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Good Health Generally Means the Ability to Resolve Contradictions—It is a Synthesis Like Breathing!

August 6, 2019 12:14 am

God created the Universe and Time. Well, we were astonished, and we were also enthralled! Absolutely enthralled. God said to us, “Watch this, because this will be beautiful and will exceed your conceptions and expectations, as it will Mine.” It is all garbled, in countless texts throughout the World. There are texts which are irretrievable now which contained amazingly accurate information about cosmology; and there are texts that mortals know; and there are texts that have been forgotten but which can be rediscovered in time. “And when he had sent the multitudes away, he went up into a mountain apart to pray: and when the evening was come, he was there alone,” reports Matthew 14.23. He was there alone. So are we. Beings are alone because they are mortal! In some way every creature is alone. In majestic isolation every star travels through the darkness of endless space. Each tree grows according to its own law, fulfilling its unique possibilities. Animals live, fight, and die for themselves alone, confined to the limitations of their bodies. Certainly, they also appear as male and female, in families and in flocks. Some of them are gregarious. However, all of them are alone! Being alive means being in a body—a body separated from all other bodies. And being separated means being alone. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

This is true of every creature, and it is more true of humans than any other creature. One is not only alone; one also knows that one is alone. Aware of what one is, one asks the question of one’s aloneness. One asks why one is alone, and how one can triumph over one’s being alone. For this aloneness one cannot endure. Neither can one escape it. It is one’s destiny to be alone and to be aware of it. Not even God can take this destiny away from one. In the story of paradise we read—“Then the Lord God said, It is not good that man should be alone.” And as we pondered, as we opened our arms and sang and tried to comfort them, while stepping invisibly and artfully through the material of Earth, something momentous made itself known to us, shocking us out of our explorations. Before our very eyes, the Twelfth Revelation of Physical Evolution was upon us! It struck us like the light from Heaven; it distracted us from the cries of the covert invisible! It shattered our reason. It caused our songs to become laughter and wails. The Twelfth Revelation of Evolution was that of the female of the human species had begun to look more distinctly different from the male of the human species by margin so great that no other anthropoid could compare! #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

The female grew pretty in our eyes, and seductive; the hair left her face, and her limbs grew graceful; her manner transcended the necessities of survival; and she became beautiful as flowers are beautiful, as the wings of birds are beautiful! What had risen, a female tender-skinned and radiant of face. And God created the woman from the body of Adam. Here an old myth is used to show that originally there was no bodily separation between man and woman; in the beginning they were one. Now they long to be one again. However, although they recognize each other as flesh of their own flesh, each remains alone. They look at each other, and despite their longing for each other, they see their strangeness. In the story, God himself makes them aware of this fact when he speaks to each of them separately, when he makes each one responsible for one’s own guilt, when he listens to their excuses and mutual accusations, when he pronounces a separate curse over each, and leave them to experience shame in the face of their nakedness. They are each alone. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

The creation of the woman has not overcome the situation which God describes as not good for man. He remains alone. And the creation of the woman, although it provides a helper for Adam, has only presented to the one human being who is alone another human being who is equally alone, and from their flesh all other beings, each of whom will stand alone. We ask, however—is this really so? Did not God accomplish something better? Is not our aloneness largely removed in the encounter of the genders? Certainly it is during hours of communion and in moments of love. The ecstasy of love can absorb one’s own self in its union with the other self, and separation seems to be overcome. However, after these moments, the isolation of self from self is felt even more deeply than before, sometimes ever to the point of mutual repulsion. We have given too much of ourselves, and now we long to take back what was given. Our desire to protect our aloneness is expressed in the feeling of shame. When our intimate self, mental or bodily is opened, we feel ashamed. We try to cover our vulnerability, as did Adam and Eve when they became conscious of themselves. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

Thus, man and woman remain alone even in the most intimate union. They cannot penetrate each other’s innermost center. And if this were not so, they could not be helpers to each other’ they could not have human community. This is why God himself cannot liberate mortals from their aloneness: it is human’s greatness that one is centered within one’s own being. Separated from one’s World, one is thus able to look at it. Only because one can look at it can one know and love and transform it. God, in creating one the ruler of the Earth, had to separate one and thrust one into aloneness. Humans are also therefore able to be spoken to by God and by other beings. One can ask questions and give answers and make decisions. One has the freedom for good or evil. Only one who has an impenetrable center in oneself is free. Only one who is alone can claim to be a human. This is the greatness and this is he burden of being. “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.” From this primal decree millions of human beings are now liberated. More and more beings have more and more leisure. The working day grows shorter, the week end longer. More and more women are released at an earlier age from the heavier tasks of the rearing of children, in the small family of today, when kindergarten and school and clinic and restaurant come to their assistance. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

More and more people are freed for other things, released from the exhaustion of their energies in the mere satisfaction of elementary wants. No longer is the pattern so simple as that of Longfellow’s blacksmith, who something attempted, something done, had earned a night’s repose. Released from what? When necessity no longer drives, when people own long hors in which to do what they want, what do they want to do? Where necessity is heavy upon beings, they yearn for the joys of leisure. Now many have enough leisure. What are the joy they find? The shorter working day is also a different working day. Nearly all people work for others, not for themselves—not the way a person works who has one’s own little plot of Earth and must give oneself up to its cultivation. For many, work has become a routine—not too onerous, not too rewarding, and by no means engrossing—a daily routine until the bell rings and sets them free again. For what? It is a marvelous liberation for those who learn to use it; and there are many ways. It is the great emptiness for those who do not. People of a placid disposition do not know the great emptiness. When the day’s work done, they betake themselves to their quiet interests, their hobbies, their gardens or their amateur workbenches or their stamp collecting or their games or their affairs or their church activities or whatever it be. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

When they need more sting in life, they have a mild “fling,” taking a little “moral holiday.” Some find indulgence enough in the vicarious pleasure of snidely malicious gossip. Their habits are early formed and they keep a modicum of contentment. However, the number of the placid is growing less. The conditions of our civilization do not encourage that mood. For one thing, the old-time acceptance of authority, as God-given or nature-based, is much less common. Religion is for very many an ancient tale, a tale of little meaning, though the words are strong, reduced to ritual or the moral precepts of the Sunday pulpit. There is little allegiance to the doctrine that every being has allotted place. How could there be when competition has become a law of life? There is incessant movement and disturbance and upheaval. And with the new leisure there come new excitations, new stimuli to unrest. So the new leisure has brought its seeming opposite, restlessness. And because these cannot be reconciled the great emptiness comes. Faced with the great emptiness, unprepared to meet it, most people resort to one or another way of escape, according to their kind. Those who are less conscious of their need succeed in concealing it from themselves. They find their satisfaction in the great new World of means without ends. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

Those who are more conscious of their need cannot conceal it; they only distract themselves from the thought of it. Their common recourse is excitation, and they seek it in diverse ways. The first kind are the go-getters. When they are efficient or unscrupulous or both, they rise in the World. They amass things. They make some money. They win some place and power. Not for anything, not to do anything with it. Their values are relative, which means they are no values at all. They make money to make more money. They win some power that enables them to seek more power. They are practical beings. They keep right on being practical, until their unlived lives are at an end. If they stopped being practical, the great emptiness would engulf them. They are like planes that must keep on flying because they have no landing gear. The engines go fast and faster, but they are going nowhere. They make good progress to nothingness. They take pride in their progress. They are outdistancing other beings. They are always calculating the distance they have gained. It shows what can be done when you have the know-how. They feel superior and that sustains them. They stay assured in the World of means. What matters is winning. “But what good cam of it at last?” Ouoth little Peterkin. “Why that I cannot tell,” said he, “But ’twas a famous victory.” Victory for the sake of the winning, means for the sake of the acquiring, that is success. So the circle spins forever means without end, World without end. Amen. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

