whether I affirm or negate the World in my soul, but how I let the attitude of my soul toward the World come to life, life that affects the World, actual life—and in actual life paths coming from very different attitudes of the soul can cross. However, whoever merely has a living experience of one’s attitude and retains it in one’s soul may be as thoughtful as can be, one is Worldless—and all the games, arts, intoxications, enthusiasm, and mysteries that happen within one do not touch the World’s skin. As long as one attains redemption only in one’s self, one cannot do any good or harm to the World; one does not concern it. Only one that believes in the World achieves contact with it; and if one commits oneself one also cannot remain Godless. Let us love the actual World that never wishes to be annulled, but love it in all its terror, but dare to embrace it with our spirit’s arms—and our hands encounter the hands that hold it. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
I know nothing of a World and of Worldly life that separate us from God. What is designated that way is life with an alienated It-World, the life of experience and use. Whoever goes forth in truth to the World, goes forth to God. Concentration and going forth, both in truth, the one-and-the-other which is the One, are what is needful. God embrace but is not myself. On account of this which cannot be spoken about, I can say in my language, as all can say in theirs: You. For the sake of this there are I an You, there is dialogue, there is language, and spirit whose primal deed language is, and there, in eternity, the word. Let us look at the experience of a young man named Britain. He came into therapy feeling sad, hopeless, lonely, lost. He felt everybody had died—his mother, his sister Britney—and the relation with Celeste was nearly dead, and now, at the end of therapy, the relation with the therapist was dying. He was in clear, unadulterated despair. However, halfway through the session he began his recovery. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
The despair was essential in bringing Britain to the point where he could give up his previous neurotic ways of behaving in his overwork and in his failure to have full relationships with other people. This experience when he had been a young man had been one turning point in his life, just as he and I believed this therapy, ten concluding, would be a turning point in one’s overcoming his love bind with Celeste. Thus, despair can lead to highly constructive action. It can be a flushing out of the Augean stables. Despair can be a giving up and a letting go of neurotic problems that had been solidifying since one was an infant. In this sense despair plays the constructive role reserved for it in every psychotherapy. I am speaking of despair not as a cosmic pout nor as any kind of intellectual posture. If it is a mood put on to impress somebody or to express resentment toward anybody, it is not genuine despair. Authentic despair is that emotion which forces one to come to terms with one’s destiny. It is the great enemy of pretense, the foe of playing ostrich. It was once thought that when an ostrich was in danger it hid its head in the ground believing that if it could not see anyone, no one could see it. That has led to the idea that is people refuse to face painful facts or unpleasant truths, they play ostrich. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
We have imposed on us a demand to face the reality of one’s life. The letting go that we noted in despair is a letting go of false hopes, of pretended loves, of infantilizing dependency, of empty conformism which serves only to make one behave like sheep huddling in a flock because they fear the wolves outside the circle. Despair is the smelting furnace which melts out the impurities in the ore. Despair is not freedom itself, but is a necessary preparation for freedom. The Grand Inquisitor is right: we would not choose to go into despair if we consulted only our rational choices. However, there is no denying destiny or fate, and reality comes marching up to require that we drop all halfway measures and temporary exigencies and ways of being dishonest with ourselves and confront our natural lives, uninhibited by external influences, which may be toxic. It is well known that in successful therapy sessions, that organizations which are far and away the most effective in treating people, state frankly that the assistant for the injured or disabled or an individual with special needs cannot be cured until he or she is in complete despair. It is only then that the individual can give up the need for the source of their dependence as a solace for his or her forlorn hopes or to bolster his or her false expectations. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Those who have been through a rehabilitation program and then help new members simply laugh outright at the predespair of unrealistic grandiosity, one’s pompous I-am-the-master-of-my-fate-attitude, and one’s vain resolutions to control one’s dependency by one’s own will power, come to understand that one has to find a higher faith in the power of God to resolve and heal situations. Then the Lord will let one see why there is none upon the Earth that can speak to my condition, namely, that one might give God all the glory. Because sometimes we hope for the wrong things, and hopes themselves can become the most seductive delusions. When a person reached the lowest point, state, or condition, for instance, when one has reached ultimate despair—one can then surrender to eternal forces; this process as giving up the delusion of false hopes and, thus, acknowledging fully the facts of destiny. Then and only then can this person begin to rebuild oneself. It is superb demonstration of the hypothesis that freedom begins only when we confront destiny. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
The same was true of Synanon, the drug rehab turned violent cult, as the system became a nest for fraud. There was failure to define and enforce clear ethical standards governing their business practices, an it rendered the treatment program to become field of predator’s paradise. Synanon started in Santa Monica, California by Charles Dederich, and morphed into a utopian community, then a religion and a cult with more than $30 million in assets and upward of 1,300 followers. True believers shaved their heads, wore overalls, and lived together at Synanon compounds, professing and almost slavish obedience to Charles Dederich, no matter how brutal his methods. They were said to even kidnap people. Despite all the high idealistic talk of oneness, fraternity, and egolessness, each of us is still an individual, still has to dwell in a body of one’s own, to use a mind of one’s own and experience feelings of one’s own. To forget this is to practice self-deception. Each will come to God in the end but one will comes as a purified transformed and utterly changed person, lived in and used by God as one will live in and be conscious of the presence of God. “And Christ hath said: If ye will have faith in me ye shall have power to do whatsoever thing is experiment in me,” Moroni 7.33. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
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One Must Know What the Struggle Between Self and Soul Really Feels Like through One’s Own Experience!
We even went in search of haunted houses together—a newfound pastime that excited us both. Of course, most of the time we found nothing in the empty buildings where spirits were supposed to appear. And those wretched persons supposed to be supposed to by possessed by the devil were often no more than commonly insane. What, then, shall we do? The only answer is: Be compassionate. The universality of evil makes human compassion necessary. I often remark to the parents who are sad about the part they are played in the problems of their children. You and I—all of us who are human—are on the same yacht. Platitude through this is it often helps relieve them of the solitary, pariahlike quality that makes them feel they are alone in their mistakes and solitary in their evil. Mere rationalism can never solve the problem of life for the intellect no longer knows is from the ought, or known from the known—that is to say, ascents to Heaven; only the dead can be forgiven; but when I think of that my tongue’s a stone. However, there is an act of harmony between the two. I am content to follow to its source every event in action or in thought; measure the lot; forgive myself the lot! When such as I cast out remorse so great a sweetness flows into the heart, we must laugh and we must sing, we are blest by everything, everything we look upon is blest. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
This is an exquisite description of what happens in the deeper sense of forgiveness toward oneself. The forgiveness extends, in the case of parents and children, to the sons and daughters as well; for the regrets are often bound up with what seems to be their opposite, resentment on the part of the parents at the son or daughter for causing him or her such perplexity and sufferings. Thus forgiveness of oneself permits one to forgive others. Forgiveness, which is one phase of compassion, puts deeper meaning into our human comedies, and enables us to get insight from our tragedies so that they become bearable. Forgiveness means to overcome the resentment—to cast out remorse—which is the curse that accumulates in most human relationships. Forgiving ourselves as well as others may be the only way of transcending this resentment. The health-enhancing aspect of the forgiving of others is that it helps wipe away the resentment toward oneself at the same time. Compassion gives us fresh perspective on what it means to be human, and helps us judge less harshly ourselves as well as the persons who impinge upon us. Paradoxical as it sounds, this gives us a point outside our remorse from which we can do more to correct it. We stop, then, condemning ourselves for being human, and we can at the same time stop condemning others for the same condition. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
All my brilliantly colored birds given away, probably for sale in the bazaar. Gray African parrots that live to be as old men. Nicolas de Lenfent lived to be thirty. Two hundred years ago, the people of Paris would have got him. He would not have had to burn himself. Got me too maybe. But I doubt it. No, there never would have been any witches place for me. He lives on in my mind now. Pious mortal phrase. And what kind of life is that? I do not like living here myself! What does it mean to live on in the mind of another? Nothing, I think. You are not really there, are you? This means that everybody needs all the clarity they can muster regarding their ignorance and finiteness, and all the support they can obtain in order to face the upsetting implications of what their clarity reveals to them. A compassionate person is one who, by virtue of accepting this situation, can provide others as well as self with such support. As a mortal walks through life keeping a secret loyalty to one’s inner spiritual self, one is likely to make a few friends among those who are keen-sighted enough to perceive this loyalty, and a few enemies among others who misconstrue one’s actions and misunderstand one’s motives. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
And because one firmly believes in complete payment for all deeds by God sets over humankind, one will remain indifferent without resentment and without hatred to the latter, while silently returning a benign love to one’s friends. Freedom without compassion is demoniacal. Without compassion, freedom can be self-righteous, inhuman, self-centered, and cruel. The less affluent and the rich are both equally free to sleep under the bridges of Paris at night—this illustrates how freedom can turn into cruelty toward the less fortunate. Many of the crusades under the banner of freedom—and not merely the ones we read about in history books—have consisted of requiring the other person to accept one’s own concept of freedom. Thus, they have turned out to be tyrannical. This can be seen in some experiences of psychotherapy. The therapist may be convinced that one’s own form of freedom is the only thing that is good for the client, which then makes for coldness, rigidity, inhumanness in the therapist even though what one does may be technically correct. Mysticism is not concerned with those who depend on traditional forms of worship and current religious creeds for the satisfaction of all their inner needs. It is not for them and could do nothing for them. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
However, those to whom such dependence is mere incidental or mostly provisional may find further nutriment in mystical teachings and practices. Spiritual pride can take different forms. One of them is a studied intellectual independence, a refusal to be committed, the maintenance of a so-called open mind which never comes to a decision. Any good thing overdone becomes a bad thing and although independent judgment and thinking for oneself, if pushed to an extreme it merges into mere pride—egoistic pride. It is only as one gets released from all the self-pictured, self-made, much limited imaginations provided for one by less educated but well-meaning mortals that one can begin to let in the grace-bestowed new understanding of God. The person, young or mature, who has one’s mind set on higher things than pleasures of the moment and is willing to sacrifice a fragment of time, attention, and interest of such studies and such prayers, will find one’s refusal to conform to other people’s ways is repaid in inner growth on the quest. Attainment of sanctity may not be bought at the price of relinquishment of sanity. I once supervised a psychiatrist whose patient, a young woman of nineteen, was giving him a good deal of trouble. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
The patient was constantly being irritated, changing the subject, and in general angry and petulant. I remarked in the supervisory hour that the young woman might be trying to get some sign of affection from the therapist. The psychiatrist in the next session, when the young woman was playing out her petulant drama, interrupted her with “You know, I like you.” The patient stopped talking, paused a moment and then said, “I guess that is what it is all about.” When the therapist reported this to me, I asked, “Do you like her?” And he answered, “No, I really do not.” There flashed before my mind a glimpse of the whole treatment collapsing, for there is no doubt that patients in therapy can sense this presence of lack of compassion, despite all pretenses. Surely enough, she broke off the therapy after a couple of sessions. Compassion on the part of the therapist is the essence of any psychotherapy which deserves the name. When the level is basic as compassion, even if though they may not speak of it, patients will see through any pretense, since they are taught in our culture to pretend that they do not see such negative things. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
If people would learn to accept the authority of the Voice of Inspiration whenever and wherever it spoke to them, they would not need to cramp and confine themselves within the narrowing walls of any sect or section, any cult or organization. The Real Self dwells above time and space, matter and form, inviolable in its perfect liberty. If that be the goal of ideal state, one must sooner or later make a beginning to come into closer relations to it and to grow by the radiance of its light. Therefore one does no wrong in standing aloof from the confinements of discipleship to one particular mortal, and the restrictions of membership in one organized group. No longer is one willing to accede to the World’s demand for one’s loyalty, for one’s conformity, for one’s surrender. One is recovering one’s own individual identity and is determined to keep it. It is to God that one must give one’s ultimate allegiance. If one’s mind is filled with other people’s teachings, it may give no attention to God’s teachings, leading, and intuitions. There is a teaching principle in every mortal which can provide one with whatever spiritual knowledge one needs. However, one must first take suitable measures to evoke it. These include cleansing of body and mind, aspiration of feeling and thought, silencing of intellect and ego. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
As an expression of the divine life-power, one is unique. In the end, one will always have to take one’s guidance from within, that is to say, direct from that life-power which has made one what one is. The independent seeker, uncommitted to any cult, may be a sheep without a fold but one is not necessarily without a shepherd. The inner voice can guide and care for one no less than a mortal in the flesh. A therapist colleague of mine was seeing regularly a patient whose manner was generally bombastic and insolent. One day the therapist’s daughter had been seriously hurt. Nothing was said by the therapist in the session about the accident, but the patient that day, as we heard on the tape, was tender, kind, and completely without his usual bombast, as though he were aware of the therapist’s tragedy—which he could not have known. Does this presuppose some degree of mental telepathy in therapy or some capacity to pick up the tiny cues such as the sound of one’s voice? I believe both are probably true. Dr. Freud was right, in my judgment, in his mortal theory of telepathy, stating that he had learned not to lie in therapy because he hand often enough experienced the fact that the patient would see through the lie n matter how hard Dr. Freud tried to cover it up. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Some refuse to claim unity exists or does not exist. One who has passed though all the trials of immersion will persist in unity after death or one will not persist in it. This refusal, this noble silence, has been explained in two way. Theoretically: because perfection is said to elude the categories of thought and assertion. Practically: because the unveiling of such truths would not assist salvation. In truth both explanations belong together: whoever treats being as the object of an assertion, pulls it down into division, into the antitheses of the It-World—in which there is no salvation. When the view prevails that soul and body are identical, there is no salvation; when the view prevails that the soul is one and the body is another, then also there is no salvation. In the envisaged mystery, even as in lived actuality, neither this it is nor thus it is not prevails, neither being nor not being, but rather thus-and-otherwise, being and not-being, the indissoluble. To confront the undivided mystery undivided, that is the primal condition of salvation. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
We may follow the faithful to the truth of our encounter; going further would involve a betrayal of the actuality that we do not fetch from our own depths but that has been inspired in us and apportioned to us, we know: if this is merely one of the foals, then it cannot be ours; and if it is the goal, then it has been misnamed. And: if it is one of the goals, then the path may lead all the way to it; if it is the goal, then the path merely leads closer to it. Jesus says, “I came into this World, that those who do not see may see.” And the apostle says, “That which we have seen with out eyes, which we have looked upon—we proclaim to you.” Both speak not about the future, but about something they have seen and still see. And they certainly do not feel as do old and new theologians that there is a conflict between seeing and hearing, between seeing and believing. “That which we have seen and heard,” writes the apostle. “Everyone who see the Son and believes in him,” says Jesus. And most important and surprising: That which we have seen with our eyes according to our gospel is the Word, the eternal Word or Logos in whom God speaks, who can be seen through the words of creation and who is visible in the man Jesus. The Word can be seen, this is the highest unity of hearing and seeing, that is the truth which can bridge the Protestant and the Catholic half-truths. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
