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This Whole Person is Architect and Developer, Tenant, and Landlord, Apollo and Dionysus in the House of Human Nature!
If the aged are increasingly isolated from community life, theirs is a fate which many groups share in an urban civilization. Not only does the city weaken the traditional kinship group; it also tends to atomize the individual by freeing one from old bonds. The anonymity and hence the alienation of the city dweller have never been more graphically described than by the following words: The restless and noisy activity of the crowded streets is highly distasteful, and it is surely abhorrent to human nature itself. Hundreds of thousands of men and women drawn from all classes and ranks of society pack the streets of most major cities. Are they not all human beings with the same innate characteristics and potentialities? And do they not all aim at happiness by following similar methods? Yet they rush past each other as if they had nothing in common. They are tacitly agreed on one thing only—that everyone should keep to the right of the pavement so as not to collide with the stream of people moving in the opposite direction. No one even thinks of sparing a glace for one’s neighbors in the streets. The more that city folk are packed into a tiny space, the more repulsive and disgraceful becomes the brutal indifference with which they ignore their neighbors selfishly concentrate upon their private affairs. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
A Passionate Eagerness to Find God is a Necessary Basis for all the Other Qualifications in its Purist
Manifest Destiny—We Have Eaten from the Tree of Knowledge and the United World of America is Our Future!
I Never Promised You a Rose Garden—At Night He Opens the Window and Looks Out into the Infinite Dark!
The World is full of abiding beauty, no soul here is really alone. It did not matter to me. I was getting out of old Egypt, and I had the source of all our power with me. And I was young and foolish and enflamed. There has never been a just place for evil in the Western World. There has never been an easy accommodation of death. No matter how violent have been the centuries since the fall of Rome, no matter how terrible the wars, the persecutions, the injustices, the value placed upon human life has only increase. When we see the effect one person can have, it perhaps is no wonder that the Lord reminded us, “Remember the worth of souls.” It is the belief in the value of human life that has caused the torture chambers and the stake and the more ghastly means of execution to be abandoned all over Europe in this time. And it is the belief in the value of human life that carries mortals now out of the monarchy into the republics of America and France. All the stories I have told you are finally as useless as all ancient knowledge is to mortals and to us. Its images and its poetry can be beautiful; it can make us shiver with the recognition of things we have always suspected or felt. It can draw us back to times when the Earth was new to mortals, and wondrous. However, we can always come back to the way the Earth is now. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
When I started work as a psychotherapist, the relationship of powerlessness and psychosis was impressed upon me a number of years ago. In the mentally troubled person psychotherapists are able to see the extremes of the behavior and the experience of us all. All weakness tends to corrupt, and impotence corrupts absolutely. A young musician, Treasure, was one of my first patients. According to the person who administered her Rorschach, she has “one foot in schizophrenia and other on a banana peel.” In her session with me she would give long, involved comparisons of the colors of the musical notes made by the train from Newark in contrast to those made by the train from New Brunswick. I had not the slightest idea about what she was talking much of the time—and she knew it. However, she seemed to need me as a person who listened, wanting and trying to understand her whether I succeeded or not. She was also a woman with considerable dignity and a sense of humor, which helped us immeasurably. However, she could not get angry. Not at me or her parents or anyone else. Her self-esteem was so shaky and vague as to be almost nonexistent. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
Once a young man in a chorus in a chorus to which Treasure belonged asked her to go to a concert with him. Se accepted. However, the next day, in a surge of self-doubt, she phoned him to say: “If you do not want to, you do not have to take me.” She could not affirm or assert herself enough to conceive that someone might like to go to a concert with her. When, at the age of eight or nine, she would play football with a boy slightly older than she, he would run into her hard enough to hurt her. Another child might have yelled at the boy, or started a fight, or cried, or abandoned the game; these are all, good or bad, ways of coping. However, Treasure could utilize none of these methods; she could only sit there on the ground, looking at him silently thinking that he should not hit her so hard. When she was exploited, as she often was, sexually or financially, she had no defenses, no way of drawing a line beyond which she could firmly say “no,” no anger to support her. (One gets a feeling that such persons almost invite exploitation—it at least gives them some relationship and significance.) Along with her inability to get angry, there went, as a necessary corollary, a deep experience of powerlessness and an almost complete lack of capacity to influence or affect other people in interpersonal relations. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
However, such a person has another aide which, as I have confirmed in working with many borderline patients since, is completely different. Treasure’s dreams were of cut-up bodies put in bags, of blood and battles—in short, as violent as her conscious life was docile. Since that time and partly due to this young woman, I have frequently reflected on the relationship between powerlessness and madness. I am purposely stressing both meanings of the word mad: its personal sense of enragedness to the point of violence; and its historical psychiatric sense of psychosis. There is a relationship between the two, and this double use of the term may lead us to the center of the problem. We know that a common characteristic of all mental patients is their powerlessness, and with it goes a constant anxiety which is both cause and effect of the impotence. The patients’ insignificance is so firmly assumed by them that they accept it as a given, often going through life making sad and pitiful gestures to get whatever bit of significance they can. An adolescent girl came to consult me in the middle of the day wearing a crinoline evening dress, possibly one of the prettiest things she had, as a gesture of how much she needed my attention and concern, unaware that it was likely to be regarded as out of place. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