One will find that the onset of insight will not be at all like the picture of it which one had previously and erroneously formed. When one awakens to truth as it really is, one will have no occult vision, one will have no astral experience, no ravishing ecstasy. One will awaken to it in a state of utter stillness, and one will realize that truth was always there within one and that reality was always there around one. Truth is not something which has grown and developed through your efforts. It is not something which has been achieved or attained by laboriously adding up those efforts. It is not something which has to be made more and more perfect each year. And once your mental eyes are opened to truth they can never be closed again. The discovery of one’s true being is not outwardly dramatic, and for a long time no one may know of it, except oneself. The World may not honour one for it: one may die as obscure as one lived. However, the purpose of one’s life has been fulfilled; and God’s will has been done. There is nothing melodramatic about realization of Truth. Those who look for marvels look in vain, unless indeed its bestowal of singular serenity is a marvel. No one really knows ho this enlightenment first dawns on one. One moment it was not there, the next moment one was somehow in it. No announcements tell the World that one has come into enlightenment. No heralds blow the trumpets proclaiming being’s greatest victory—over oneself. This is in fact the quietest moment of one’s whole life. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

To find out that one’s way does lie through cults, in the hope of finding one to suit one, ventures into a danger-beset field, where lunacy is often mistaken for illumination and where exaggerated claims substitute for solid facts. The desire for power over others, for authority, is a form of personal ambition which has, in the past, mixed easily with a spiritual glimpse. A new sect, a new movement, has then come to birth. The seeker after truth who comes in contact with it would be far safer to take some of the teaching without sacrificing one’s freedom, without joining the group. If any work, institution, or organization is centered in the Overself it cannot fall into the base, negative, or selfish currents which, in the historic past, have polluted, poisoned, and sometimes destroyed so many tasks and enterprises. The fears which repression serves to overcome may also be overcome by keeping the hostility under conscious control. However, whether one controls or represses hostility is not a matter of choice, because repression is a reflex-like process. It occurs if in a particular situation it is unbearable to be aware that one is hostile. In such a case, of course, there is no possibility of conscious control. The main reasons why awareness of hostility may be unbearable are that one may love or need a person at the same time that one is hostile toward one, that one may not want to see the reasons, such as envy or possessiveness, which have promoted the hostility or, that it may be frightening to recognize within one’s self hostility toward anyone. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

In such circumstances repression is the shortest and quickest way toward an immediate reassurance. By repression the frightening hostility disappears from awareness, or is kept from entering awareness. I should like to repeat this sentence in other words, because for all its simplicity it is one of those psychoanalytic statements which is but rarely understood: if hostility is repressed the person has not the remotest idea that one is hostile. The quickest way toward a reassurance, however, is not necessarily the safest way in the long run. By the process of repression the hostility—or to indicate its dynamic character we had better use here the term rage—is removed from conscious awareness but is not abolished. Split off from the context of the individual’s personality, and hence beyond control, it revolves within one as an affect which is highly explosive and eruptive, and therefore tends to be discharged. The explosiveness of the repressed affect is all the greater because by its very isolation it assumes larger and often fantastic dimensions. As long as one is aware of animosity its expansion is restricted in a few different ways. First, consideration of the circumstances as they are in a given situation shows one what one can and what one cannot do toward an enemy or alleged enemy. Second, if the anger concerns one whom one otherwise admires or likes or needs, the anger will sooner or later become integrated into the totality of one’s feelings. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

Finally, inasmuch as a being has developed a certain sense of what is appropriate to do or not to do, personality being as it is, this too will restrict one’s hostile impulses. If the anger is repressed, then access to these restricting possibilities is cut off, with the result that the hostile impulses trespass the restrictions from inside and outside, though only in fantasy. If the chemist I mentioned yesterday had followed his impulses he would have wanted to tell others how Kirk had abused his friendship, or to intimate to his superior that Kirk had stolen his idea or kept him from pursuing it. Since his anger was repressed it became dissociated and expanded, as would probably have shown in his dreams; it is likely that in his dream he committed murder in some symbolic form, or became an admired genius, while others went disgracefully to pieces. By its very dissociation the repressed hostility will in the course of time usually because intensified from outside sources. For instance, if a high employee has developed an anger toward his chief, because the chief had made arrangements without discussing them with him, and if the employee represses his anger, never remonstrating against the procedure, the superior will certainly keep on acting over his head. Thereby new anger is constantly generated. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

The neurotic attitude calls forth a reaction of the environment, by which the attitude itself is reinforced, with the result that the person is more and more caught, and greater and greater difficulty escaping. This phenomenon is called Teufelskreia. Another consequence of repressing hostility arises from the fact that a person registers within oneself the existence of a highly explosive affect which is beyond control. Before discussing the consequences of this we have to consider a question which it suggests. By definition the result of repressing an affect or an impulse is that the individual is no longer aware of its existence, so that in one’s conscious mind ones does not know that one has any hostile feelings toward another. How then can I say that one registers the existence of the repressed affect within oneself? The answer is possessed in the fact that there is no strict alternative between consciousness and unconscious, but that there are several levels of consciousness. Not only is the repressed impulse still effective—one of the basic discoveries of Dr. Freud—but also in a deeper level of consciousness the individual knows about its presence. Reduced to the most simple terms possible this means that fundamentally we cannot fool ourselves, that actually we observe ourselves better than we are aware of doing, just as we usually observe others better than we are aware of doing—as shown, for example, in the correctness of the first impression we ger from a person—but we may have stringent reasons for not taking cognizance of our observations. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

For the sake of saving repetitive explanations I shall use the term register when I mean that we know what is going on within us without our being aware of it. These consequences of repressing hostility may themselves be sufficient to create anxiety, provided always that the hostility and its potential danger to other interests are sufficiently great. States of vague anxiety may be built in this way. More often, however, the process does not come to a standstill at this point, because there is an imperative need to get rid of the dangerous affect which from within menaces one’s interest and security. A second reflex-like process sets in: the individual projects one’s hostile impulses to the outside World. The first pretense, the repression, requires a second one: one pretends that the destructive impulses come not from one but from someone or something outside. Logically the person on whom one’s own hostile impulses will be projected is the person against whom they are directed. The result is that this person now assumes formidable proportions in one’s mind, partly because in any danger the degree of potency depends not only on the factual conditions but also on the attitude taken toward them. The more defenseless one is the greater the danger appears. The anxiety with which we react to a danger does not depend mechanically on the realistic greatness of the danger. An individual who has developed mechanically an attitude of helplessness and passivity will react with anxiety to a comparatively small danger. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

As by-function the projection also serves the need for self-justification. It is not the individual oneself who wants to cheat, to steal, to exploit, to humiliate, but the others want to do such things to one. A wife who is unaware of her own impulses to ruin her husband and subjectively convince ed that she is most devoted may, because of this mechanism, consider her husband to be a brute wanting to harm her. The process of projection may or may not be supported by another process working to the same end: a retaliation fear may get hold of the repressed impulse. In this case a person who wants to injure, cheat, deceive others has also a fear that they will do the dame to him. How far the retaliation fear is a general characteristic ingrained in human nature, how far it arises from primitive experiences of sin and punishment, how far it presupposes a drive for personal revenge, I leave as an open question. Beyond doubt it plays a great role in the minds of neurotic person. These processes brought about by repressed hostility result in the affect of anxiety. In fact, the repression generates exactly the state which is characteristic of anxiety: a feeling of defenselessness toward what is felt an overpowering danger menacing from outside. “Tell them to fear not, for God will deliver them, yea, and also all those who stand fast in that liberty wherewith God hath made them free,” Alma 6.21. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

Ah Love, Let Us be True to One Another of the Heart has its Reasons which Reasons Knows Not!