The technique of treatment must be in yourself for the best therapist is one who has problems one’s self, but is aware of them and is working on them. In psychotherapy one cannot have compassion for another if one never has experienced psychological problems of one’s own. Note that I do not ay the same psychological problems as the clients—that is not necessary. However, the therapist must know what the struggle between self and soul really feels like through one’s own experience. This is why, in interviewing and selecting candidates for two different psychoanalytic training institutes, I would never consider the candidate who was “well adjusted” and who had not endured the wresting with one’s own destiny. I assumed—and I believe rightly so—that such persons would not empathize with and feel compassion for the patient or client. The two greatest therapists I ever knew personally, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and Harry Stack Sullivan, had, individually, almost every problem you can imagine, and both had fantastic insight into the problems of their patents and corresponding compassion. One of the obvious and central functions of the didactic therapy that the trainee is required to go through is to sensitize oneself to the problems within oneself in order to have compassion for the other persons one is to work with. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
The person who lack compassion does not grasp the whole circuit in one’s human relationships. When we speak of the importance of art, poetry, religion, and other right-brain functions, unassisted consciousness must always tend toward hate; not only because it is good common sense to exterminate the other fellow, but for the more profound reason that, seeing only arcs of circuits, the individual is continually surprised and necessarily angered when one’s hardheaded policies return to plague inventor. The inadequacy of a solely ration point of view, for reason is pliable to every sense, and in practice reason is often a matter of truth on this side of the Pyrenees, error on that. It is our destiny to live always in some form of community. Even the frontiersman who counted it a matter of pride that all of twenty miles separated one from one’s nearest neighbor was still bound to that neighbor by a language no matter how rarely one spoke it, by one’s memory, by every thought, ad infinitum. The wolf child is an anomaly and, indeed, is a proof of what I am saying in that one became human only when one exhibited a communal morality. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
The fact that we belong to a community as well as being individual persons requires that we acknowledge this destiny and relate to each other with compassion. Compassion limits our freedom, but it renders freedom human at the same time. As we have seen, the refusal to admit destiny is to cut ourselves off from other. And now we can see its cruelty. Surely it is relevant: If I do not take care of myself, who else will? However, if one takes care only of oneself, one’s freedom can become cruelty to others. Love, of which compassion is the first step, keeps freedom from becoming tyrannical. The universality of evil also makes necessary human mercy, the gentle virtue, as Shakespeare, in The Merchant of Venice, rightly insisted. Mercy not only drops like a soft Spring rain, but it is like forgiveness in that it blessed one who gives and one wo takes, Mercy is the attribute to awe and majesty, wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings; but mercy is above this sceptered sway, it is enthroned in the hearts of kings, it is an attribute to God himself, and Earthly power doth then show likest God’s when mercy seasons justice. Evil will not disappear of shrink away during the night. We will never wake up in the morning to find that evil has vanished from the face of the Earth. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
The purpose of human life is not to avoid mistakes, nor to show an unblemished escutcheon, but to rise to meet the challenges as our destiny reveals itself and to search out in freedom the challenges we wish to engage in. As I read the human tragicomedy, we will go on struggling, avoiding complete nuclear catastrophe by the skin of our teeth, trying to become aware of the pitfalls in ourselves and our society, so that we can make constructive choices whenever possible. In this tragicomedy forgiveness and mercy will season justice and make life bearable with the presence of beauty, the emotion of love, and the occasional experience of joy. Seeing is the most astonishing of our natural powers. It receives the light, the first of all that is created, and as the light does it conquers darkness and chaos. It creates for us an ordered World, things distinguished from each other and from us. Seeing shows us their unique countenance and the larger whole to which they belong. Whenever we see, a piece of the original chaos is transformed into creation. We distinguish, we recognize, we give a name, we know. I have seen—that means in Greek I know. From seeing, all science starts, to seeing it must always return. We want to ask those who have seen with their eyes and we ourselves want to see with our eyes. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
Only the human eye is able to see in this way, to see a World in every small thing and to see a Universe of all things. Therefore the human eye is infinite in reach and irresistible in power. It is the correlate to the light of creation. However, seeing means more than the creation of a World. Where we see we unite with what we see. Seeing is a kind of union. As poetry has described it, we drink colors and forms, forces and expression. They become part of ourselves. They give abundance to the poverty of our loneliness. Even when we are unaware of them they stream into us; but sometimes we notice them and welcome them and desire more of them. Those bewildered by the doctrinal differences between the established or traditional creeds, theologies, liturgies, and customs, yet still seeking some mental satisfaction, finding similar differences between the religious heresies, the non-established or modern cults, have a way out of their problem. This is to apply themselves to direct personal practices which can give them their own experience, their own teaching, from within. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
These standard practices include self-purification and prayer. For this inner work they do not have to join any group or organization, do not have to search for, follow or cling to any guide. The God within them becomes, with faith, patience, persistence, and practice, the light on their path. If one finds the same tenet in ten different religious creeds or metaphysical codes one is glad to get their repeated confirmation. However, in the end one must get it for oneself from within one’s own self—God. It is the firmest base of life. Although it is quite true that each quester must travel the path for oneself, must move on one’s own two feet, this does not mean that one is travelling completely along, or on one’s own. If one has no personal guide to accompany one, God is still there, within one, pulling, drawing, leading, or pointing, if only one can learn how to recognize it. One wants to be faithful to the Glowing Light within, not subjected to or obstructed by an outside authoritarianism. If the Infinite Power is everywhere present, it can surely make itself known to is ardent seeker in any place, even though that place be bereft of masters. “It is by faith that miracles are wrought; and it is by faith that Angels appear and minister unto mortals; wherefore, if these things have ceased wo be unto the children of mortals, for it is because of unbelief, and all is vain,” reports Moroni 7.37. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Why Do I Harm the Very Person I Love?
Do you think we find our destiny somehow, no matter what happens? I mean, do you think even as immortals we follow some path that was already marked for us when we were alive? We have said that human freedom gives birth to the human spirit and that spirit is necessary if there is to be freedom. However, are not human spirit and freedom also the sources of evil? What did do we really mean when we say the wrath of God is necessary if there is to be any love of God? In the course of my therapeutic experience I have met and talked with a number of parents whose son or daughter happened to be in treatment with me. When the parents let their hair down, their attitudes varied from tearful regret on the part of a clergy member high up in the ecclesiastical hierarchy about his son’s depression to the genuine, if sad, puzzlement of a mother whose psychotic episode when her daughter was born had a good deal to do wit the latter’s present promiscuity to the boisterous instructions of a Wall Street executive who adjured me to hurry and get his son to shape up. The boisterousness of the executive only served to emphasize his subconscious realization that his authoritarianism had a good deal to with his son’s perpetual failures in everything he tired. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
If these parents could have spoken out of the depths of their feelings, each one of them—even the Wall Street executive—would have cried out, “Why do I harm the very person I love?” When we see the evil we do, scarcely any of us can remain unaffected, mostly unintentionally, to those in our own family and to people we love by our inability to understand what is going on in the other’s thoughts. Oscar Wilde’s line “Yet each man kills the thing he loves” may relieve us to some extent in that it presents the universal quality of the problem of evil; we are not alone in the harm we partly cause. However, Oscar Wilde also makes it impossible for us to forget that each of us participates in the inhumanity to other human beings. The inevitability of evil is the price we pay for freedom. And the denial of evil is also the denial of freedom. Since we have some margin of freedom, we have to make some choices; and this means the chance of making the wrong choice as well as the right one. Freedom and evil presuppose each other, whether we accept responsibility for our freedom and evil or not. Possibility is possibility for evil as well as good. We can pretend innocence, but such retreating to childhood ignorance does not help anyone. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
There is an inescapable egocentricity in all of us, leading to the absolutizing of our own perceptions, which then become destructive to those closest to us. There is a tendency in each one of us to be absolute in one’s self. Each of us is bound up in one’s own skin, each of us sees life through one’s own eyes, and none of us can escape doing some violence to those we long most to understand. The good that I would I do not, and the evil that I would not do, that I do. There is no evading this dilemma. This is the original sin: each of us speaks out of one’s separate individuality and thus inexorably runs roughshod over yearnings and perceptions that are precious to people we love. And if one tried very hard not to do this, if one makes every effort to do good, one succeeds only in adding an element of self-righteousness to the ways one confronts one’s fellows. The problem of evil has been a stumbling block for philosophers and theologians for millennia. Those who represent the rational approach to evil, from Aristotle through Aquinas to the rational philosophers of today, hold that the more we solve our problems, the less evil will exist. Evil is thus a lack of goodness. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The more our science progresses, the argument goes, the more mysterious of life and nature are solved, and the less evil there is in this would. However, I believe this point of view is wrong. I heard this judgment much more in my earlier days before the advent of Adolph Hitler, before the Second World War with all its newly technologized ways of killing, before the use of concentration camps as an accepted political arm of the government, and before hydrogen bomb, with its unutterably cruel mass maiming and slaying. This depressing list should make clear the fact that the progress of science and technology has not resulted in our being less evil. Human cruelty and capacity for evil increase neck and neck with technological progress, just look at how many of the TV news stations lie, distort facts, and ruin lives for fun. Our ways of killing are made more efficient as well as our ways of living. In fact it is thought, people who are terrorized for fun should be beautiful in person so the insult to God might be greater when the Dark Tick is done. When the World of mortals collapses in ruin, beauty will take over. The trees shall grow again where there were streets; the flowers will again cover the meadow that is now a dank field of hovels. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
That shall be the purpose of the Satanic master, to see the wild grass and the dense forest cover up all trace of the once great cities until nothing remains. And why call this Satanic? Why not call it chaos? That is all it is. However, mortals invented Satan, did they not? Satanic is merely the name they give to the behavior of those who would disrupt the orderly way in which mortals want to life. Satan is mortal’s invention, a name for the force that seeks to overthrow the civilized order of things. The first man who made laws—be he Moses or some ancient Egyptian king Osiris—that lawmaker created the devil. The devil meant the one who tempts you to break the laws. And we are truly Satanic in that we follow no law for mortal’s protection. So why not truly disrupt? Why not make a blaze of evil to consume all the civilizations of Earth? The main example of the evil that is present in technology along with the good is, of course, nuclear power. If we had any doubts about the dangers to health and even life itself in radiation, nuclear residue, as well as the nuclear bombs per se we have only to listen to the Union of Concerned Scientists to shock us out of our delusions. Not only can nuclear fission destroy the World population many times over, but there is evidence that radiation and strontium 90 may already be seeping into the bodies of an unknown number of us. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
In any case, we walk a razor’s edge in dealing with nuclear fission. Science and technology deal with the how of life, and not the why or what for—which truth reputable scientists by the score tell us. Science increases the possibilities for good and the possibilities for evil, which many esteemed scientists have been shouting to us from the housetops. There is also another group of philosophers and the theologians who take a different approach. This group includes Heraclitus, who said “war is both king of all and father of all,” through Sokratis, Augustine, Pascal, Boehme, and down to Kierkegaard and Bateson. These thinkers directly face the fact that freedom makes evil inevitable. As long as there is freedom there will be mistake choices, some of the catastrophic. However, to relinquish the capacity to make choices in favor of the dictatorial segment of us called our reason is to surrender what makes us human in the first place. The modern form of the Grand Inquisitor’s plan leads people to hand over their responsibility to the scientists in the white coat or to the psychotherapist in the comforting office or to the priest in the church or to the anonymous environment all about us. If we could do these things, we would have the temporary facsimile of evading evil. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
However, while we are no longer committing evil, we also are no longer committing goodness; and the age of the robot will be upon us. The ultimate error is the refusal to look evil in the face. This denial of evil—and freedom along with it—is the most destructive approach of all. To take refuge with the Moonies, or with Jonestown, or any others of the hundreds of cults, most of which seem to spring up in California, is to find a haven where our choices will be made for us. We surrender freedom because of our inability to tolerate moral ambiguity, and we escape the threat that one might make the wrong choice. The mass suicides at Jonestown seem to me to be the terrible, if brilliant, demonstration of the ultimate outworking of the attitudes with which the adherents joined in the first place. They committed spiritual suicide in surrendering their freedom to evade the partial evil of life, and they end up demonstrating to the World in their own mass suicides the final evil. Religious people have for millennia fervently asked, “How could a God of love permit evil?” An answer is given by that tributary of Christianity, Gnosticism: God allowed evil to exist, woven into the texture of the World, in order to increase mortal’s freedom and one’s will to prove one’s moral strength in overcoming. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
However, the question the religious people above ask is simplistic. Let us recall the words of Boehme, above, that God is a fire and it is necessary to confront the wrath of God if the love of God is to have any reality. A Hassidic saying points toward the same thing: God is not nice, God is no uncle. God is an Earthquake. We note that some saints through history have spoken of themselves as the “Chief of sinners.” Obviously, this cannot mean sinner in the sense of committing overt, objective crimes. However, it can mean that the saints, being more highly developed spiritually than ordinary people, have a correspondingly deeper awareness of their pride, vanity, hardness of heart, and obtuseness of understanding. If we look at sin from the inside, we see that there is indeed, sound meaning to their claim. It is impossible to have a sensitive conscience and a good conscience at the same time. If one has a sensitive conscience one will be aware of the evils of the World in which we as human beings participate. Hence, there is no clear, good conscience, but an active concern about the evils. It is not at all surprising, then, that in the Garden of Eden myth, the knowledge of good and evil comes by virtue of the evil of rebellion against God. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
If Adam and Eve are to have any freedom, any true autonomy or true independence, they must defy the orders of God; and whether Yahweh is benevolent or destructive does not at that moment matter. This defying of the orders of God is essential for this development of their own consciousness. Otherwise they will forever be the inert appendage of God. Is this alienating? Anxiety-creating? Guilt-producing? Of course. However, what become available with these “curses” are the blessings of love, responsibility, and the passion and power to create. Still, after meeting with certain people, one may complain about a sense of depression which comes to one’s mind. One should reduce such meetings to the least number possible, and where it is necessary to deal with them, to do so by correspondence as much as one can. It does not matter that such people may have spiritual interests and many also on the Quest. The Quest is an individual matter; it is not a group Quest. One finds God by oneself, alone in the privacy of one’s heart and life, not with the help of a group nor in public associations. Be yourself, your own divine self. Why play a part? Why be an echo? Why follow the World in its pursuit of the trivial, the stupid, the pain bringing? #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
One should not permit oneself to be re-entangled by others in past contacts which have out served their purpose and which now will only keep one down. This freedom to search for and find truth as well as to select one’s own path of approach toward it, is a precious prerogative. One refuses to accept a label; one feels oneself to be outside all the common categories. The divergence of opinion among leading individuals on every subject is extraordinary and emphasizes one again the necessity of thinking for oneself. Remember that custom and habit are the great tyrants who enslave the mass of humankind. Only when one is true to one’s own self, real freedom is possible. Do not permit yourself to be hypnotized by the common indifference to these high matters, but be loyal to the promptings of the spirit. With this decree one runs up one’s personal declaration of independence. No school can hold one. One’s loyalty is henceforth given to global thought. Nor is this all. The mystic life depends on no institution, no tradition, no sectarianism. It is an independent and individual existence. Without falling into the vacuity of skepticism, the intelligent and independent seeker shuns strict and rigid doctrines sectarian intellectual or emotional positions. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
However, this openness of mind, one’s semi-detached stand, do not prevent one’s forming favourable appreciations or accommodating unflattering impressions. “All this is the genius of Our Divine Violinist, but we must now be with him every waking moment. To force him to write we tie him to a chair. We put ink and paper in front of him. And if this fails, we make him dictate as we write down plays.” If you do not feel any affinity with it, let others follow whatever path attracts them, but do not let them impose their path upon you. The unified I: for (as I have said earlier) the unification of the soul occurs in lived actuality—the concentration of all forces into the core, the decisive moment of mortals. However, unlike that immersion, this does not entail ignoring the actual person. Immersion want to preserve only what is pure, essential, and enduring, while stripping away everything else; the concentration of which I speak does not consider our instincts as too impure, the sensuous as too peripheral, or our emotions as too fleeting—everything must be included and integrated. What is wanted is not the abstracted self but the whole, undiminished mortal. This concentration aims at and is actuality. The doctrine of immersion demands and promises penetration into thinking the One, that by which the World is thought, the pure subject. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
However, in lived actuality no one thinks without something being thought; rather is that which thinks as dependent on that which is thought as vice versa. A subject that annuls the object to rise above it annuls its own actuality. A thinking subject by itself exists—in thought, as the product and object of thought, as a limit-concept that lacks all imaginable content; also in the anticipatory determination of death for which one may also substitute its metaphor, that deep sleep which is virtually no less impenetrable; and finally in the assertions of a doctrine concerning a state of immersion that resembles such deep sleep and is essentially without consciousness and without memory. These are the supreme excesses of It-language. One has to respect its sublime power to ignore while at the same time recognizing it as something that can at most be an object of living experience but that cannot be lived. In the former centuries there was a long-lasting struggle in the Church about the religious significance of hearing and seeing. First, seeing prevailed, but then hearing became more and more significant. Finally, in the days of the Reformation hearing became completely victorious. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
The typical Protestant church-building bear witness to the victory. They are halls to hear sermons, emptied of everything to be seen of pictures and sculptures, of lights and stained windows, of most of the sacramental activities. Around the desk of the preacher a room was built to listen to the words of the law and gospel. The eye could not find a place to rest in contemplation. Hearing replaced seeing, obedience replaced vision. Truth is knowledge of things as they are, and as they were and as they are to come. Truth looks backward and forward, expanding the perspective of our small point in time. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” Truth shows us the way to eternal life, and it comes only through our Savior, Jesus Christ. There is no other way. Jesus Christ teaches us how to life, and, through his Atonement and Resurrection, he offers us forgiveness from our sins and immortality beyond the veil. This is absolutely true. Our mortal quest is to strengthen our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, to choose good over evil, and to keep his commandments. While we celebrate the innovations of science and medicine, the truths of God go far beyond these discoveries. We can know things of God as we seek them spiritually. The things of God knoweth no mortal, except one as the Spirit of God for they are spiritually discerned. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Here the Spirit Achieves Unity and Freedom–Angles and Blue Skies, Clouds, those the things You Made Me See!
No. He found a way to imitate immortal life. To be one with mortals. He slew only the evildoer, and he painted as mortals paint. When you were telling me, Angels and blue skies, clouds, those are the things you made me see. He created good things. And I see wisdom in him and a lack of vanity. He did not need to reveal himself. He had lived a thousand years and he believed more in the vistas of Heaven that he painted than in himself. You have to suffer through emptiness and find what impels you to continue. There is perfection in life you cannot deny. We are illusions of what is more, and the stage is an illusion of what is real. Do you not see, the color of wine in a crystal glass can be spiritual. The look in a face, the music of a violin. A Paris theater can be infused with the spiritual for all its solidity. There is nothing in it that has not been shaped by the power of those who possessed spiritual visions of what it could be. Seduce the public with voluptuousness. For God’s sake, and the devil’s, use the power of this life and the theater as you will. Can anyone look on the great works of the past and the present and not call them spiritual? Mystics, such as Anne Rice, Sarah Winchester, Meister Eckhart and Jacob Boehme, use the language of the spirit with a greater insight than the rest of us. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
The human spirit can never be satisfied with what light it has but storms the firmament and scales the Heavens to discover the spirit by which the heavens are driven in revolutions and by which everything on the Earth grows and flourishes. The spirit, in knowing, has no use for number, for numbers are of use only within time, in this finite World. No one can strike one’s roots into eternity without being rid [of concept] of number. The human spirit must go beyond all number-ideas, must break past and away from ideas of quantity and then one will be broken into by God—God leads the human spirit into the desert, into one’s own unity—here the spirit achieves unity and freedom. Freedom turns out to be central in the concept of the mystics, probably because they exercise their own freedom so intensively in achieving their inspirations. God does not constrain the will, rather, he sets in free, so that it may chose him, that is to say, freedom. The spirit of the mortal may not will otherwise than what God wills, but that is no lack of freedom. It is true freedom itself. When we considered the curious union of destiny and freedom that characterizes the great religions we see in them that freedom and necessity, or freedom and bondage, are ultimately identical. Your intensions are right and your will is free. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
When we consider art in the great churches, one ponders, is it spiritual or is it voluptuous? Is the Angel in the stained glass caught in the material, or was the material transformed? No matter what on things, one never doubts the beauty of value of the work. I know I do not. And it is the material transformed. It ceases to be a window and becomes magic, just as the blood ceases to be liquid and becomes life. God is fire. Existence is a stream of fire. All life is fire. The fire is the will. Will—freedom—is the principle of all things. Freedom is deeper than and prior to all nature. Freedom is the foundation of being, freedom is to most deeper and more primary than all being, deeper and more primary than God himself. If the love of God it to have any meaning, the wrath of God is necessary. By our own powers we are visually impaired, but through the spirit of God, our own inborn spirit pierces all things. However one judges them, authentic mystics have a source of wisdom that cannot come from learning, but must come from insights that spring out of an immediate participation in the Universe in ways we cannot understand, but surely can admire. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The mystics’ wisdom seems to be a combination of empathy, telepathy, intuition. This shows how far off the mark are those who criticize such things as acupuncture, and placebos of many sorts from a purely left-brain, rationalistic point of view. Such things as placebos may simply represent tangible patterns that act as foci on which a person may project the insights and intuitions that come from different sources. Whatever peculiarity one may have shown in the past one need not look like that today, and does not need to assume theatrical postures. One can be ordinary and inconspicuous, one’s behavior normal, one’s demenour simple. However, one thing one may do and that is cultivate some individuality in one’s attitude toward life. Most mortals live as prisoners of ideas which are not even their own, but which have been suggested to them by other people. Independent thinking is rare. Consciously or unwittingly, most of us are suggestible. We accept the thoughts which other persons want to put in our heads. And we do so to such an extent that we live vicariously: we do not really live our own lives. This is quite fitting and proper to the childhood and adolescent years, but how can it be worth of the adult ones? #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Where is the mortal who has one’s own self, and not one made for one by others? Heredity and environment, society and suggestion, convention and education heavily contribute to forming an “I” that is not one’s own “I,” to making a pseudo-individual that is not oneself but passes for it. As one goes deeper and deeper into oneself, one’s private acts become more and more independent of other people’s suggestions and resistant to their influence. The longer I live the more I am impressed, to the point even of awe, by the tremendous power of suggestion on the human mind. Where is the person who is able to cultivate one’s own intelligence without being conditioned by ideas and examples put into it by one’s environment or by one’s reading, by one’s religion or one’s family, by one’s social tradition, or by the personal fears and desires connected wit others? It is others, whether of the long-dead past or of the living present who partly or wholly imprison one in their thoughts and imaginations, their conflicts. An inner life not entirely directed by or dependent on another person is an adult one. No one is such who has to seek another’s approval of one’s actions or shrink from disapproval of them. We do not have to accept all the burdens which others try to put upon our shoulders. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
We are free to choose and to be sure that we are not merely surrendering our own ego to the other person’s. Of what use is it to ask or accept the opinions of those who are inexpert in this subject because they have yet to study it thoroughly? A truth which is born out of personal knowledge, or hammered out of personal experience, has more value for a mortal than other people’s hearsay. Whatever form our outer life may have to take under the pressure of destiny, one will keep one’s inner life inviolate. It is not necessarily an unstable mind which pushes one from guru to guru, or from belief to belief, or from group to group. It may be that one is really seeking the one Truth and has not by one’s own standards found it in others yet. It is the individual who refuses to be cast in a mold who brings inspiration, inner contact with the divine, not the institution. There are few who rise above the crowd to this level by their own self-ennoblement and self-interiorization. The philosopher is not discouraged because the number of those who adopt philosophical ideas is so small. One is not seeking the success of a movement, group, program, or sect. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Even if one were the only person who held these ideas one is learning and expressing, one would still not be discouraged. For one knows that one has not been put in the World to reform it but to reform oneself. One makes ones own World-view rather than inherits it with one’s body, that is, one thinks for oneself, without inherited bias and prejudice. It is sometimes beneficial to throw away the manuals of spirituality, the textbooks of holiness! There is no justification for invoking the “are one” is obvious for anyone who reads the Gospel according to John without skipping and with an open mind. It is really nothing less than the Gospel of the pure relationship. There are truer things here than the familiar mystic verse: “I am you, and you are I.” The father and the son, being consubtantial—we may say: God and human, being consubstantial, are actually and forever Two, the two partners of the primal relationship that, from God to mortal, is called mission and commandment; from mortal to God, seeing and hearing; between both, knowledge and love. And in this relationship the son, although the father dwells and works in one, bows before one that is grater and prays to one. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
All modern attempts to reinterpret this primal actuality of dialogue and to make of it a relationship of the I to the self or something of that sort, as if it were a process confined to mortal’s self-sufficient inwardness, are vain and belong to the abysmal history of deactualization. However, mysticism? It relates how unity within duality feels. Have we any right to doubt the faithfulness of this testimony? I know not only of one but two kinds of event in which one is no longer away of any duality. Mysticism sometimes confounds them, as I, too did at one time. First, the soul may become one. This event occurs not between mortals and God but in a mortal. All forces are concentrated into the core, everything that would distract them is pulled in, and the being standalone in itself and jubilates in its exaltation. This is mortal’s decisive moment. Without this one is not fir for the work of the spirit. With this—it is decided deep down whether this means preparation or sufficient satisfaction. Concentrated into a unity, a human being can proceed to one’s encounter—wholly successful only now—with mystery and perfection. However, one can also savor the bliss of one’s unity and, without incurring the supreme duty, return into distraction. Everything along our way id decision—intentional, dimly sensed, or altogether secret—but this one, deep down, is the primarily secret decision. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
The other event is that unfathomable kind of relational act itself in which one has the feeling that Two have become One: “one and one made one, bare shineth in bare.” I and You drown; humanity that but now confronted the deity is absorbed into it; glorification, deification, universal unity have appeared. However, when one returns into the wretchedness of daily turmoil, transfigured and exhausted, and with a knowing heart reflect on both, is one not bound to feel that Being is split, with one part abandoned to hopelessness? What help is it to my soul that it can be transported again from this World into that unity, when this World itself has, of necessity, no share whatever in that unity—what does all enjoyment of God profit a life rent in two? If that extravagantly rich Heavenly Moment has noting to do wit my poor Earthly moment—what is it to me as long as I still have to live on Earth—must in all seriousness still live on Earth? That is way to understand those masters who renounced the raptures of the ecstasy of unification. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Which was no unification. Those human being may serve as a metaphor who in the passion of erotic fulfillment are so carried away by the miracle of the embrace that all knowledge of I and You drowns in the feeling of a unity that neither exists nor can exist. What the ecstatic calls unification is the rapturous dynamic of the relationship; not a unity that has come into being at this moment in World time, fusing I an You, but the dynamics of the relationship itself which can stand before the two carriers of this relationship, although they confront each other immovably, and cover the eyes of the enraptured. What we find here is a marginal exorbitance of the act of relation: the relationship itself in its vital unity is felt so vehemently that its members pale in the process: its life predominates so much that the I and the You between whom it is established are forgotten. This is one of the phenomena that we find on the margins where actuality becomes blurred. However, what is greater for us than all enigmatic webs at the margins of being is the central actuality of everyday hour on Earth, with a streak of Sunshine on a maple twig and an intimation of the eternal You. Against this stand the claim of the other doctrine of immersion that at heart the Universe and the self are identical and hence no You-saying can ever grant any ultimate actuality. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
When one rests in deep sleep, without dreams, that is the self, the immortal, the assured, the All-being. In that state, O sublime one, we do not know of our self, we are in unity with God. We, however, are resolved to tend with holy care the holy treasure of our actuality that has been given to us for this life and perhaps for no other life that might be closer to the truth. In lived actuality there is no unity of being. Actuality is to be found only in effective activity; strength and depth of the former only in that the latter. Inner actuality, too, is only where there is reciprocal activity. The strongest and deepest actuality is to be found where everything enters into activity—the whole human being, without reserve, and the all-embracing God; the unified I an the boundless you. It is not true that religious faith is belief in things without evidence. The word evidence means seeing thoroughly. And we are asked to see. We have present with us what we see; therefore, we want to see what we love, what is significant for us. The great people of God wanted to see God; Moses asked this as the highest of all favors of Jahveh. Isaiah was made the most powerful of the prophets after he had seen God in the temple. Jesus blesses the pure in heart as those who will see God. In the Fourth Gospel he says about himself that he has seen the Father, and that whoever has seen him has also seen the Father. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
In pious imagery the Angels and the saints are described as those who see God face to face. And the ultimate fulfillment, the end of all moving and striving, is pictured as the eternal vision of God. However, when we look at our present human predicament, doubts and questions arise. Is faith not the opposite of vision? Must we not believe without seeing? Does Jesus not bless those who have not seen and yet believe? Is not faith defined as the evidence of things not seen? And does not Paul write, “We walk by faith, not by sights”? “We look not at the things which are seen, but at things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporal, but the thing which are not seen are eternal”? All this seems to indicate that faith must be based on hearing and not on seeing. You hear about something you do not see. You believe one who tells you. You accept the word of authorities in humility and obedience. You believe what the Bible says because the Bible says it. You accept what the Church teaches because it is taught by the Church. You call the word of the Bible and of the Church “Word of God.” You hear, you believe, you obey, but you do not see. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Maybe as the years pass, desire will come again to many. We will know appetite again, even passion. Maybe when we meet in another age, these things will not be abstract and fleeting. I will speak with a vigor that matches yours, instead of merely reflecting it. And we will ponder matters of immortality and wisdom. We will take about vengeance or acceptance then. For now it is enough for me to say that I want to see you again. I want our paths to cross in the future. And for that reason alone, I will do as you ask and not what you want. The seeker must be distinctive and not accept conventional views or orthodox religious notions. One must judge all problems from the philosophic standpoint for one should not believe any other will yield true conclusions. This standpoint has the eminent perspective which alone can afford a true estimate of what is involved in these problems. We turn away from a teaching which does not satisfy our inmost spirit, which leaves our deepest thirst unslaked. In this matter our wisest course is to follow the scientist’s example and test the truth of these theories, either by ourselves carrying out experiments or by observing the experiences of other people. “And it came to pass that there was no contention among all the people, in all the land; but there were mighty miracles wrought among the disciples of Jesus,” reports 4 Nephi 1.13. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Heartbreakingly Innocent He Seemed in the Midst of the Crowd–Is there an Empty Space in Your Soul?