August 2, 2019 10:26 pm

I think I sold my soul for a place like this. Look, you are alive, whatever you are, but you are not human. You can make a miracle, can you not? I love art, of course. Beauty. However, I got mixed up in my head when I was seventeen that I was going to start a new religion, a cult—free love, give to the less affluent, rise one’s hand against no one, you know, a sort of Amish community. There were these books on the table, medieval books! Tiny medieval prayer books. Of course, I know a prayer book when I see it; but a medieval codex, no; I was an altar boy when I was very little, went to Mass every day for years with my mother, know liturgical Latin as was required. The point is, I recognize these books as devotional and rare. These books were not like the others books. They were psalms that never appeared in any Bible. I figured that much out, simply by comparing them to other Latin reprints of the same period that I got out of the library. This was some sort of original work. If one joins a monastic order one will usually have to take a vow to practise certain restraints and renunciations. To a lesser degree this also occurs with joining certain groups and circles in the World outside such orders. The value of the vow is that it sets up a standard to be followed, a course to be travelled, and a goal to be reached. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

One may fall from the standard, deviate from the course, and fail to approach the goal, but their existence of sacred standards and goals may help one come closer to the object of the vow than one might otherwise have come. On the other hand, the layman who is not interested in vows but simply resolves to improve oneself lacks their stimulus. There is nothing but the inner force of one’s own ideal to keep one from abandoning the self-imposed rigours of one’s discipline. One depends on the power which one will have to summon up from somewhere within oneself. The weakness of binding oneself to the new regime which one has imposed on one’s own life that it can easily be shirked at any time, that if one yields to the inclination to do so, the restraints upon it will be weaker and fewer. Whatever church, organization, or cult to which one commits oneself, one should always make for oneself at least the reservation that one should retain the freedom to leave and go elsewhere or to cease seeking among outer organizations and to search within. However, there is a place and a need for the cohesion of a group, for the sustained teamwork of an organization, and for the discipline imposed on individuals by a church. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

Any institution dedicated to training for the life of the Spirit will always keep out the Spirit. It cannot be found through any formal performance nor through any organized group work. And all that training can do is to open a way wherethrough, if It is already coming or will come, it may pass. I made my life rich enough that I stopped caring about changing the World if ever I really thought of it; I made a life you see, you know, a World unto itself. However, others are able to open their soul in a sophisticated way to…to something. There is something else, something about our dilemma, that you cannot invent theologies, but for them to work they have to come from some deeper place inside a person—a totality of human experience. Illumination is not a result which follows moral purification and emotional discipline. These things are necessary but only preparatory. It is a result which follows conscious attempts to seek the Real and discard the illusory. This discrimination will show itself in the kind of values that are attached to the World, in the thinking reflections that are made about the World, and in the deliberate rejection of ego that takes place during meditation. It begins with either the intellect as enquiry, or the feelings as World-weariness, but is passes gradually into the whole life of the individual. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

It the enlightenment is to be continuous and the self-conquest completed, the technique which is to achieve them must be a sufficiently adequate one. To become established in the Reality is to give up seeking all those transient and temporary experiences which come by pursuing particular techniques, whether they be techniques of yoga or techniques of taking supplement, and take to philosophy. We must carefully qualify by such words as “intermittent,” “partial,” and “temporary,” the attainments to which exercises lead. This is because the full and permanent attainment cannot emerge out of meditation alone. It is a fruit of the threefold planting of meditation and reflection and action combined. Hence although the foregoing exercises will bring the student considerably nearer it, it must not be thought that any mystical exercise of itself can confer ultimate enlightenment. The path to this exalted result must traverse all fields to spiritual enlightenment. We need to know the truth, the wisdom-knowledge, but it is not enough. We need to have the living mystic experience, the vital feeling of what I am, but it is not enough. For we need to synthesize the two in a full actual intuitive realization, conferred by the Overself. This is Grace. This is to emerge finally—born again! #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

Good people work here. Since joining the company I have not heard one person raise one’s voice to another in anger, and rarely even in irritation. Apparently when you remove fear from a being’s life you also remove one’s stinger. Since there is no severe competition within our shop, we are serene. We do compete mildly perhaps, by trying to achieve good marks in the hope that our department head will recommend a promotion or an increase to the Salary Committee. Cutting out the other beings and using tricks to make one look bad is hardly ever done. At higher levels, now and then, executive empires will bump into each other and there will be skirmishes along the border. However, these are for the most part carried on without bullying and table pounding, and the worst that can happen to the loser is that one will be moved sideways into a smaller empire. It would be wrong to say that our employees are not lively. They have fun and love, and go on camping trips, go skinning, and operate power boats, have yacht parties, and read things and go to the movies, and ride motorcycles like anybody else. In the office they know what to do (usually after consolation) in almost any circumstance. What a great many of them have lost, it seems to me, is temperament, in the sense of mettle. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

We speak of a mettlesome horse. Well, these are not mettlesome people. When the ego is threatened—because at our company we do not threat people’s egos, they lack, perhaps, the capacity to be mean and ornery. Rather the ego tends to atrophy through disuse. Another curious thing is our talent for being extremely friendly without saying anything to each other. I remember a conversation that went on something like this: “Sully! Where did you come from? I have not seen you in—I guess it has been about a year and a half.” “Just about that, Jillian. A year and a half at least.” “What are you up to, for goodness’ sake?” “I have been in Canada, and now I am back in the states.” “Always on the move!” “Well, I guess I am. I just thought I would come down and have a chat with you before leaving.” “It is great that you did. How is your family?” “Fine, Jill, how is yours?” “They are fine, too. We just all had a family reunion and it was lovely.” “The years go by, do they not?” “They sure do.” “Well…” “Well…” Well, I guess I had better be moving along.” “It has been wonderful talking to you, Sully. Look, before you get on the plane, why do you not come down for another talk?” “I will, young lady. You can count on it.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

Also common among our employees is a genuine and lively interest in the career of upper-level executives whom they may never have laid eyes on. As the gentlemen move from one station to another, their progress is followed with exclamations and inside comments. “Hmm…Armin has moved to Purchasing! I thought so.” “Look at Welsh—he has taken over the top spot in Patagonia. Anybody can tell that they are setting him up for a vice-presidency.” Who cared about Armin and Welsh? At one point, I did. I had to prepare a press release about them, and update—add two more lines to—their official biographies. The role of the corporation’s top directors in our cosmos is an interesting one. In out company, members of the board are not remote figures from outside who drop in to attend meetings now and then. They are on the job every day. They recognize us, nod, and often say hello. I have found these august gentlemen to be amiable and even shy in the presence of their subordinates, but their appearance one the scene is the occasion of total respect, body and soul, such as I have never witnessed outside the army. They are not feared either. They conduct themselves in a friendly, most democratic manner. It is not awe they inspire but, so far as I can see, pure admiration. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