Yes, perfect mortal raiment, and yet he seemed all the more supernatural, his face too dazzling, his eyes fathomless and just for a split second glinting as if they were windows to the fires of hell. When you are powerful enough that no one can ever take the knowledge from you against you will, you will help me with what I have to do, but only when you are ready for the knowledge, when you have shown that you truly wish to know. However, a millennium of nights will be yours to see light as no mortal has even see it, to snatch from the distant stars as if you were Prometheus an endless illumination by which to understand all things. I am as one whom the Earth has given back. The spiritual and the carnal came together, and it was the spiritual, I am convinced that survived. Holy Communion it seems to be the case, The Blood of the Children of Christ serving only to being the essence of life itself into my understanding for the spit second in which death occurred. Only the great saints of God are our equals in this spirituality, this confrontation with mystery, this existence of prayer and denial. Yet, we have seen the greatest of our companions vanish, bring destruction upon themselves, go mad. We have witnessed the inevitable dissolution of covens, seen immortality defeat the most perfectly made Children of Darkness, and it seems at times some awesome punishment that it never defeated us. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
The time has come to proclaim to a nobler humanity, the freedom of the spirit, and no longer to have patience with mortal’s tearful regrets for their lost chains. We are miracles or horrors, depending upon how you wish to see us. And when you first know about us, whether it is through the dark blood or promises or visitations, you think anything is possible. However, that is not so. The World closes tight around this miracle soon enough; and you do not hope for other miracles. That is, you become accustomed to the new limits and the limits define everything once again. So they say Aaliyah continues. They all continue somewhere, that is what you want to believe. Not a single one remains in the coven in Rome from those nights when I was taught the ritual; and maybe the coven itself is no longer even there. Years and years have passed since there was any communication from the coven. However, they all exists somewhere, do they not? After all, we cannot die. God knows the future because God is the possessor of all the facts. Freedom is an absolute force…flowing up from a spring of boundless depth. Freedom is the power to create out of nothing, the power of the spirit to create out of itself. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
What is there to know? What is there to give? We are the abandoned of God. And there is no Devil’s Road spinning out before me and there are no bells of hell ringing in my ears. Freedom bandied about with salutes and holiday flags, and the crowds are inspired by a pretty word which the eye deadens and thought enfeebles. What is freedom then? Obviously not merely to send mortals to parliament every three years to sit there dully, wings of thought clipped like inert prisoners behind a sea of prejudices. Freedom, rather, is life’s finest treasure. Only one is free who boldly aspires forward, whose deepest craving is the deed, whose goal is an heroic act of the spirit. And is it anything more than words and sound, if we hail the rosy dawn of freedom, and not understand that its finest fruit can ripen only in the light of the spirit? This was for three centuries, this darkness, this nothingness. The radiant auburn-haired child by the fire could open his mouth again and out would come blackness like ink to cover the World. However, it is just as truth that the human spirit is made possible only by freedom. Without freedom, there is no spirit; and without spirit, no freedom; and without freedom, no self. Mortals are spirit. However, what is spirit? Spirit is the self. However, what is the self? #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
Mortals are a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temperal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity. In our day the word spirit has become less respectable because of its association with ghosts, apparitions, specters, fairies, and other forms of spiritualism. “I have the spirit” is the prelude to speaking in tongues and other practices in fundamentalist churches. It is significant that all of these are endeavors to leave behind our humdrum existence and get free by leaping immediately into a spiritual existence. Crossing the boundaries from material to spiritual existence so easily is a sign of magic rather than spirit. Whatever one my think of these apparitions, I am not talking of this usage of spirit. I use the word spirit in it etymological sense of the nonmaterial, animating principle of human life. Its root is spirare, which also means “breath” and is the root of aspire, aspiration, inspire, and inspiration. Thus, spirit is the breath of life. God breathes the spirit into Adam, as the creation myth puts it, and from then on Adam shares this capacity to pass on the life-giving principle to his own descendants in ways that are still a mystery to us. Spirit is that which gives vivacity, energy, liveliness, courage, and ardor to life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
We speak of the Spartans fighting at Thermopylae with great spirit. When one is high-spirited, one is lively, active in the sense that is meant when we describe the free person as active and not passive. Or one has lost all spirit meaning that the person is in deep despondency and at the point of giving up life entirely. We borrow from the French the phrase “esprit de corps,” implying the confidence that comes from participating in the spirit of everyone else in one’s group. Spirit increases as it is shared, and decreases as one’s freedom is blocked off. Spirit has its psychological roots in each individual’s inner freedom. We see this identity between freedom and spirit as nature commanding every being, and the beings obey. Mortals feel the same impetus, but one realizes one is free to acquiesce or resist; it is above all in the consciousness of this freedom that the spirituality of the soul is shown. Spirit can be powerful—indeed, so powerful that it can transcend natural law. For fate has put a spirit in his heart that drives one madly on without a pause, and whose precipitate and rash behest O’erleaps the joy of Earth and natural laws. The spirit here is described as part of fate, of destiny—or as we would say in contemporary language, it is both born in us and developed as our culture influences us from birth. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
The description of the spirit can be seen in our day in the patients who come for psychotherapy who are workaholics, driven by ambition, who not only push themselves into a heart attack, but also miss what joys of Earth en route. Spirit is also an epistemological capacity: one can see into things, get insights, perceive things that were covered before. This capacity is partially intuition. Spirit is a special perspicacity, a keenness, a lucidity. One seems to exist on a higher level; one transcends the mundane and the boundaries of the mundane. I hope you prosper. I wonder if any of you, with all your Dark Ways and Dark Rituals, have ever really wanted this nightmare that we all share. Many have been drawn into it as I have, really. And we are all Children of Darkness now, for better or worse. However, be wise in what you do here. Be clever and keep your hiding place safe. You put terror into their hearts. The language of spirit is image, symbol, metaphor, myth; and these also comprise the language of freedom. This is a language that points toward wholeness; a half image, for example, is still a whole image. Each one of these terms, whether it be image, symbol, metaphor, or myth, deals wit the whole circuit. This points toward the totality of the event. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
Hence, these terms in the language of spirit deal with quality, which by its very nature is a wholeness, rather than quantity, which by its very nature is a wholeness, rather than quantity, which by its very nature is partial. We speak, for example, of a painting as being sensitive, powerful, communicating a richness of color to us—all terms that deal with qualities. The quantity of a painting or piece of music—say, the size of the canvas of Picasso or the number of notes in a concerto—is silly when we are talking of works of art. This whole circuit indicates that our logical left-brain thinking deals in arcs—for instance, parts of the circuit rather than the whole. One is thus confined, limited, unfree as one sees only part of the reality one is looking at. This confinement is, of course, necessary in empirical thinking. However, when freedom and the spirit enter our discourse, we find ourselves bursting out of these limits and dealing with a symbol of the whole, the universality of a myth, or a metaphor which stands for the totality. This is why we insists on the inclusion of right-brain thinking as part of our description and why we put so much emphasis on the contests in which one does one’s thinking. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Mere purposive rationality unassisted by such phenomena as art, religion, dream, and the like, is necessarily pathogenic and destructive of life; and its virulence springs specifically from the circumstances that life depends upon interlocking circuit of contingency, while consciousness can see only such short arcs of such circuits as human purpose may direct. That is the sort of World we live in—a World of circuits structures—and love can survive only if wisdom [for instance, a sense of recognition of the fact of circuity] has an effective voice. I curse you. Remember that when your dark children strike out at you, when they rise up against you. Remember me. I showed you my power to understand. You made pictures. And rather childish pictures. You have done this all along. And here, when there is a respite in the struggle, what do you do but try to sow dissension between me and my people. The things I have spoken here are true. The individual need to escape from rigid formalism into intellectual freedom comes only to a minority. However, it is from this minority that the real truth-seekers emerge. Taking no theoretical position, not committed to any beliefs, not wearing any labels, not putting oneself in any categories, the philosophical student starts one’s search for truth in intellectual freedom and ends it in personal inner freedom. One is then what one is. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
The independent self-reliant attitude of Saint Paul set an example which, had it been followed by succeeding generations, might have changed the history of one’s religion. One refused money gifts and followed one’s craft of tent-making throughout one’s wide travels. To become a follower of this quest there is no master or organization whose permission one must ask: one is free to do so just so far as one’s aspiration and capacity permit one to. Has one refused to submit to one’s own ego only to submit to society’s? Shall one conform to the World and its ways out of fear of the World’s opinion of one? Is one to have courage enough to reject one’s neighbour’s religious ideas but not to resist one’s neighbour’s foolish habits? If one cannot find in society or surroundings the standards which suit one’s character, then one must find one’s own. It is this that makes one a quester. A mortal must stay in one’s own orbit and take one’s directives from within. If through fear of loneliness, intimidation, or suggestion, one joins the marching groups of one’s time, one will not reach one’s best. Those who said it—the Church and its servants in all periods—made it a matter of law and tradition, of habit and convention. They made it into something we believe we know and have tried to follow. It does not cut any more into our ordinary World. It has become part of our ordinary World. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
Christianity, as it has become in its organized and institutionalized state, presents the good citizen as its model. However, as long as society is itself ignorant of where it is going wrong in its appraisal of the nature of mortals and mesmerized by institution prestige while neglectful of inner light, so long ought its demand for conformity to be treated with cold reserve will be asserted. So long as so many mortals live in error or compromise with wrong, merely because both have been established by tradition or custom, so long must a few among them do the greater and nobler thing by following a bold nonconformity. Without making any fuss and avoiding unnecessary friction, one my purse one’s independent path and choose one’s own goals. The average, the normal, is not to be taken as the true standard. One must walk at one’s own pace, not society’s hasty trot. One must choose one’s own road, not the most trodden one. The way of life which one’s neighbours follow does not suit one, so one must alter it. One hold the desire to fashion oneself creatively into something better than one is at present, something nobler, wiser, and more perceptive. However, they hold no such desire, are content with static existence. One must be willing and even determined to think and feel differently from those around one. How can it be otherwise when one’s goal is different from theirs, too? #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
So far as a convention is reasonable and helpful, one will respect it, but when it becomes a hollow formality or stuffy pomposity, one will not. Like the prophets with whom Jeremiah fights in our text, the ministers of the word have ceased to ask, to cry for, a word from the Lord. They claim to have it as their possession, and since the Word of God can never be a possession, the words they say are not a word from the Lord. We have received it. However, as it has been distorted in the mouths of the preachers, so it has been resisted in the ears of the listeners, that is, in all of us. We hear it, but we cannot perceive it. As Christians we do not reject it, but it has lost its voice, that voice with which Jahweh poke into the hearts of the prophets, that voice with which the Spirit spoke into the hearts of the disciples. We hear the words which have been said before. However, we do not feel that they speak to our situation, and out of the depth of our situation. They may even produce torturing doubts and drive us to task passionately for a word from the Lord against what we have received as the Word of God, in the Bible, and Church. For there is no word from the Lord except the word which is spoke now and is spoken by us? There is only one answer: By keeping ourselves open when it comes to us! This is not easy. We try to resist it, and if it is too strong for us we try to falsify it. We may be in a situation out of which we cannot extricate ourselves. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
A great cycle has ended, and even years ago one has felt it closing without understanding it was a cycle at all. So the word from the Lord comes as a word of judgment and we cannot take it. Or the word which comes to us requests a radical change in our ways of life and thought. However, this we cannot achieve, and we back into our habits of good and evil, of right and wrong. Or we are in doubt and guilt and despair, and the word comes to us and tells us that we can say yes to ourselves because an eternal yes has been said to us and of us. However, we resist the word which demands of us the courage to say yes to ourselves because we are in love with out doubt and out guilt and our despair. We go into the fire or we go into the legend. Some choose to memorize the laws, perfect their performance of the ceremonial incantations, the rituals, and the prayers. Some see the greatest Sabbats one has ever been witness to. And they learn the most powerful and skillful and beautiful beings one is ever to know. Many learn so well that one has become a missionary sent out to gather the vagrant Children of Darkness into covens, and guide others in the performance of the Sabbat, and the workings of the Dark Trick when the World and the flesh of the Devil call for it to be done. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
In Spain and in Germany and in France, I had taught the Dark blessings and Dark Rituals, and I had known savage and tenacious Children of Darkness, and dim flames had flared in me in their company and in those moments when the coven surrounded me, comforted by me, deriving its unity from my strength. I had learned to summon those who truly wished to die. Dazzling visions I have, if they should want to receive, but I did not move towards them nor even close my arms around them. Drawn inexorably towards me, it was they who embraced me. It seemed to me in the best of these moments my way was profoundly spiritual, uncontaminated by the appetites and confusion that made up the World, despite the carnal rapture. It is not easy to keep oneself open for a word from the Lord. And nobody can make it easier for us by giving us the direction in which to listen. No fixed place can be named, either in our religious tradition or in our cultural creations, or in the depth of our souls. However, for this very reason, no place is excluded from communicating to us a word from the Lord. It is always present and tries always to be perceived by us. It is like the air, surrounding us, omnipresent, trying to enter every space. It is the empty space in our souls into which it tries to enter here and now. So the last question is: Is there any empty space in your soul? #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
Without a soul opened for it, no word from the Lord can be received. Listening with an open soul, keeping an empty space in our inner life, sharpening our spiritual hearing: this is the only thing we can do. However, this is much. And blessed are those whose minds and hearts are open. Do devils love each other? Do they walk arm in arm in hell saying, “Ah, you are my friend, how I love you,” tings like that to each other? It was a rather detached intellectual question I was asking, as I did not believe in hell. However, it was a matter of a concept of evil, was it not? All the creatures in hell are supposed to hate one another, as all the saved hate the damned, without reservation. I had known that all my life. It had terrified me as a child, the idea that I might go to Heaven and my neighbour might go to hell and that I should hate her. I could not hate her. And what if we were in hell together? I now know, whether I believe in hell or not, that we can love people who dedicate themselves to evil, that in being dedicated to evil, one does not cease to love. Or so it seemed for that brief instant. However, do not start crying again. I cannot abide all this crying. So far conformity connotes pretense and insincerity and timid blind imitation, one is not one to favour it; but so far as it connotes decency in behaviour, consideration for others, and experience-tested proven standards, one is for it. One must accept the fact that one is not, and does not want to be, like the majority of people. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
I speak the truth and you know. And what you will never know is the full depth of each other’s hatreds and resentments. Or suffering. Or love. The superior person always has a choice facing one: is one to live in that way others live in order to please them or is one to live in the way one’s own standards call for? If one lets them pull one down one loses what has taken one many, many years to develop. Somewhere at some point one must take one’s stand, must plant one’s feet and refuse to budge any farther. The ideal World will be one in which the seeker can live without becoming Worldly, where one can fulfill one’s social obligations without becoming a slave to social conventions. The philosopher’s brake defiance of stuffy herd thought has a beneficial spirit behind it and not a negative one. When mortals falls away from the false standards set by materialism, one falls into conflict with the crippling conventions of one’s time. Therefore, let us keep open our ears and let us keep open our hearts, and ask with great seriousness and great passion: Is there a word from the Lord, a word for me, here and now, a word for our World in this moment? It is there, it tries to come to you. Keep open for it! Who can love us, you and I, as we can love each other? #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
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Without Pain We Would Become a Nation of Zombies—Some Critics Believe We Have Already Arrived at that State!
Amazing how the mind works kind of like a puzzle and as it grows, as your neurons produce more synapses which have dendrites. My guidance is what you need. You have only begun your adventure and you have no beliefs to hold you. You cannot live without some guidance. We need to understand the function of illness and health in a culture. The disease itself is not the ultimate enemy. It may actually be a blessing in disguise in that it forces the person, as tuberculosis did to me, to take stock of his life and to reform his style of work and play. Having a disease in one way of resolving a conflict situation. Disease is a method of thinking one’s World so that, with lessened responsibilities and concerns, the person has a better chance of coping successfully. Health, on the contrary, is a freeing of the organism to realize its capacities. I believe that people utilize disease in the same way older generations used the devil—as an object on which to project their hated experiences in order to avoid having to take responsibility for them. However, beyond giving a temporary sense of freedom from guilt feeling, these delusions do not help. Health and disease are part and parcel of our continuous process throughout life of making ourselves adequate to our World and our World adequate to ourselves. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Nor is pain the ultimate enemy. Americans are probably the most pain-conscious people on the face of the Earth. For years we have had it drummed into us—in print, on radio, over television, in everyday conversation—that any hint of pain is to be banished as though it were the ultimate evil. Leprosy is such a dreaded disease because of the fact that the affected person has lost the sense of pain and has no signal to tell one how and when to take care of the infected parts. We consume in this country a fabulous number of tranquilizers in the process of blocking out pain. Has this been the danger all along, the trigger of our fear? Even as we recognize it, we are yielding, and it seems the great lessons of our life have all been learned through the renunciation of fear. Fear is one again breaking the shell around us so that something else can spring to life. The interplay of pain and pleasure, and the dependence of one on the other–never, never in all our existence, not mortal or immortal, have we been threatened with an intimacy quite like this. Many of us, for example, want to know why beauty exists, why nature continues to contrive it, and what is the link between the life of a tree and its beauty, and what connects the mere existence of the sea or a lightning storm with the feelings these things inspire in us? #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
If God does not exist, if these things are not unified into one metaphorical system, the why do they retain for us such a symbolic power. What is the lantern by which we see the Devil’s Road, by what lantern have many traveled it? What have people learned besides devil worship and superstition? What do we know about other humans and how they came into existence? Give that to us, and it might be worth something. And then again, it might be worth nothing. How strange would appear to be this thing that mortals call pleasure! And how curiously is it related to what is thought to be its opposite, pain! The two will never be found together in a mortal, and yet if you seek one and obtain it, you are almost bound always to get the other as well, just as though they were both attached to one and the same head. Wherever the one is found, the other follows up behind. So, in my case, since I had pain in my leg as a result of the fetters, pleasure seems to have come to follow it up. Pain is a sensitizer in life. In running away from pain we lose our vitality, our capacity genuinely to feel and even to love. I am not saying that pain is a good thing in itself. I am saying that pain and the relief from pain paradoxically go together. They are the bow and the string of Heraclitus. Without pain we would become a nation of zombies. Some critics believe we already have arrived at that state. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
There is a common illusion that medical technology is wiping out one disease after another—such original lethal scourges as tuberculosis, which supposedly claimed the life 2nd President of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, William Wirt Winchester, in 1880. That is why in memory of her husband, Mrs. Sarah Winchester donated over $1,00,000.00 ($25,053,725.49 adjusted for inflation) to the General Hospital Society of Connecticut, for the care and treatment of tuberculosis patients. The clinic still proudly exists today as part of the Yale New Haven Medical Center. Infantile paralysis along with tuberculosis being among the recent examples—that we need only to wait, hoping we live long enough until medicine vanquishes all diseases. However, this illusion rests on a serious misunderstanding of the functions of illness and health in any human society. However, physicians must resist the idea that technology will some day abolish disease because as long as humans feel threatened and helpless, they will seek the sanctuary that illness provides. And as the population grows and we cure more diseases, other symptoms will pop up to cure the disease that overpopulation is causing the planet to suffer from. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch the people. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Not only do physicians need to resist this illusion, but even more do play people, to whom the idea that medical technology will ultimately save them is the most powerful rationalization for evading their own responsibility for their health. For human beings live—it is their destiny to do so—delicately balanced between health and illness, and this balance is what is important. There is no doubt that we, as a race, are getting healthier. However, will I be misunderstood when I affirm that the possibilities of illness get proportionately greater at the same time? Certainly, there is just as much consulting with doctors as there was one hundred years ago. What seems to be occurring is the shift in the kinds of illness from infectious diseases—which attack the person from the outside—to internal diseases like heart attacks, hypertension, and strokes—which are intimately related to anxiety and stress. The latter are the greatest killers of our day. Illness and health are complexly balanced in each of us, and taking responsibility, so far as we can, gives us some possibility of restoring the balance when it goes awry. It is not by accident that so many of our greatest persons have struggled with diseases all their lives. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Noting the large number of important creative human beings who have had tuberculosis, a physician some years ago wrote a book entitled Tuberculosis and Genius in which he argued that the tubercular bacilli must eject some serum into the blood to produce the genius. This explanation seems to me absurd. It makes much more sense to hold that they way of life of the genius—intensive work, unquenchable enthusiasm, the fire in the brain—puts too much of a strain on the balance, and hence the individual becomes ill as a necessary way of withdrawing into oneself for a times. The struggle between health and illness is part of the source of creativity. Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Mary Baker Eddy, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust and Elizabeth Barrett Browning all suffered severe illness and met in constructively. George Pickering, who suffered from his own osteoarthritic hips as an ally, which he puts to bed when they get painful; and in bed he cannot attend committee meetings or see patients or entertain visitors. However, these the ideal conditions for creative work: freedom from intrusion, freedom from the ordinary chores of life. #RandolpHarris 6 of 13
Sometimes when in pain or under the weather, one way to treat it I by becoming aware that you are involved in a fight and to pray for a cure. For ten minutes each day, focusing on your body being healed. That is a way to be conscious of and handle the consciousness of your illness or pain without letting it overcome you. One will be better, but in order to contrive with one’s body, to impose one’s wishes upon it or to cede prudently to its will. It is important to devote as much as one can into regulating one’s World, in building the being who you are, and in embellishing one’s life. What am I? Is such an ancient and perennial question only because it has to be answered by each individual for oneself. If one finds the true answer, one will find also that one cannot really transfer it to another person but only its idea, its mental shadow. That too may be valuable to others, but it is not the same. Surely the human race has by this time, by this late century in history found the truth? Why, then, does the mortal who wants it have to make one’s own personal search all over again? It is because one must know it for oneself within oneself. You yourself are your own guru. Be that. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
One who seeks the truth about these matters will discover that it is contrary to current opinion, and therefore one will have to discover it by oneself and for oneself. One should verify the truth not by reference to book or bible but by reference to one’s own private experience. There is no room in this school for those who are ready to dispose of life’s problems with secondhand judgment. The need of individual thinking is vital here. Humanity will not be saved in groups or by organizations. It will be saved individual by individual. Being true to oneself brings happiness. Being indifferent to the criticisms of those who misunderstand brings freedom from anxiety on their account. Walking the streets in a spirit of independences, enables us to walk as a billionaire! If they will, let others sacrifice themselves to snobbery; let us be free. Only when the feet rest can we bring the mind to rest—unless we are Attained Ones! We can be devout and dignified but we need not therefore be dull. I do not deny that the drift of several movements which are in the World’s eye today, is toward this idea of greater spirituality. However, whereas they are confined in their search by attachment to a set creed, or a particular philosophy, or even some one person, we propose to pursue an absolutely independent quest—one limited in its width by no qualifications or conditions. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
There are not concrete threats against life and well-being, there is not a depressing guilt feeling or a despair about ourselves. There is not a disintegrating doubt or an intolerable emptiness. There is not an extreme situation. Does this mean that there is no desire to ask for a word from the Lord? Are the situations which are not extreme situations, deprived of a word out of the dimension of the eternal? Is God silent if the foundations of our existence are not shaken? A hard question, and answered in many different ways! How would we answer? I shall never forget the word of a wise old man who said to my grandfather when I was still a child, “I need somebody who I can than when a great joy is given to me.” Can we share this experience? Do we remember such moments in which the eternal made itself felt to us through the abundance or greatness or beauty of the temporal? I believe that none of us is completely without such experiences. However, did we not say that a word from the Lord is the eternal cutting into the temporal does not mean negating it. This can mean, and this is does mean whenever we are driven into an ultimate situation. There are in everybody’s life such situations, and they are frequent in mortal’s tragic history. However, the eternal can also cut into the temporal by affirming it, by elevating a piece of it out of the ordinary context of temporal things and events, making it translucent for the Divine glory. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Without such moments, life would be poor and sad; there would be on creations in which the greatness of life is expressed. However, they exist, and the eternal shines through them; they can become a word from the Lord to us. However, still some of you are thinking: All this may be as you say, but it remains strange to us. Neither in ultimate situations nor in moments of a great elevation has the eternal cut into our temporal existence. We never got a word from the Lord. Maybe you did not hear it. However, certainly it was spoken to you. For there is always a word from the Lord, a word that has been spoken. The problem of mortals is not that God does not speak to one: God does speak to everyone who has a human countenance. For this is what makes one a human. One who is not able to perceive something ultimate, something infinitely significant, is not a mortal. Mortals are human because one is able to receive a word from the dimension of the eternal. The question is not that humankind has not received any word from the Lord; the question is that it has been received and resisted and distorted. This is the predicament of all of us. Human existence is never without that which breaks vertically into it. Mortals are never without a manifestation of that which is ultimately serious and infinitely meaningful. One is never without a word from the Lord and one never ceases resisting and distorting it, both when one has to hear it and when one has to say it. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Every Christian, and especially every Christian minister, should be aware of this: We resist and distort the word from the Lord not only when we hear it, but also when we say it. When we ask why our message of the Word of God is rejected, we often find that one does not reject that for which we stand, but the way in which we stand for it. Many of those who reject the Word of God reject it because the way we say it is utterly meaningless to them. They know the dimension of the eternal, but they cannot accept our names for it. If we cling to their words, we may doubt whether they have received a word from the Lord. If we meet them as persons, we know they have. There is always a word from the Lord, a word that has been spoken. The Christian Church believes that this word has a central content, and that is has the name Jesus the Christ. Therefore, the Church call not his words but his Being the Word of God. The Church believes that in his Being, the eternal has broken into the temporal in a way which once for all gives us a word, nay, the word from the Lord. It believes that whatever word from the Lord has been said in all history and in every individual life, is implied in this Word, which is not words but reality, a new reality, the reality of the eternal in the temporal, conquering the resistance and the distortions of the temporal. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
So we have not a, but the word from the Lord? As Christians we can boast that we have it? Can we really? Did we not receive the message through mortals, and are not we who heard it mortals? And does that not mean that the message, while it went through the mouths of those who said it and through the ears of us who heard it, lost is power to cut into our World and our soul? It is supposed that God will enter the being that ha been freed of I-hood or that at that point one merges into God; the other view supposes that one stands immediately in oneself as the divine One. Thus the first holds that in a supreme moment all selfishness ends because there is no longer any duality; the second, that there is no truth in selfishness at all because in truth there is no duality. The first believes in the unification, the second in the identity of the human and the divine. Both insist on what is beyond I and You: for the first this comes to be, perhaps in ecstasy, while for the second it is there all along and reveals itself, perhaps as the thinking subject beholds its self. Both annul relationship—the first, as it were, dynamically, as the I is swallowed by the soul, which then becomes a united being; the second, as it were statically, as the I is freed, becomes a self, and recognizes itself as the only being. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
The doctrine of dependence considers the I-supporter of the World-arch of pure relation as so weak and insignificant that one’s ability to support the arch ceases to be credible, while the one doctrine of immersion does away altogether with the arch in its perfection and the other one treats it as a chimera that has to be overcome. The doctrines of immersion invoke the greater epigrams of identification—one of them above all the Johannine “I and the Father are one,” and the other one the doctrine of Sandilya: “The All-embracing is my self in the inner heart.” The paths of these two epigrams are diametrically opposed. The former (after a long subterranean course) had its source in the myth-sized life of a person and then unfolds in a doctrine. The second emerges in a doctrines and culminates (provisionally) in the myth-sized life of a person. On these paths the character of each epigram is changed. The Christ of the Johannine tradition, the Word that has become flesh but once, takes us to Eckhart’s Christ whom God begets eternally in the human soul. The formula of the coronation of the self in the Upanishads—“That is the actual, it is the self, and you are” takes us far more quickly to the Buddhistic formula of deposition: “A self and what pertains to the self are not to be found in truth and actuality.” Beginning and end of both paths have to be considered separately. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
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You Would See an Illumination that is All Your Own—Somber, Yes, but Light and Beauty Come Together in You in a Thousand Different Patterns!