I was once talking to a young man in the employee-relations department when his eyes, gazing over my shoulder, suddenly lit up with joy. I turned, expecting to see our pretty receptionist, but it was a director passing by and giving us a wave of his hand. This unity and harmony are important for everyone who does not know how to control one’s inmost self would feign control one’s neighbor’s will according to one’s own conceit. For the living person, power is not a theory but an ever-present reality which one must confront, use, enjoy, and struggle with a hundred times a day. Every person is born a bundle of potentialities. Very few of these have become formed into actual powers at birth; one cannot yet walk or talk or make a flying machine. However, one can cry and this cry is the potentiality that develops into the complex system of communication in language. No one can doubt the delight the normal infant gets at the maturing of these potentialities into powers as one is able to talk, to crawl, to walk, to run. All of us who have watched children running in the park, skipping and jumping as randomly as puppies, can appreciate the pleasure of sheer movement, of exercising muscles that demand to be used. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

The potentiality to explore, to see the World as a person of one’s age can, will increasingly become an actual power as one’s neuromuscular structure develops. Everyone who has observed one’s own development with wonder will be aware that there is both nature and nurture in every step of this actualization of one’s potentialities. However, these potentialities also being anxiety. Potentiality becomes actuality, but the intervening variable is anxiety. The potentiality for pleasures of the flesh, which takes a decisive leap ahead at puberty, brings excitement and joy but also the anxiety associated with new relationships and new responsibilities. Power pushes toward its fulfillment. It is neither good nor evil, ethically speaking; it only is. However, it is not neutral. It requires in some way its own expression, although the forms of the expression vary greatly. There is an inescapable conflict between a being’s individual powers and the culture to which he or she belongs; and there is bound to be a struggle of these powers against the culture that seeks to hold the individual within its bounds. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

This constant struggle has a dialectical nature—as one pole changes, the other does too. Anxiety connected with an activity will spoil the pleasure that it would otherwise hold. This is not true for minor anxieties; on the contrary, they may produce an added zest. Riding a roller-coaster with some apprehension may make it more thrilling, whereas doing it with strong anxiety will make it a torture. A strong anxiety connected with pleasures of the flesh will render them thoroughly unenjoyable, and if one is not aware of the anxiety one will have the feeling that pleasures of the flesh do not mean anything. That maybe confusing because I have said that a feeling of dislike may be used as a means of avoiding an anxiety, and now I am saying that the dislike may be a consequence of the anxiety. Actually, both statements are true. Dislike may be the means of avoiding and the consequence of having anxiety. This is one small example of the difficulty in understanding psychic phenomena. They are intricate and involved, and unless we make up our minds that we must consider innumerable, interwoven interactions we shall make no progress in psychological knowledge. The purpose of discussing how we may defend ourselves against anxiety is not to give an exhaustive picture of all possible defenses. In fact we shall soon learn more radical ways of preventing anxiety from arising. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

My main concern now is to substantiate the statement that one may have more anxiety than one is aware of, or may have anxiety without being aware of it at all, and also to show some of the more common points where it may be looked for. Thus, in short, anxiety may be hidden behind feelings of physical discomfort, such as heart-pounding and fatigue; it may be concealed by a number of fears that seem rational or warranted; it may be the hidden force driving us to drink or to submerge ourselves in all sorts of distractions. We shall often find it as the cause of inability to do or enjoy certain things, and we shall always discover it as the promoting factor behind inhibitions. For reasons we shall discuss later, our culture generates a great deal of anxiety in the individuals living in it. Hence practically everyone has built up one or another of the defenses I have mentioned. The more neurotic a person is, the more is one’s personality pervade and determined by such defenses, and the greater the number of things one is unable to do or does not consider doing, although according to one’s vitality, mental capacities or educational background one would be justified in expecting one to do them. The more sever the neurosis, the more inhibitions are present, both subtle and gross. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

There are three contemporary dilemmas: (1) the failure of institutional authority, (2) the rising ride of nihilism, and (3) the struggle for psychospiritual balance, or integration. When people declare that God is dead, they do not mean all gods or every God to come; they meant the gods, both secular and religious, that no longer bred inspiration and hope, but only disillusionment and decay. This denotes the corrupt gods that catered to some greedy elite; churches financed by cocaine king; the repressive gods that stifled pleasures of the flesh, creative play, and emotional expressiveness; the technocratic gods that sapped the populace of meaningful and stimulating work; and the scientistic gods that deny the legitimacy of nonrational phenomena. This forecast the breakdown of institutional authority. We can also foresee a gaping chasm left in the wake of this breakdown—a chasm which could lead to nihilism. When people no longer have traditions to steer them or gods to inspire them, what happens? Many of them flounder; they become reckless, anarchistic beast, or they form reactionary, xenophobic enclaves. These extremes strike a note of familiarity in our own unstable era, an era bereft of traditions. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

This World view can be characterized as a primordial clash of counraries—on the one hand, repression, order, or an Apollonian consciousness and on the other hand, indulgence, abandon, or Dionysian awareness. Wherever one is sacrificed the other suffers, because neither can operate in isolation. How can we cope with these warring (individual and collective) tendencies? By confronting them, by acknowledging both our limits and our possibilities, our need for order and discipline, as well as spontaneity and abandon. In so doing, we foster dynamic, realistic lives. This is what is meant by passionate people who master their passions, or those who self-overcome. Sometimes it is okay to surround ourselves with limited horizons, as long as we do not retire from life but put ourselves in the midst of it; do not be fainthearted but take as much as possible upon yourself, over yourself, and into yourself. What we want is totality; fight for the extraneousness of reason, senses, feeling, and will. Discipline yourself to wholeness, create yourself. A human being who is strong, highly educated, skillful in all bodily matters, self-controlled, reverent toward oneself, and who might dare to afford the whole range and wealth of being natural, being strong enough for such freedom is a being of tolerance, not weakness but of strength. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

Such a spirit who has become free stands amid the cosmos with a joyous and trusting fatalism, in the faith that only the particular is loathsome, and that all is redeemed in the whole. In the case of abstract painters, for example, the encounter may be with an idea, an inner vision, that in turn may be led off by the brilliant colors on the palette or the inviting rough whiteness of the canvas. The paint, the canvas, and the other materials then become a secondary part of this encounter; they are the language of it, the media, as we rightly put it. Or scientists confront their experiment, their laboratory task, in a similar situation of encounter. The encounter may or may not involve voluntary effort—that is, will power. A healthy child’s play, for example, also has the essential features of encounter, and we know it is one of the important prototypes of adult creativity. The essential point is not the presence or absence of voluntary effort, but the degree of absorption, the degree of intensity. Let prayer stay as a beautiful, peace-bestowing, and calming exercise. If it does, it need not limit you to getting stuck with “Experience” as a final attainment. It is a felt experience, but one which must be accompanied by the knowledge that the entire Universe is a form of knowledge. The two together complete the prayerful experience. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