Natural enough was not it, that one of his own should take him away from this place where mortals would sooner or later have approached him, driven him stumbling away. He gave no resistance to me. In a moment he was standing on his own feet. And then he walked drowsily beside me, my arm about his shoulder, bolstering him and steadying him until we were moving away from the Palais Royal, towards the rue St.-Honore. Let us single out one aspect of that revolution, acupuncture, as represented by Dr. Harold Bailen, a doctor of Western cardiology who later became an acupuncturist. His shift to acupuncture occurred because of his growing conviction that the model of Western medicine was at best incomplete and at worst simply wrong. The sickness itself is not the enemy. Rather the wrong way of life is. Western medicine, being disease-oriented, blocks off the symptom with which patients come to the doctor, whereas Eastern medicine, with a tradition of thousands of years behind it, asks: What is the symptom trying to tell us? The symptom is the right-brain language—in its pain, ache, often remarks to patients, “Is not it marvelous that your body is so bright that it can speak to you in that language?” #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
In contrast to the left brain, from which language, logic, and rationality largely spring, the right-brain is the side that communicates in fantasies, dreams, intuition—and symptoms. The symptom is a red warning light. Right-brain language cannot be attacked from a purely rational, left-brain point of view. Acupuncture enhances communication between the right and left brain, states Dr. Bailen. It synthesizes this information, something like an altered state of consciousness. The aim of acupuncture is to stimulate, through the use of the needles, the energy circuits of the body so the body will be energized to cure itself. These circuits, called meridians, are not synonymous with the neural pathways of the body. The most accepted theory these days is that acupuncture activates endorphins, a morphinelike hormonal substance in the body. Dr. Rene Dubos, who is not an acupuncturist, describes this well: “Acupuncture can trigger the release of pituitary endorphin which, somehow, gains access to the cells of the spinal cord and can thus exert an opiate-like effect on the perception of pain. It is not too far-fetched to assume that, as in the case of other hormones, mental attitudes can affect the secretion of endorphin and thereby the patient’s perception of disease.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Dr. Dubos goes on to say that endorphin acts not only on the mechanisms of pain itself, but also inhibits the emotional response to pain and, therefore, to suffering. Hence, the demonstrated anti-pain effect of acupuncture as used by a number of dentists in their work. Acupuncture requires that the person being treated not simply be a “patient,” but that one’s body and one’s consciousness—meaning one’s whole self—be an integral part of the treatment. It is not simply done to a patient, but requires the patient’s awareness of one’s freedom and responsibility at every point. If the patient gets this message loudly and clearly, Dr. Bailen states, one is confronted with a choice point. This may take the form of a question to himself: “Oh, my God. Do I want to get rid of this?” Occasionally patient (generally arthritics) become better, get the insight, and then stop the treatment with the conclusion “It is easier for me to bear the pain than to make the change.” They had become so rigid, so bound by habit, and had gotten so much secondary gain, such as being taken care of, out of the ailment that they chose not to change their way of life. This is a conscious, responsible choice. The person is no longer in one’s victim role. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
This very much like the goal of psychotherapy, in my judgment. The purpose of psychotherapy is not to cure the clients in the conventional sense, but to help them become aware of what they are doing and to get them out of the victim role. Its purpose is to help the disturbed one get to the stage where one is free to choose one’s own way of life, as far as that is realistically possible, and to accept one’s situation in life, as far as that is unavoidable. To illustrate the choice point, I will cite an experience of Rollo May. The problem—or the symptom—with which he went to Dr. Bailen for treatment was tachycardia, which he had had since he was four years old. Though it had not handicapped him seriously as an adolescent, during the last years it had gotten severe enough to cause fainting and even more dangerous symptoms. He has been put on Inderal, one of the drugs which controls the beat of the heart. When he began he was on six Inderal (each one 10 milligrams) a day. This, indeed, did control his heartbeat, butt at the price of shutting off his brain. He felt like a zombie. The following are notes he made at the time of his acupuncture. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
This past Monday I felt very good after the acupuncture treatment, and my mood continued to be excellent on the morning of Tuesday. I was already down to one Inderal a day after several months of treatment. I decided then to cut the Inderal out entirely. However, by noon, when I was feeling high because of the possibility of curing the tachycardia entirely, I began to get a strange feeling of deep and pervasive loneliness. I paced back and forth in my office trying to figure out what this might be. There was no particular reason why I should be lonely. However, I continued to feel as though I were in a foreign land where I could not speak the language, in a World in which I was lost and unable to communicate with anyone. I has also the strange feeling that I had lost myself; I had only half an identity. In the middle of the afternoon it occurred to me that this loneliness had come out of my fantasy that the tachycardia could be cured entirely and I would be free of it. Yes! an important part of how I had experienced my identity in the past would be gone. I had grown accustomed to this image, this myth of myself, that I was this man with this particular ailment, namely tachycardia. The ailment seemed to be my friend; it has stood by me faithfully when I was under too much stress and needed some withdrawal from the active World. Like the prisoners of the River in Sacramento, California, I had become friends with my very chains. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
That night I dreamed that I was dying. My friends were gathered together and I was going around the circle saying good-bye to them. I was crying in the dream and felt that I was saying good-bye to this World. The following night I dreamt that I was having a brain operation and part of my hair had been cut away in order for the surgeons to get the part of my skull that was going to be cut out. The chief surgeon was tall, thin man [Dr. Bailen is tall and thin]. I ran out of the operating room. When I woke up the next morning [Wednesday] my tachycardia has returned in full force; my heart was pounding at the rate of 150 a minute. The tachycardia continued to trouble me all morning. I was glad to get to Dr. Bailen’s office that afternoon; for I knew that the dreams and behavior had been a very clear, if strident, cry that I was not yet ready to give up this ailment. The loneliness, and the first dream, were saying that to give up my symptom of tachycardia would be tantamount to dying, and also surrendering the identity by which I had known myself and survived since I was a child of four. The second dream makes an even more explicit cry about parting from the tachycardia: “Not yet!” it was shouting. Dr. Bailen laughingly agreed with my interpretation that I would need another month or so before making the drastic change completely. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
The hanging on to illnesses, or the difficulty in asserting one’s freedom and responsibility toward illness, has been well known through history and literature. Jean-Jacques Rousseau remarks about the tendency of human beings “to run to meet their chains thinking they secure their freedom.” Even in the Declaration of Independence our forefathers recognized this truth: “All experience hat shown that humankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed.” Thomas Mann shows in one of his stories how we make a way of life out of our own or others’ sickness. In “Tobias Mindernickel,” he pictures the dog as overly independent, a longer and not very friendly toward its master. In an accident the dog breaks its two front legs. The man then puts it in bed beside him nurses it through the illness. Finally, wen the dog recovers and is able to run around as used to be its wont, the man no longer has the animal to care for nor the animal’s friendliness and dependency upon him. He is beside himself. Unable to stand his present isolation, the man takes a hammer and breaks the dog’s legs all over again. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
The moral of this story is applicable to the multitude of relationship in our World in which marriages, friendships, dependencies of various are kept together essentially by the need to be care for on the part of one member and the need to take care of on the part of the other. On the healthy side this is the comradeship we experience in comforting each other as we embrace cold and lonely destinies we cannot change. On the unhealthy side, it is the self-limitations built into the World by persons who have suffered illnesses are loathe to give up their dependency when the possibility of freedom does open up again. One must remember that one has set one’s feet upon a path, and one has begun to move on that path. One must continue to do so. One must not desert the Quest under any circumstances. He must go on until the goal is reached. It is impossible in life to avoid at some period or other difficulties, trials, handicaps, obstacles, temptations, and so on. They must come, but that is no reason why anyone should give up the Quest. One should stick to the Quest for truth in spite of all that is happenings to one. If one gets a sense of failure—and one may get it—or a sense of intense depression, one may think that the Quest is too difficult and its rewards remote, and one may be tempted to give it up. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
One must understand what is happening. One should understand that one is expressing a mood, a mood of depression and a sense of failure. However, one should remember that it is just a mood; it will pass away. And so one can say to oneself: “Very well, I will not occupy myself with thoughts of the Quest for the present. I can feel no enthusiasm for it.” Very well, but one must not give up the Quest. One should realize that one is doing it for the present, that tomorrow or next week or next month or even next year one will take it up and continue, that one is not giving it up, that one is just laying low, so to speak, for a while, but keeping in the back of one’s mind that one is sticking to the Quest, even though for a while one has to give up conscious effort. If one feels that one has failed, if one feels that one has sinned, even these are no reasons why one should give up the Quest for God. One may fall a thousand times. That does not justify one’s giving up the Quest. One must pick oneself up and try for the thousand-and-first time. There is no steady, smooth progression to he goal. It is not an easy path. One walks, and there is no possibility of moving towards the goal without meeting with hindrances and rebuffs. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
And one has to learn to be patient and to be tolerant with oneself, not to withdraw because one meets with those rebuffs or because one becomes dissatisfied with oneself. One must not give up. One can wait, and then one can continue, even if one falls, still one can say one is destined to succeed the thousand-and-first times, it may be that one is destined to succeed the thousand-and-first time. So one must try, because one never knows which of one’s efforts is going to be a successful one; and if one persists, there will come a time when this a time when this effort will and must succeed. It is as though the gods like to play with one for a while to try one’s patience and endurance, just to see how keenly one wants this attainment. If one gives up at the first few hindrances or rebuffs, it means that one is not so very keen after all; but if one can endure and keep on, and keep om, and still keep on, no matter what happens, well then, the gods say, here is someone who really wants truth, so we must give it to one. That is the attitude which one must develop. It does not matter how troubled one is personally or how dark circumstances are: they will change because they must change. The wheel of destiny is turning all the time. So one must not let circumstances or one’s own inner moods deter one from continuing on the path. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
As a matter of fact, once one has begun on the right-hand path, there is no turning back. One has accepted the responsibility, and one will have to go on with it—and if one tried to turn back, what happens is that one meets with nothing but suffering and disappointment in order to force one to return to the path. So, it is really serious undertaking to enter upon this path, because one has to continue, and the gods will give one no rest if one runs away from it once one has really set one’s foot on it. If one allows other people to influence one to abandon a worthy endeavour, one must blame only oneself, only one’s own weakness, not them. If, too, one allows obstructive circumstances to influence one in the same way, one is again to blame. This fault is harder to see and to admit than the first one. However, the Quest cannot be played with, nor undertaken only for one’s easier and more comfortable hours. It is a master to whom one has been indentured for lifelong obedience. It is a duty from which one must let nothing swerve one. If the quest becomes too arduous one can always take a holiday. It would be foolish, in the end futile, to give up altogether. Hope is the instinctive turning of the flower to the Sun. It bestows inspiring strength on the weak and gallant endurance on the sorrowful. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Hope is a way up from flinty tracts to the level plateau where the worst troubles vanish. And those of us who have planted our feet on the grander path that shall lead one day to ultimate wisdom, have to go on—whether it be through sorrow or joy, weakness or strength, World-turmoil or World-peace. For us there is not turning back. Once one has solemnly made this momentous decision and has reverently dedicated oneself to the quest, one has to remain loyal to it under all the experiences of pleasure and pain, temptation and tribulation which will henceforth be brought to bear upon one. To desert the quest at any point will only delay one’s movement and increase one’s suffering, for one will find in the end that no other ways is open to one except the way of repentance and return. One is indeed free who, unpossessed by one’s own possessions, unswayed by one’s own family, undeflected by one’s own desires, remains ever loyal to the quest. Once one has started on this quest in earnest, one will never be able to leave it again. One may try to do so for a time and to escape its claims but in the end one will fail. For some power which one cannot control will eventually and often abruptly emerge in the midst of one’s mental or emotional life and control one. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
This quest is an irreversible journey. Once you have really started on it there is no turning back. You may believe that you have given it up in despair or turned away from it for a Worldier existence, but you are only fooling yourself. For one day either a deep repressed hunger will suddenly reassert itself or else a cataclysmic turn of events will drive you back to seek this last and enduring refuge of mortal. Where is the truth to be found in all this bewildering array of doctrines, creeds, claims, systems, and beliefs? That is the reaction of many young aspirants toward a life higher than the materialistic one offered by society today. Theirs is the choice: the responsibility cannot be evaded. There may be long mental struggle or easy swift emotional acceptance but the consequences belong to them. Though all these things they learn, develop, discover, and find their way in the end. “Charity is the pure love of Christ, and it endureth forever; and whoso is found possessed of it at the last day, it shall be well with one. Wherefore, my beloved brethren, pray unto the Father with all the energy of heart, that ye may be filled with this love, which one hath bestowed upon all who are true followers of his Son, Jesus Christ; that ye may become the sons of God; that when one shall appear we shall be like him, for we shall see him as he is; that we may have this hope; that we may be purified even as he is pure. Amen,” reports Moroni 7.47-48. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
I Roamed with My Mortal Attendants through a Paradise of Material Wealth, Claiming Everything that I Wanted!
He watches. Sometimes he lets himself be seen. However, when he discovers what is really going on here, only God knows what he will do. Of the countless empirical studies which bear this out, I will cite an article from the Journal of the American Medical Association, which was reported in the daily press under the caption “Nice Patients Die Faster.” This was a study of how two groups of women dealt with terminal breast cancer. “Feisty, combative women survived longer than trusting, complacent women” was the conclusion. The women who survived longest were, as a group, more anxious, depressed, hostile, and alienated about their illness tan those who succumbed faster. The feisty women seemed to maintain a combative posture rather than being hopeless victims. “They were going down fighting!” wrote Dr. Derogatis, the psychologist who made the study. “The women who survived longer had mechanisms of externalizing their conflicts, fears and angers about the disease. They were more demanding of physicians, less satisfied with treatment and were rated as less well adjusted. By contrast, the other woman—who died sooners—felt less anxious and more optimistic towards their doctors, and rated themselves as more content on a self-evaluation. I believed they has divested themselves of the responsibility of fighting the disease.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
Now breast cancer does indeed seem to be a blow of fate. Yet the women who could assert their freedom and take responsibility for the illness—and this for fighting it—have a better chance of living. I do not wish my emphasis on responsibility to be confused with that of expressed sequence tag (a unique stretch of DNA within a coding region of a gene that is useful for identifying full-length genes and serves as a landmark of mapping). Is the unborn baby the cause of its brain defect because of its mother’s malnutrition? To hold that we are responsible for everything that happens to us is to show to what absurdities when we have no understanding of our destiny. Our freedom—and, therefore, our sense of responsibility—exists only as we acknowledge and engage our destiny. Norman Cousin’s book Anatomy of an Illness excellently describes his own encounter with a vital problem of health. Cousins was pronounced incurably ill of a rare disease of the collagen tissues which he had developed in Russia. Possessing a remarkably strong will to live, he asked himself the question: “If negative emotions produce negative chemical changes in the body would not the beneficial emotions produce beneficial chemical changes? It is possible that love, hope, faith, laughter, confidence, and the will to live have therapeutic value?” #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
Norman Cousins tells us how, when the specialists pronounced him doomed, he summoned his own concern with the problem and his will to health. He moved out of the inhospitable hospital and into a hospitable hotel and began a new regimen, in consultation with his own physician. Cousins went on a program consisting of large quantities of vitamin C and equally large amounts of health-giving laughter. His story is the documentation of how one individual asserted his limited freedom and his responsibility for confronting his destiny, cruel and unfair as that destiny was. When asked by a friend whether he had not been terribly discouraged, Cousins answered that he was, “especially at the start when I expected my doctor to fix my body as though it were an automobile engine that needed mechanical repair, like cleaning out the carburetor, or reconnecting the fuel pump.” When one discusses the need for the individual to take responsibility for one’s own health, the tendency of listeners is to interpret the discussion as an attack on modern medicine. An address of Roll May’s called, “Personal Freedom and Caring,” before the convention of the American Occupational Therapy Association was reported in a newspaper under the caption “Caring Physicians Rob Patients of Their Freedom, Responsibility.” This was, if anything, directly opposite to the meaning of his address. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
Rollo May was not attacking medicine as such. None of us can escape marveling at and valuing the tremendous progress of modern medicine in the development of medical technology and the new drugs. Among his friends who are advocates of holistic medicine, his task is to caution against viewing the medical profession as the enemy. “Talk of enemies does not sit well,” Norman Cousins says, “in a movement in which spiritual factors are no less vital than practical ones.” In does no good furthermore, to refuse on principle to take a prescribed drug because one wants to preserve one’s freedom, nor to refuse to go to a doctor when such is indicated. We cannot withdraw from the contemporary World, hermitlike, to contemplate our own navels. Furthermore, such revolt smacks too much of the Luddites, eighteenth-century workers who, realizing the threat to their livelihood in the industrial revolution, armed themselves with crowbars and pickaxes and attached the machines. This rebellion does no good beyond the self-righteous feelings it gives the rebels themselves. In a given illness I believe one’s responsibility to oneself is to get the best medical advice available. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
However, they very progress of modern medicine makes our emphasis here all the more necessary, since this progress increases the mystification and authoritarianism that people have thrust upon the medical profession the medical profession has assumed all too readily. When I lived in a large metropolis, I found myself, when I needed medical service, phoning my own physician to find out which specialist I should go to. The “laying on of hands,” which has classically been central in the healing profession, has now become all too often the laying on of techniques. Since assuming the role of priest, as doctors began to do as early as Paracelsus in the sixteenth century, the tendency has been for people to see in the physician the god who has power over life and death. However, as long as physicians are made god on people’s conscious level, they will also be made the devil on an unconscious level. The rash of malpractice suits in the last fifty years shows the disillusionment and rage that people feel as this belief in the devil begins to surface. When I told my present physician of my intention to work also with an acupuncturist on the problem of tachycardia, he well remarked, “Western medicine is on the verge of a great revolution.” He did not mean in the sense of new discoveries in techniques. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
The doctor meant, rather, a revolutionary change in the philosophical and ethical basis of medicine, a change in the cultural context in which doctors operate. This revolution is seen most dramatically in the incursion of Eastern insights into Western medical treatment. The complete acceptance of philosophy involves a complete reordering of a mortal’s life. One’s conduct will be motivated by new purpose which will themselves be the result of one’s new values. One will stop acting impulsively and start acting rationally. However, in actual practice we find that the acceptance of philosophy is never so complete as this. The individual will bring it into a part of life but not into the whole of their lives. It is only gradually absorbed and the ideals which are sought to be realized are only gradually set up. Those whom embark on the quest must pay for their journey with personal self-denial and unceasing self-struggle. Knowledge of the higher laws, consciousness of the higher self, bring special obligations. To apply them carries new responsibilities to live according to them. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
There will be murmurings, complaints, and disheartenment; there may even be short or long lapses; but one will understand sooner or later that one will have to go through with this quest till the very end. Something that is certainly not one’s ordinary self drives one to do so. Indeed, one power of choice or freedom of will have become irrelevant to this particular matter. Is there any word from the Lord? This is a question asked by mortals in all periods of history. It has been asked by kings in moments of danger. They asked it of priests and prophets. It has been asked by people in all ages and places in times of unrest. They asked it of extraordinary men and women, often of those considered to be abnormal, of ecstatics and hysterics. It has been asked by individuals in moments of great personal decisions. They asked it of holy Scriptures which should give a special word to them, from saints and inner voices. What about ourselves? Have we never asked for a word from the Lord? Many, certainly, will answer with a definite “No.” They will tell us that they always decided for themselves, using their own reasonable judgment, based on experience, knowledge, and intelligence. Perhaps they impress us. Perhaps we are ashamed to confess that sometimes we have asked for a word from the Lord. However, let us wait with out answer until we have found out what these words mean. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
We should not be misled by the phrase, “word from the Lord.” It sounds as if we turned to a Heavenly authority after all others, including the authority of reason, have failed. It sounds as if we asked the Lord of providence to give us for a moment a glimpse into what he plans for us, individually and in history. However, such a favor is not granted. The answers given by seers, ecstatics, books and inner voices are mostly ambiguous, open to different interpretations, so that we would have to ask for a second Divine word to interpret the first, and so on indefinitely. Or, these answers are clear and agree with the best wisdom we can have without them. Therefore, I repeat: Let us not be misled by the phrase “word from the Lord.” It is not an oracle-word telling us what to do or to expect. Then what is it? It is the voice from another dimension than that in which we ordinarily live. It cuts into the dimension of things and events which we call our World. It does not help us to manage things within this dimension more successfully than before. It does not add to our knowledge of the factors which influence a situation, it does not remove the responsibility for our decisions. It does something else. It elevates the situation in which we have to decide, into the light of a new dimension, the dimension of that which is ultimately important and infinitely significant and for which we use the word “Divine.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
So it was in the case of the king Zedekiah and of the false prophets with whom Jeremiah had to fight. The king came to Jeremiah in a hopeless situation, in a situation into which he had brought himself and his people through guilt and error and disregard of the warnings of the prophet. He was supported in his wrong decisions by nationalistic politicians who called themselves prophets without having received a word from God. They did not interpret the situation of Judah in the midst of threatening empires in its seriousness. They lacked the realism which is the quality of true prophetism. They were not able to look beyond political chances and military calculations. And so disaster attempts to get a consoling or helping word from the prophet. However, he did not get it. Out of his prison Jeremiah tells him the only thing he did not want to hear: You shall be delivered into the hand of the king of Babylon! God will not say you! And the king felt: So it is! He did not slay the prophet of doom, as present-day dictators or nationalistic mobs would do. On the contrary, he helped him out of his miserable prison. However, he did not do anything to change the situation. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
It was too late for this politically and psychologically, and the threat of the prophet, the word he has received from the Lord for Zedekiah, became a terrible reality. Yet it was spoken in vain. It has been remembered ever since, not as an interesting historical report but as an event in which the eternal gives ultimate meaning to an historical catastrophe. The many words from the Lord which are recorded in the Old Testament have the same quality. They are not promises of an omnipotent ruler replacing political or military strength. They are not advices of a Heavenly counselor, replacing intelligent human counsel. However, they are manifestations of something ultimate breaking into our existence with all its preliminary concerns and insights. They do not add something to our situation, but they add a dimension to the dimension in which we ordinarily live. The word from the Lord is the word which speaks out of the depth of our situation. It is, one could say, the deepest meaning of the situation, of every situation which comes to us in such words. It is also the depth of our own situation that speaks to us when we receive a word from the Lord. Let us imagine an hour in which we have to make an important decision, but it the choice of a vocation, be it the choice of a mate for life. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
We know most of the factors. Nevertheless, we cannot decide. The anxiety of the possible consequences in each of them. We ask friends, counsellors; we seek for counsel in ourselves. However, the anxiety of having to decide increases. And a longing grows in our souls, a longing for something that liberates us from the anxiety of the possible and gives us the courage toward the real. It is the question of our text: Is there a word from the Lord? And perhaps an answer has been received. However, it was not an oracle-word pointing to the right vocation to choose, or the right man or woman to join with. It was a voice out of the depth of our situation, elevating our concrete problems into an ultimate perspective. In doing so, it probably has devaluated some factors determining our decision and has stressed others. Or it has left the balance of possibilities unchanged, but has given us the courage to make a decision with all the risks of a decision, including error, failure, guilt. The word from the Lord, the voice out of the depth of our situations, ends the anxiety of the possible and gives the courage to affirm the real with its many questionable elements. Some of you may say: If this is what “word from the Lord” means, how can it help me in moments of decision? However, would you really want me to tell you where to turn for an oracle which would liberate you from the burden of decision? #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
Certainly, that which is weak in you would like it. However, that which is strong in you would reject it. The Lord from whom you derive a word wants you to decide for yourselves. He does not offer you a safe way. You may be wrong in your decision. However, if you realize that in you would reject it. The Lord from whom you derive a word wants you to decide for yourselves. He does not offer you a safe way. You may be wrong in your decision. However, if you realize that in relation to God mortals are always wrong. Your wrong may turn out to be right. If in the presence of the eternal you risk defeat, through your very defeat a word from the Lord has come to you. One aspect of the perfect love is our Heavenly Father’s involvement in the details of our lives, even when we may not be aware of it or understand it. We seek the Father’s divine guidance and help through heartfelt, earnest prayer. When we honor our covenants and strive to be more like our Savior, we are entitled to a constant stream of divine guidance through the influence and inspiration of the Holy Ghost. The scriptures teach us, “For your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him, and God “knoweth all things, for all things are present before God’s eyes.” The prophet Mormon is an example of this. He did not live to see the results of his work. Yet he understood that the Lord was carefully leading him along. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
When he felt inspired to include the small plates of Nephi with this record, Mormon wrote: “And I do this for a wise purpose; for thus is whispereth me, according to the workings of the Spirit of the Lord which is in me. And now, I do not know all things; but the Lord knoweth all things which are to come; wherefore, he worketh in me to do according to his will.” Although Mormon did not know of the future loss of the 116 manuscript pages, the Lord did and prepared a way to overcome that obstacle long before it occurred. The Father is aware of us, knows our needs, and will help us perfectly. Sometimes that help is given in the very moment or at least soon after we ask for divine help. Sometimes our most earnest and worthy desires are not answered in the way we hope, but we find that God has greater blessings in store. And sometimes our righteous desires are not granted in this life. Sometimes God has a greater blessing prepared for us than we initially anticipated. And sometimes our righteous petitions to God will not be granted in this life. Faith also includes trust in God’s timing. We have the assurance that his own way and in his own time, Heavenly Father will bless us and resolve all of our concerns, injustices, and disappointments. “And thus the Lord did pour out his blessings upon this land, which was choice above all other lands,” Ether 9.20. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
I roamed with my mortal attendants through a paradise of material wealth, claiming everything that I wanted. Couches and chairs, china and sliver plate, drapery and statuary—all things were mine for the taking. And in my mind I transformed the castle where I had grown up as more and more good were carried out to be crated and shipped south immediately. To little kids I sent toys of which they had never dreamed—tiny ships with real sails, dollhouses of unbelievable craft and perfection. I learned form each object I touched. And there were moments when all the color and texture became too lustrous, too overpowering. I wept inwardly. After all, where did I spend my time now? At the grandest theaters in Paris. I had the finest seats for the ballet and the opera, for the dramas of Moliere, Corneille, and Racine—it was in tragedy that two of the three great dramatist of seventeenth-century France excelled. I was hanging about before the footlights gazing up at the great actors and actresses. I had suits made in every color of the rainbow, jewels on my fingers, hairstyles of the latest fashion, shoes with diamond buckles as well as gold souls. And I had eternity to be drunk on the poetry I was hearing, drunk on the singing and the sweep of the dancer’s arms, drunk on the organ throbbing in the great cavern of the Winchester Mansion and drunk on the chimes that counted out the hours to me, drunk on the snow falling soundlessly on the gardens of the estate. And each night I was becoming less wary among mortals, more at ease with them. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
My God—What Have We Done?