Thus one learns to understand that one must advance beyond ordinary situations to this goal of Being, to become established in it, in this stillness, ever-present and ever-proven. So do as you wish in this matter, do not deprive yourself of the occasional or even regular practice of prayer, should you be inclined toward it, so long as you comprehend that though it has its very important place in the Quest, it is not essential to attainment of the ultimate goal itself. Love is the primary attribute and motive for the spiritual purposes we were changed to undertake by our beloved God. A marvelous work is about to come forth. This revelation establishes that those who desire to serve God qualify for such faith, hope, charity and love, with a focus on the glory of God. Charity, which is the pure love of Christ, includes God’s eternal love for all his children. We are blessed with great love for our fellow beings and environment, for we are called to carry the gospel to the World to win souls unto Christ. When we gain a vision of love, the Lord’s work will be accomplished. We need to align our hearts with love and move away from feelings of mere responsibility or guilt. Loving performing ordinances for ancestors will strengthen and protect our youth and family in a World that is becoming increasingly evil. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

When we work in righteousness, our decisions are Heaven blessed. Most of us need time to fit and equip ourselves for the glorious moment of insight, but a few receive it in a day. It must be remembered that it does not actually happen in time but out of it, in the great Stillness. The being does not know about the absolute final truth a second before—and then it is all there. How soon it can settle down in one will also vary with different persons—it is a few hours in one case but three years in another. Those who seek the will of the Lord as individuals and for their families must strive for righteousness, meekness, kindness, and love. Humility and love are the hallmark of those who see the Lord’s will, especially for their families. Perfecting ourselves, qualifying ourselves for the blessings of covenants, and preparing to meet God are individual responsibilities. We need to be self-reliant and anxiously engaged in making our homes a refuge from the storms that surround us and a sanctuary of faith. When there is love at home, there is beauty all around. Whether enlightenment is reached by steps as an outcome of practice unremittingly done, or that it comes suddenly all at once, it must be a concept-free phenomenon, a set of doctrines and covenants that are understanding, and possess a recognition of what always was, is, and will be. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

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

July 30, 2019 12:04 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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What Do You think Really? Inside of You? Is there a God or a Devil? I Mean Truly, What do You Believe?

July 20, 2019 1:27 am

I arrived quite early in the evening for I had gone backwards in time against the turning of the World. It was cold and crisp, but not cruelly so, though a bad norther was on its way. The sky was without a cloud and fully of small and very distinct stars. I went at once to my beautiful house at Cresleigh Rocklin Trails. It has an intimate view of the greenbelt and its is a beautiful community. It was not until tomorrow night that Mr. Raglan James meant to meet me. And impatient as I was for this meeting, I found the schedule comfortable, as I wanted to find Louis right away. But first I indulged in the mortal comfort of a hot shower, and put on a fresh suit of black velvet, very trim and plain, rather like the clothes I had worn in Miami, and a new pair of black boots. And ignoring my general weariness—I would have been asleep in the Earth by now, had I been still in Europe—I went off, walking like a mortal, through the town. The person living with an alienated and reified, negative identity concept of oneself closely resembles the hypochondriacal patient, except that one’s unhappy preoccupation concerns not a physical ailment but a reified physical or psychic quality that has become the focal point of one’s self-image. The relief one gains from one’s burdensome preoccupation is due to the fact that the reified bad quality no longer is viewed as part of the on-going process of living and of goal-directed thought and action. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

The perceived reified bad quality has been severed from the “I” that acts with foresight and responsibility and is looked upon as an inherent, unalterable, unfortunate something an ossified part of oneself that no longer participates in the flux, growth, and development of life. It is experienced as an unchangeable fate whose bearer is doomed to live and die with it. The relief this brings is that the person no longer feels responsible for the supposed consequences of this fixed attribute; one is not doing anything for which one can be blamed, even though one may feel ashamed and unacceptable for being such and such. The preoccupation with the reified identity directs attention away from what one does to what one supposedly is. Furthermore, one no longer has to do anything about it because, obviously, one cannot do anything about it. Thus, the anxiety, fear, and effort that would be connected with facing and acting upon the real problem is avoided by putting up with the negative, fixed identity which, in addition, may be used to indulge self-pity and to enlist the sympathy of others. Kind of like how in Anne Rice’s The Tale of the Body Thief, Lestat is so lonely that he considers killing himself by going into the Sun, but David tells him not to, and he does it anyway and only gets darker. And also when Lestat considers letting the body thief take his body, but David tells him, “You’re going to make another ghastly mistake!” #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

So far we have discussed mainly negative self-images. However, alienated identity concepts may be beneficial as well as negative. Alienated identity of the beneficial variety occurs in vanity, conceit and—in its more pathological form—in delusions of grandeur, just as in its negative counterpart the “I” of the vain person is severed from a fixed attribute on which the vanity is based. The person feel that one possesses this quality. It becomes the focal point of one’s identity and serves as its prop. Beauty, masculinity or femininity, being born on the right side of the river, success, money, prestige, or being good may serve as such a prop. While in the negative identity feeling a reified attribute haunts the person, such an attribute serves the beneficial self-image as a support. Yet it is equally alienated from the living person. This is expressed nicely in the phrase “a stuffed shirt.” It is not the person in the shirt but some dead matter, some stuffing that is used to bolster and aggrandize the self-feeling. It often becomes apparent in the behavior of the person that one leans on this real or imagined attribute, just as it often is apparent that a person feel pulled down by the weight of some alienated negative attribute. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

When one is weighed down by some alienated negative attribute, it could be similar to how Reglan James behaves in Anne Rice’s novel The Tale of the Body Thief. “David, that’s what’s wrong with him! I’ve been trying to figure it since I saw him on the beach in Miami,” says Lestat. “That isn’t his body! That’s why he can’t use its musculature or its…its height. That’s why he almost falls when he runs. He can’t control those long powerful legs. Good God, that man is in someone else’s body. And the voice, David, I told you about his voice. It’s not the voice of a young man. Oh, that explains it!” Instead of being possessed by another entity or being, people’s negative emotions give off such a vibe that they do not seem normal. The way they talk, the way they move, the things they say, it indicates something is wrong with them. They are possessed by darkness. The reliance on an identity, on a self-image based on the prop of some reified attribute remains precarious even where is seems to work, after a fashion, as it does in the self-satisfaction of the vain. This precariousness is inevitable since the beneficial self-evaluation of such a person does not rest on a feeling of wholeness and meaningfulness in life, in thought, feeling, and deed. One is always threatened with the danger of losing this thing, this possession, or which one’s self-esteem is based. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

Today, especially in this country where youth has become a public fetish, many thousands try to preserve its alienated mask while terrified by the prospect of suddenly growing old, when the mask can no longer be worn or will become grotesque. The beautiful picture of youth can alienate beings from their actual life, which effects the internal markup of the being, marking their aura over with years of cruelty, selfishness, and greed, as they advance in age. Their true character is a secret threat that they feel when be exposed as they age because they are superficial and have no substance to go with their beauty. All beauty and no brains. In ever case of alienated identity concepts, there is a secret counterimage. Very often the hidden self announces its presence merely in a vague background feeling that the person would be lost, would be nothing if it were not for the alienated, reified quality on which the feeling of being something, somebody, or the feeling of vanity, is based. In this feeling both a truth and an irrational anxiety find expression. The truth is that no being who looks upon oneself as a thing and bases one’s existence on the support of some reified attribute of this thing has found oneself and one’s place in life. The irrational anxiety is the feeling that without the prop of such an attribute one could not live. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

Similarly, in the negative alienated identity concepts there usually is a beneficial counterimage. It may take a generalized, vague form: If it were not for such and such (the reified attribute forming the focus of the negative identity), I would be all right, successful, wonderful, and so forth. Or it may take the more concrete form of some grandiose, exaggerated fantasy about one’s beneficial qualities. These artificial beneficial counterimages, too, express both an irrational hope and a truth. The irrational hope is that one may have some magical quality which will transport one into a state of security, or even superiority, because then one will possess that attribute which, instead of haunting one, will save one. However, actually it is nothing but the equally reified counterpart of what at present drags one down. The truth is that beings have potentialities for overcoming their alienation from oneself and for living without the burden and the artificial props of alienated, reified identity concepts. There is a distinction between helpful self-awareness and futile and self-torment rumination. We should oppose the ascetic interpretation we find among our modern hypochondrists and those who turn their vengeance against themselves. Instead, one sees the real meaning of self-knowledge in taking notice of oneself and becoming aware of one’s relation to other people and to the World. The pseudo self-knowledge against which one speaks foreshadows the widespread present-day self-preoccupation which is concerned, fruitlessly, with an alienated, negative sense of identity. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

A productive self-knowledge is to pay attention to what one is actually doing in one’s relation to others, to the World and to oneself. A complete understanding of a neurosis is not possible without tracing it back to its infantile conditions, I believe that the genetic approach, if used one-sidedly, confuses rather than clarifies the issue, because it leads then to a neglect of the actually existing unconscious tendencies and their functions and interactions with other tendencies that are present, such as impulses, fears and protective measures. Genetic understanding is useful only as long as it helps the functional understanding. Proceeding on this belief I have found in analyzing the most varied kinds of personalities, belonging to different types of neuroses, differing in age, temperament and interests, coming from different social layers, that the contents of the dynamically central conflict and their interrelations were essentially similar in all of them. My experiences in psychoanalytical practice have been confirmed by observations of persons outside the practice and of characters in current literature. If the recurring problems of neurotic persons are divested of the fantastic and abstruse character they often have, it cannot escape our attention that they differ only in quantity from the problems bothering the normal person in our culture. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

The great majority of us have to struggle with problems of competition, fears of failure, emotional isolation, distrust of others and of our own selves, to mention only a few of the problems that may be present in a neurosis. The fact that in general the majority of individuals in a culture have to face the same problems suggests the conclusion that these problems have been created by the specific life conditions existing in that culture. That they do not represent problems common to human nature seems to be warranted by the fact that the motivating forces and conflicts in other cultures are different from ours. Hence in speaking of a neurotic personality of our time, I not only mean that there are neurotic persons having essential peculiarities in common, but also that these basic similarities are essentially produced by the difficulties existing in our time and culture. As far as my sociological knowledge allows me I shall show later on what difficulties of our culture are responsible for the psychic conflicts we have. The validity of my assumption concerning the relation between culture and neurosis ought to be tested by the combined efforts of anthropologist and psychiatrists. The psychiatrists would not only have to study neuroses as they appear in definite cultures, as has been done from formal criteria such as frequency, severity or type of neuroses, but particularly they should study them from the point of view of what basic conflicts are underlying them. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

The anthropologist would have to study the same culture from the point of view of what psychic difficulties its structure creates for would have to study the same culture from the point of view of what psychic difficulties its structure creates for the individual. One way in which the similarity of attitudes open to surface observer can discover without the tools of psychoanalytic technique, concerning persons with whom one is thoroughly familiar, such as oneself, one’s friends, members of one’s family or one’s colleagues. There is a curious relationship between our society’s attitude toward power on one hand and sexuality on the other. This is partially seen in our own day with pornography, our sexy commercialism, our advertising built on luscious blondes and shapely brunettes. If they could, people would mold magic gold into gigantic phallus to shock the ladies and gentlemen. In the Industrial Revolution there began the radical separation between the product of the worker’s hands and one’s relation with the persons who use one’s product. Indeed, the worker normally saw nothing at all of the product one helped produce except one’s own little act. The alienation of labor added to the alienation of persons from themselves and from other people. Their personhood is lost. With the growth of industry and the bourgeoisie, pleasures of the flesh becomes separated from the beings; one’s pleasures of the flesh are bought and sold, as is the product of one’s hands. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

There are some situations of power when force, or coercion, or compulsion is an integral part of power. War is one of them. With sick persons or children, compulsion or coercion has to be used in proportion to the lack of capacity of knowledge of the other person. When my son was three years old, I kept a firm grip on his hand as we walked across Broadway, a condition that was relaxed as he grew and earned the intricacies of traffic enough to be able safely to take on the responsibility of crossing himself. However, there are ultimate limits to the application of force. If a species of animal uses its superior force to kill off all the other animals in its vicinity, it obviously will not have them for food when it needs them. This balance of nature is a delicate interweaving of the force of various animals and plants in relation to each other. When this balance is upset, we are faced with fearful prospects, indeed—as we are learning to our sorrow in modern ecology. Thus, to keep from self-destruction, power can be allied with force only up to the point where it might destroy the identity of the other. In a gun battle of the West, to destroy the identity of the enemy is precisely the goal of shooting. Hence I cite this as an example of the self-destructive effect of power allied with force. The one who is killed, obviously losing one’s being, is no longer present to give what one can to the community, no longer a person to whom to relate; and we are the poorer thereby. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

Also the spontaneity of the other person cannot be destroyed without a loss to the destroyer as well. This is the danger in extreme forms of coercion and compulsion in brainwashing, conditioning, and hypnosis. If the person is transformed into something resembling a mechanism, one may still preserve some spontaneity; but if he is transformed into a complete mechanism, one ceases to be a person in the process. Power, therefore, ought to move with the affirmation of the spontaneity of the person it encounters; this will assure it most success in the long run. This is why I permitted Mercedes, an individual with practically no sense of her own power or spontaneity or choice to start with, to decide wen she wished to come to her psychotherapy sessions and when she chose not to. It was a process not only of letting her use her own spontaneity but requiring her to use it. While it is utopian to try to divorce power completely from force, compulsion, and coercion, it is cynical to identity all kinds of power with them. Is a tiny rain drop the same rainstorm? Can it cause a dam to burst as a rain storm? No—although the two are of the same nature, they are not of the same identity. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

For any being to say “I am God” is incorrect, unless one understands the statement to refer only to the nature of one’s innermost being and only in this way, that one is but an insignificant drop of God with all the limitations that belong to a spark. We have to find our own self before we can find that of God’s. Hence there is real need of the higher self tenet. We are not entitled to aspire towards union with the wholeness of God so long as we still have not attained union with the godlikeness in beings. The mystical quest does not open the inner mysteries of God to our gaze. It opens the inner mysteries of beings. It leads them to one’s own divinity, not to God’s. There was once a less affluent Russian painter who could scarcely get enough money to buy bread for his wife and children. When the artist is on his death bed, his best friends finds the canvas on which the painter was working. It I blank except for one word, unclearly written and in very small letters, that appears in the center. The word can either be solitary—being alone; keeping one’s distance from events, maintaining the peace of mind necessary for listening to one’s deeper self. Or it can be solidarity—living in the market place; solidarity, involvement, or identifying with the masses. Opposites though they are, both solitude and solidarity are essential if the artist is to produce works that are not only significant to his or her age, but that will also speak to future generations. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