Torches blazed ahead, and over a chorus of mourful wails, there came other cries, distant but filled with pain. Yet something beyond these puzzling cries had caught my attention. Amid all the foulness, I sensed a mortal was near. It was Nicolas and he was alive and I could hear him, the warm, vulnerable current of his thoughts mingled with his scent. And something was terribly wrong with his thoughts. They were chaos. Also, when I exercised my freedom and vice versa the anxiety engulfed me like a tidal wave. The anxiety came in the person of this figure whom I identified as my enemy-friend, a kind of figurative devil. It is the anxiety that comes, in varying intensity, whenever one leaps into the field of new possibilities, whenever one moves into the area of new idea or new compositions in music or a new style in art. It comes after such subconscious thoughts as “Ah, there is a new vision—nobody ever painted a scene like this before.” Then there comes the feeling “Do I want to venture out so far?” And I remind myself of all the dangers in venturing into that no man’s land. In such situations the person finds oneself adjuring oneself to calm down, not to get too excited, when getting excited in the sense of becoming inspired is exactly what, on the deepest level, one wants. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Freedom and anxiety are two sides of the coin—there is never one without the other. The anxiety is part and parcel of the vision or an idea that, in the particular form it comes to us, no one has ever thought of before. This anxiety—or dread, if we wish to translate angst that way—is a function of the freedom of imagination we must exercise in order to get any idea of significance. The dread comes with the new possibility and the risk that this leap requires. We might, like the scientists who split the atom, break through into a new land, where the usual mooring places by which we have oriented ourselves no longer even exist. Hence, the sense of alienation and bewilderment—and even the experience of intense human aloneness—that such a breakthrough brings in its train. I am told that when the scientists stood behind their glass barrier near Los Alamos and saw the first atomic explosion, the faces of a number of them turned white. One cried aloud, “My God, what have we done?” There is a rational explanation for this anxiety. We must keep in mind that the anxiety comes not from the possibility that the new idea or discovery might be wrong and useless (then it can simply be discarded), but from the possibility that it might be true, as it was, for example, with atomic fission or with Armin van Buuren’s new idea about musical harmonies. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Then one’s colleagues, the professors at one’s university, will be jolted, will be required to change their lecture notes because the possibility that there are new truths has been proven to be correct. This causes upset, which was very great indeed with the splitting of the atom. Or if one is a Nicolas Copernicus with new theory that the Earth moves around the Sun, or a Karl Marx with a radically new approach to the economic life of humankind, the uproar that accompanies the shaking of the foundations will be that much more catastrophic. Although the examples above are of great mortals, we are illustrating something that we all experience, though to a lesser degree. When he or she exercises the freedom to move out into the real World of possibility, every human being experiences this anxiety. Only by not venturing—that is, by surrendering our freedom, we can escape the anxiety. I am convinced that many people never become aware of their most creative ideas since their inspirations are blocked off by this anxiety before the ideas even reach the level of consciousness. A pressure toward conformism infuses every society. One function of any group or social system is to preserve homeostasis, to keep people in their usual positions. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The danger of freedom to the group is possessed exactly at that point: that the nonconformist will upset the homeostasis, will use one’s freedom to destroy the tired and true ways. Sokratis was condemned to drink hemlock because, so the good citizens of Athens believed, he taught false daimones (moral philosophy that defines right action as that which lead to the well-being of the individual, thus holding good behavior as an essential value) to the youth of Athens. Jesus was crucified because he upset the accepted religion of his day. Joan of Arc heard voices and was burned at the stake. Aaliyah choose the material and images she liked best and perished in a mysterious plane crash. These extreme examples are of person whose idea later become the cornerstones of our civilization. However, the fact only confirms my point. The persons whose insights are too disturbing, who bring too much of the anxiety that accompanies freedom, are put to death by their own generation, which suffers the threat caused by the Earthquake of the news ideas. However, when their ideas are crystallized into the strict and rigid doctrines of the new age and there is no chance of the dead figures rising from their silent graves to disturb the peace a new, they are worshipped by subsequent generations. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
The prototype of the person who produces something new is found in Prometheus, who created fire—or, as the myth presents it, stole it from the gods—and gave it to humankind as the beginning of human civilization. No one envies his punishment in being chained to a mountainside, where an eagle would eat away at his liver all day. At night, the liver would grow back, and the same grisly process would begin all over again the next day. This accompanies his great act of defiance, which was one aspect of Prometheus’ personal freedom. The denying of the dizziness of freedom is shown in the phrase pure spontaneity. For no one can seek that without succumbing to the dreadful implications of freedom. Even John Lilly, in his experiencing pure spontaneity in one’s stimulus-free tank, describes the great dangers therein, and one’s own great anxiety in one’s experience hovering on the edge of nonbeing, death. One may envy one’s colleagues who claim to exist in pure spontaneity and who seem to be on a perpetual high. Yes, we may envy them, but we do not love them for that. We love them for their vulnerability—which means their accepting and owning the dizziness of their freedom, their destiny which always stalks their freedom. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The legend of Icarus presents a picture of a young man refusing to accept the dizziness, or the anxiety, of freedom. Icarus that day must have felt a sense of great adventure—to be the first person who could sail high and taste the ecstasy, the sheer freedom from the bonds of the Earth, with no limits at all. For this one afternoon he was completely subject, not limited even by the distant reaches of the sky. One could order one’s Universe as one wished, could live out one’s whim and desire born in one’s own imagination. Here, indeed, was pure spontaneity. No longer part of the World, no longer subject to the laws of Earth or its destiny or the requirements of community. What exhilaration there must have been in the young man’s heart! A great dream comes true, an experience of complete freedom, pure spontaneity at last. One needs only the self-preoccupation, the refusal to consider compromise. He is like humanists of previous decades who insisted that there was no evil they need bother to consider. Human kind had done such great things in the past; why could we not overcome any and all difficulties in the future? Icarus remained as spontaneous as a child and burst into the sea to drown not as a young man, but as a child. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
When they hear these truths concerning the inward life and Universal laws, how sad, how foolish that so many people turn their heads away in indifference, in apathy, and in inertia! They believe that, even if there were any truth in them, these ideas are only for a handful of dreamers, for an esoteric cult with nothing better to do with its times and thought than to entertain them. There does not seem to be any point of contact between these ideas and their own lives, no applicability to their personal selves, and hence, no importance in them at all. How gross this error, how great this blindness! The mystic’s knowledge is full of significance for every other mortal. The mystic’s discoveries are full of value for one. Mortal’s hope for a happier existence and need of faith in Universal meaning has led one to try so many wrong turnings which brought one only father from them, that it is understandable why cynicism or indifferentism should claim so many votaries. However, this is not yet the end result. The few who today have found both hope and need adequately satisfied are presages of what must happen to the others. Even those mortals who do not believe in God are unknowingly seeking to find him or waiting for him. Every mortal has within one this divine possibility. However, if one refuses to believe it, or puts one’s faith in a hard materialism, or fails to seek for it, it will remain only latent. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
It is the thought of attaining happiness in some way which induces mortals to commit most crimes, just as it is the thought of attaining truth which induces them to hold the most materialistic beliefs. Although they see both happiness and truth from a wrong angle and so are given this deceptive result, still the essential motivation of their lives is the same as that of the questers. The segregation in thought of a spiritual elite as being the only seekers is valid only for a practical view, not for an ultimate one. Like people who are visually impaired, they seek the unseen. Like mystics they want the unknow centre of their being, but the conscious mind does not yet share in this desire. Everything else they try must in the end fail them, since life itself fails them at death. Those who do not choose to tread the path of mysticism need not therefore tread the path of mysticism need not therefore tread the path of misunderstanding it. This wisdom is latent in the bad as well as the good mortal. Any moral condition will suffice as a starting point. Jesus spoke to sinners as freely as to those of better character. One’s words were not wasted as the sequence showed. Even to those who had committed great crimes, as they as they repent and understand what repentance entails, Jesus promised salvation. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Was it for the sake of a small withdrawn spiritual elite that Jesus walked in Galilees, that Buddha wandered afoot across India, that Sokratis frequented the Agora in Athens? There is hope for all, benediction for the poor and the rich, the good and the bad, for every mortal may come into this great light. However—some mortals may come more easily, more quickly, while others may drag their way. “If anyone among you thinks that one is wise in this age, let one become a fool that one may become wise. For the wisdom of this World is folly with God,” reports 1 Corinthians 3.18-19. When a speaker in a morning chapel service used this as his text, I got a written question in class: “What do you think about this morning’s sermon?” And this was the implication: How can philosophy stand in view of Paul’s deprecating words? I want to answer by trying to interpret what I believe Paul means, not only in the passage above but in the whole context. At the end of his discussion he gives the key by saying: Let no one boast of mortals. For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the World or life or death or the present of the future, all are yours; and you are Christ’s and Christ is God’s. (I Corinthians 3.21-23.) #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Paul has asked, “Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the World?” And now he exclaims, “World and life and Apollos are yours.” This means that the wisdom of the World is ours also. How could it be otherwise? We could not even read Paul’s words without the wisdom of the World which enables us to understand ancient texts, which gives us the technical tool to spread the Christian message all over the Earth, which produces and sustains the political and educational and artistic institutions which serve and protect the Church. All this is ours. And even the different theologies are ours: the more dialectical one of Paul, the more ritualistic one of Peter, the more apologetic one of Apollos. There is only one type of theology which Paul dislikes—that which wants to monopolize the Christ and call itself the party of Christ. For each of these theologies wisdom of the World is needed; scribes are needed, debaters are needed, philosophers are needed, a language is needed to which everybody contributes. It is impossible to deny all this. However, it is possible to discredit through loose talk what one cannot avoid using at the same time. There is a deep dishonesty in the accusation against the use of historical research and philosophical thought in theology. In daily life one calls somebody dishonest who bring defamation upon those whom one uses. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
We should not commit this dishonesty in our theological work. And we cannot escape using the wisdom of this World. If we say “let us use a little of it, but not much in order to escape the dangers implied in it, this is no escape. This is certainly not what Paul means. The whole World is yours, he says, the whole life, present and future, not parts of it. These important words speak of scientific knowledge and its passion, artistic beauty and its excitement, politics and their use of power, eating and drinking and their joy, pleasures of the flesh and its ecstasy, family life and its warmth and friendship with its intimacy, justice with its charity, nature with its might and restfulness, the mortal-made World above nature, the technical World and its fascination, philosophy with its humility—daring only to call itself love of wisdom—and its profundity—daring to ask ultimate questions. In all of these things is wisdom of this World and power of this World and all these things are ours. They belong to us and we belong to them; we create them and they fulfill us. However, and this “but” of Paul’s is not one of those prepositions in which everything is taken back that was given before. The great preposition to the World which is ours gives both the foundation and the limit of the World that is ours: “And you are Christ’s,” namely, that Christ whose Cross is foolishness and weakness to the wisdom of the World. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
The wisdom of this World in all its forms cannot know God, and the power of this World with all its means cannot reach God. If they try it, they produce idolatry and are revealed in their foolishness which is the foolishness of idolatry. No finite being can attain the infinite without being broken as one who represented the World, and its wisdom and its power, was on the Cross. This is the foolishness and the weakness of the Cross which is ultimate wisdom and which is the reason that Christ is not another bearer of wisdom and power of this World but that he is God’s. The Cross makes him God’s. And out of this foolishness we win the wisdom to use what is our, the wisdom of the World, even philosophy. If it be unbroken, it controls us. If it be broken, it is ours. “Broken” does not mean reduced or emaciated or controlled, but it means undercut in its idolatic claim. Paul’s courage in affirming everything given, one’s openness towards the World, his sovereignty towards life should put to shame each of us as well as all our Churches. We are afraid to accept what is given to us: we are compulsive self-seclusion towards our World, we try to escape life instead of controlling it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
We do not behave as if everything were ours. And the Churches do so even less. The reason for this is that we and out Churches do not know as Paul did what it means to be Christ’s and because of beings Christ’s, to be God’s. Those who feel no call to develop themselves spiritually, no obligation to follow the quest, are nevertheless unwittingly doing both. Only, they are doing so at so sow and imperceptible a pace that they do not recognize the activity and the moment. All the experience of life are in the end intended to induce us to seek wholeheartedly for God. That is, to lead us to the very portal of the Quest. The vision of the tree of life shows us how the effects of casualness can lead us away from the covenant path. Consider that the rod of iron and the strait and narrow path, or the covenant path, led directly to the tree of lie, where all the blessings provided by our Savior and his Atonement are available to the faithful. If we are not careful in living our covenants with exactness, our casual efforts may eventually lead us into forbidden paths or to join with those who have already entered the great and spacious building. If not careful, we may even drown in the depths of a filthy river. “The Spirit of Christ is given to every mortal, that one may know good from evil and is sent forth by the power and gift of Christ; wherefore ye may know with a perfect know it is of God,” reports Moroni 7.16. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Randolph Harris II International Institute 