There is no contradiction between advising aspirants at one time to seek a master and follow the path of discipleship, and advising them to seek within and follow the path of self-reliance at another time. The two counsels can be easily reconciled. For if the aspirant accepts the first one, the master will gradually lead one to become increasingly self-reliant. If one accepts the second one, one’s higher self will lead one to a master. When this craving for a guru becomes excessive, inordinate, it is a sign of weakness, an attempt to escape one’s own personal responsibility and to place it squarely on somebody else’s shoulders, a manifestation of inferiority complex such as we are accustomed to see in faces that have long been enslaved by others. Although it is true that one must find one’s own way to the goal, one need not do so as if one exists alone on this planet. One may be helped by drawing creatively on the experience gained by others even while one critically judges it. “And they did land upon the shore of the promised land. And when they had set their feet upon the shores of the promised land they bowed themselves down upon the face of the land, and did humble themselves before the Lord, and did shed tears of joy before the Lord, because of the multitude of God’s tender mercies over them. And it came to pass the they went forth upon the face of the land, and began to till the Earth,” reports Ether 6.12-13. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13

The Self-Conscious Preoccupation with this Wished-form Magic Object Called Personality Interfere with the Actual Experience for Living

July 18, 2019 1:46 am

I told you. Such stories always come into our hands. Satanism, vampirism, voodoo, witchcraft, sightings of werewolves; it all comes across my desk. Most of it goes into the trash, obviously. However, Godsmack produced a great song called “Voodoo,” which is about Resurrection. I know the grain of truth when I see it. In daily life the question of identity arises when we want to claim something from the post office, or when we want to pay by check in a store where we are not known, or in crossing a border. On such occasions we are asked: “Who are you, so that I can know for sure that it is you and nobody else?” And we establish our identity by showing a driver’s license or a passport or some similar document which tells our name, our address, the date of our birth, and perhaps some physical characteristics. Together, these will tell us apart from anybody else and will also establish that we are the same person that was born on such and such a date. We have papers to establish our identity, and this paper-identity is something fixed and definite. This is also the meaning of the word “identity,” as applied to people, for the average person. Such paper-identity seems far removed, at first glance, from the current concern of psychoanalysts, philosophers, and other students of the contemporary scene, with a being’s search for and doubt in one’s identity. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

However, actually paper-identity is quite central for a person’s search of oneself. It is a telling symbol of alienated identity. It is a kind of identity which is the product of bureaucratic needs of commerce or administration. It is most gruesome and tragic manifestations occurred in our time when being’s identities were reduced to numbers on plantations and or in the penal system, and when countless people fleeing from the terror of the totalitarian states were shunned from country to country because they did not have the right paper-identities. In the case of paper-identities, the person who demands and examines one’s papers is the one who, in one’s role as an official, is alienated from the other person as a human being. Similarly, the guards on the plantations were alienated from their victims. However, many of these victims systematically robbed of any meaningful purpose and dignity in their lives, succumbed to their tormentors and lost their sense of identity long before they lost their lives. In our own and many other societies the loss of identity takes place without the terror of the plantation in more insidious ways. Many beings in our time tend to think of their lives as though they were answering the kind of questionnaire that one has to fill out when, for example, applying for a passport. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

Most beings tend to accept the paper-identity as their real identity. It is tempting to do so because it is something fixed and definite and does not require the person be really in touch with oneself. The paper-identity corresponds to the logical propositions concerning identity: A = A, and A is not non-A. However, beings are not a logical proposition, and the paper-identity does not answer the question who this person, identified by some scrap of paper, is as a person. This question is not simple to answer. It has haunted many people increasingly in the last hundred and seventy years. They no longer feel certain who they are because in modern industrial society, they are alienated from nature, alienated from others and from the World around us. The problem of identity and alienation from the self came to the attention of psychoanalysts in the last one hundred years when they observed its role in an increasing number of patients. Many beings suffer in one form or another from the lack of a sense of identity. This may take the form of feeling like an imposter—in their work or in relation to their background, their past, or to some part of themselves that they repress or consciously want to hide because they feel ashamed or guilty. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

Or else some feel that they ought to have something they ought to have something they lack or imagine they lack, such as material possession, prestige, or certain personal qualities or traits; or they feel that a different husband or wife, or friends different from those they have, would give them the status they want and thereby, miraculously, transform them into full-blown persons. When the lack of a sense of identity becomes conscious, it is often experienced—probably always—as a feeling that compared with others one is not fully a person. Among adults one can observe two frequent reactions to the conscious or unconscious feeling of not being fully a being, of not having found an identity acceptable to oneself. One is an anxious retreat or depressive resignation, or a mixture of these. The other is a more or less conscious effort at disguise, at playing a role, at presenting an artificial façade to the World. These reactions are not mutually exclusive. They usually occur together, one of them being more emphasized or closer to consciousness than the other. The fear or exposure is present in both, but especially strong in people who rely on a façade. They tend to feel that they travel with a forged passport, under an assumed identity. When their disguise and the reasons for it have been analyzed, the sense of a lack of identity often comes to the fore as strongly as in those who, to begin with, have been aware of and suffered from the feeling of not really or fully being a person with a meaningful place in life. Both then to feel that they do not really know who they are, what they want, or how they feel about other people. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

When these people consult an analyst, they often expect, implicitly or explicitly, that one will tell them who they are or who they should be. Their wish and search is for a definite, fixed identity. They want to be a personality. Often these are people who suffer from over-adaptation to whatever situation they are in, and to whomever they are dealing with at the moment. They have been described pointedly in several pays and stories by Pirandelio. They long for a definite, fixed, circumscribed personality. Having such a personality, as one has a possession, they hope will solve their dilemma. Having such a personality, they feel, is good; not having it, bad. Their wish is to possess a definite identity does not and cannot solve the problem of their alienation from themselves, because it actually is the continuation of alienation. They want to substitute a fixed, reified personality for the on-going process of living, feeling, acting, and thinking in which alone they could find themselves. They search for a definite, stable shell called personality to which they want to cling. Their quest is self-defeating, because what they search for is an alienated concept of a thing, rather than a living, developing person. Their wish is a symptom, not a cure. In this symptom, however, both the malady of alienation and the longing for more meaningful life find expression, even thought in a way which perpetuates the ill form which they seek to escape. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

The self-conscious preoccupation with this wished-form magic object called personality interfere with the actual experience for living. In calling the object of these people’s search an alienated concept of identity, I do not mean a scientific or even an explicit concept. I am describing an implicit concept, which becomes apparent only in the analysis of the underlying, often not conscious, assumptions that direct this kind of search. This applies equally to the following examples of alienated concepts of identity. Talking of fears and defenses, I am afraid that by this time many being will have become impatient about such an extensive discussion of so simple a question as what constitutes a neurosis. In defending myself I may point out the psychic phenomena are always intricate, that while there are seemingly simple questions there is never a simple answer, that the predicament we meet here at the beginning is no exceptional one, but will accompany us throughout the essay, whatever problems we shall tackle, The particular difficulty in the description of a neurosis is possessed in the fact that a satisfactory answer can be given neither with psychological nor with sociological tools alone, but that they must be taken up alternately, first one and then the other, as in fact we have done. If we should regard a neurosis only from the point of view of its dynamics and psychic structure we should hypostatize a normal human being: one does not exist. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

We run into more difficulties as soon as we pass the borderline of our own country or of countries with a culture similar to our own. And if we regard a neurosis only from the sociological point of view as a mere deviation from the behavior pattern common to a certain society, we neglect grossly all we know about the psychological characteristics of a neurosis, and no psychiatrist of any school or country would recognize the results as what one is accustomed to designate a neurosis. The reconcilement of the two approaches is possessed in a method of observation that considers the deviation both in the manifest picture of the neurosis and in the dynamics of the psychic processes, but without considering either deviation as the primary and decisive one. The two must be combined. This in general is the way we have gone in pointing out that fear and defenses are one of the dynamic centers of a neurosis, but constitutes a neurosis only when deviating in quantity or quality from the fears and defenses patterned in the same culture. We have to go one step father in the same direction. There is still another essential characteristic of a neurosis and that is the presence of conflicting tendencies of the existence of which, or at least of the precise content of which, the neurotic oneself is unaware, and for which one automatically tires to reach certain compromise solutions. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

It is this latter characteristic which in various forms Dr. Freud has stressed as an indispensable constituent of neuroses. What distinguishes the neurotic conflict from those commonly existing in a culture is neither their content nor the fact that they are essentially unconscious—in both respects the common cultural conflicts may be identical—but the fact that in the neurotic the conflicts are sharper and more accentuated. The neurotic person attempts and arrives at compromises solutions—not inopportunely classified as neurotic—and these solutions are less satisfactory than those of the average individual and are achieved at great expense to the whole personality. Reviewing all these considerations, we are not yet able to give a well-rounded definition of a neurosis, but we can arrive at a description: a neurosis is a psychic disturbance brought about by fear and defenses against these fears, and by attempts to find compromise solutions for conflicting tendencies. For practical reasons only if it deviates from the pattern common to the particular culture, then is it advisable to call this disturbance a neurosis. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

Some perceive their World as boring and their stature as lowly, and these beings long to break away from their predicament, to soar—but in the quickest, most inexpensive way. The devil can provide beings with a mirror on this longing and immerses one in its consequences. Some of these consequences are delightful—as they are for most overachievers—but many of them disastrous. In the end, most are able to reassess their expansiveness, appreciate the value of one’s limitations, and thus become a more enriched and deliberate person. One must think of what life can be—its temptations, its catastrophes, and its joys. What is life and what are damnation and salvation? What does it mean to be a human being? God is the occult of the Universe. God created humans in his own image and likeness. I suspect that is the key. Nobody knows what it really means, you know. God is a creative force. And so are we. He told Adam to “Increase and multiply.” That is what the first organic cells did, increased and multiplied. Not merely changed shape but replicated themselves. God is a creative force. He made the whole Universe out of himself through cell division. That is why the devils are so fully of envy—the bad Angels, I mean. They are not creative creatures; they have no bodies, no cells, they are spirit. And I suspect it was not envy so much as a form of suspicion—that God was making a mistake in making another engine of creativity in Adam, so like himself. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

The Angels probably felt the physical Universe was bad enough, with all these replicating cells, but thinking, talking beings who could increase and multiply? They were probably outraged by the whole experiment. That was their sin. God has a body and always did. The secret of cell dividing life lies within God. And all living cells have a tiny part of God’s spirits in them, that is the missing piece as to what makes life happen in the first place, what separates it from nonlife. It is exactly like Anne Rice’s vampiric genesis. The first spirit of Amel—one evil entity—infused the bodies of all the vampires. Well, the humans share in the spirit of God in the same way. People yearn to believe that the God of progress—our great machines, our vast technology, our supernational corporations, now even our nuclear weapons—all these, we yearn to believe, will have a beneficent effect upon us and will bring us vast gains to humanity. It is indeed thrilling to realize that out of the same milieu of strive, intense activity, even cruelty, came our political proclamation: “that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain inalienable rights, that among these are life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.” We now living in a person when vast numbers of people are dedicated to interpreting evil in such a way that it will eventuate in good. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

Power is the ability to cause or prevent change. It has two dimensions. One is power as potentiality, or latent power. This is power that has not yet been fully developed; it is the ability to cause a change at some future time. We speak of this future change as possibility, a word which comes directly from the same root as power, namely posse, “to be able.” The other dimension is power as actuality. It is to this aspect of power I shall be referring in this chapter. Ancient Greek philosophers define power as being—that is to say, there is no being without power. And since power is the ability to chance, being is in continual flux. This definition has come down the mainstream and tributaries of philosophy through the ages to contemporary ontological thinkers like Paul Tillich, who describes power similarly as “the power of being.” The philosopher of life, such as Nietzsche with his will to power emphasize the element of power in all living things. Power is for them an expression of life. No teaching can be a final complete and exhaustive one. The Universe may yield its secret but being’s minds are not the World-Mind; it cannot put into finite words what is greater than itself. When we attempt to identify power with the life process itself, there can be danger. This would lead us astray. There are many things in the life process—such as consciousness, desire, curiosity—which may be allied with power but are not to be identified with it. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

If a being claims to know what God is in the same way that God knows it, one is talking nonsense, and falling into the sin of spiritual pride. No one can penetrate this irreducible mystery expect in one’s own imagination, speculation, or psychic fantasy. No human effort can plumb the depth of the ultimate power. No human being has found the truth in all its angles, nor uttered the last word upon it. Whatever knowledge a mystic may acquire through trance or intuition, it will always be limited. The World-Mind’s knowledge is always absolute. The circumferences of these two circles can never coincide. Power and love can be allied, but they also can be contrasted; the distinction between them must be kept clear. Power can be identified only with the original power of being itself, from which beings gets its start. Beware of professionalism in this field, of the professional expounder of truth and the professional seeker of it. Both Way and Goa are far simpler than most of them seem to think it is, and markedly unlike the impression left by many writings and lectures, books and teachings, whether ancient or modern. First at the beginning of the Long Path, and again at the beginning of the Short Path a master, a spiritual guide, is really required. However, outside of these two occasions an aspirant had better walk alone. The teacher oneself has to go to this inner source for one’s own enlightenment, why not go to it directly yourself? #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

It may be slower but it will be much safer, present-day conditions being what they are, to teach oneself and liberate oneself. Something more is needed than what books or even gurus can give one. This can only be found within oneself. The courage needed for such a standpoint must also be found, and can be, within oneself. For curious reason we are shy about sharing the things that matter most. Hence people short-circuit the more dangerous building of a relationship by leaping immediately into bed. After all, the body is an object and can be treated mechanically. However, intimacy that begins and remains on the physical level tends to become inauthentic, and we later find ourselves fleeing from the emptiness. Authentic social courage requires intimacy on the many levels of the personality simultaneously. Only by doing this one can overcome personal alienation. No wonder the meeting of new persons brings a throb of anxiety as well as the joy of expectation; and as we go deeper into the relationship each new depth is marked by some new joy and new anxiety. Each meeting can be a harbinger of an unknown fate in store for us but also a stimulus toward the exciting pleasure of authentically knowing another person. “I am mindful of you always in my prayers, continually praying unto God the Father in the name of his Holy Child, Jesus, that he, through his infinite goodness and grace, will keep you through the endurance of faith on his name to the end,” reports Moroni 8.3. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13

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

July 16, 2019 12:52 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 12, 2019 12:09 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 9, 2019 11:45 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 6, 2019 11:12 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 6, 2019 12:21 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Randolph Harris II International Institute