When a person like Treasure can no longer support this way of life, something cracks within her and she may then move into a state in which she is nothing but mad. The person then seems to be the exact opposite of what she had been. The violence of dreams like Treasure’s then becomes the content of her waking life. The person seems all madness, which is surely why psychosis through the centuries was called madness. Mad now at everybody, including herself, the person threatens or attempts to experience death by suicide, cuts her wrists, smears blood over the doors in hospitals to dramatize her need of the attendants and interns. She does overt violence to herself and whoever gets in the range of her projections. We see the same movement in other patients. In the autobiographical novel on her own schizophrenia I Never Promised You a Rose Garden, Hannah Green was admitted to Chestnut Lodge at sixteen. She was the epitome of docility and placidity, never showing any anger at all. Whenever she needed to, she withdrew into the mythology of her private spirit World and talked with mythical figures. Dr. Frieda Fromm-Reichman, the psychiatrist at Chestnut Lodge who treated her, dealt with this mythology with respect, assuring Hannah that she would not take it away as long as the girl needed it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
However, when Dr. Fromm-Reichman went to Europe one Summer, another, younger doctor was assigned to the girl. He charged in, blithely courageous, to break up her mythological World. The results were disastrous. In her explosion of violence, the patient set fire to herself and to her belongings at the Lodge, scarring herself for life. The error of the young doctor was that he did not appreciate that the mythology was what gave significance to Hannah’s existence. The question was not whether it was theoretically right or wrong, but its function for her. This placid patient, who seemed incapable of any aggressive act, swung from docility into outright violence. This may seem and feel like power to the hospital attendants, but it is a pseudopower, an expression of impotence. The patient may now be spoken of as “mad,” which means that she does not fit the accepted criteria in our society which, like all societies, prefer docile, placid “face.” It is important to see that the violence is the end result of repressed anger and rage, combined with constant fear based on the patient’s powerlessness. Behind the pseudopower of the madness we can often find a person struggling for some sense of significance, some way of making a difference and establishing some self-esteem. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
When Treasure was in treatment with me, she received a newspaper from her home town in which it was reported that a certain man in her village had experienced death by suicide. She said to me: “If only one other person in that town had known him, he would not have experienced death by suicide.” Note that she did not say, “If he had known someone,” but “if someone had known him.” She was telling me, I believed, that she would not put a violent end to her life so long as I was related to her. However, she was also describing something critically important for a human being—the necessity of having somebody listen, recognize, know him. It gives a person the conviction that one counts, that one exists as a part of the human race. It also gives one some orientation, point where one can find meaning in an otherwise meaningless World. It would be a red-letter day when Treasure could get angry with me, for I knew that she could then begin to protect herself in her contacts with other people in the wide World. And what is more, she could dare to live out her considerable capacities as an original and loveable as well as loving human being. “And now, my beloved brethren, behold, I declare unto you that except ye shall repent your houses shall be left unto you desolate,” reports Helaman 15.1. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Yet in all these relations the questions arise: Is our way of having these pleasures right or wrong? Do we use them for pleasure’s sake or because we want to unite in love with all that to which we belong? We never know with certainty. And those of us together with those in the past history of Christianity who have an anxious conscience, prefer to renounce pleasures although they are established as good by creation itself. They hide their anxiety behind parental or social or ecclesiastical prohibitions, calling these prohibitions Divine commands. They justify their fear to affirm the joy of life by appealing to their conscience, calling then the “imitation of Christ.” However Jesus, in contrast to John the Baptist, was called a glutton and a drunkard by his critics. In all these warnings against pleasure, truth is mixed with untruth. Insofar as they strengthen our responsibility, they are true; insofar as they undercut our joy, they are wrong. Therefore let me give another criterion for accepting or rejecting pleasures, the criterion indicted in our text: Those pleasures are good which go together wit joy; those are bad which prevent joy. In the light of this norm we should risk the affirmation of pleasures, even if our risk may prove to have been an error. It is not more Christian to reject than to accept pleasure. Let us not forget that the rejection implies a rejection of creation, or as the Church Fathers called it, a blasphemy of the Creator-God. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
And every Christian should be aware of a fact of which many non-Christians are keenly aware: the suppression of the joy of life produces hatred of life, hidden or open. It can lead to a self-destruction, as many physical and mental diseases prove. Such sweeping statements not only need qualification but also translation into recognizable and verifiable terms. Who are the alienated? Is the phenomenon of alienation new in history, or is it age-old? If age-old, are its present-day manifestations more widespread? And if so, how can measure the differences? Should mention alienation par excellence and point to the prevalence of experiencing death by suicide today? Old Testament princes and Roman soldiers, defeated or disgraced, ran upon their spears or hanged themselves from trees. Shall we cite modern rates of homicide? The cave man too could be homicidal. Shall we refer to the numbers of insane, unknown as well as institutionalized? However, mortals have always been mad. So it is not to gross statistics that we look, but to the untold lives of quiet desperation that mark our age—the multitudes of factory and white-collar workers who find their jobs monotonous and degrading; the voters and non-voters who feel hopeless or do not care. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
There are also the juveniles who commit senseless acts of violence; the growing army of idle and lonely old people; the African Americas who want to be treated like human beings; the women who want equal pay; the stupefied audiences of mass media; the people who reject the prevailing values of our culture but cannot—or may not—find any alternatives, the escapists, the retreatists, the nihilists, and the desperate citizens who would solve all major political problems by moving our society underground and blowing up the planet. There are few statistics to tell us about them, especially as many continue to function with the appearance of normality. Yet even with indirect evidence it seems safe to assume that there is something in common between them, something that touches the very roots of our social order. There are particular conditions in modern industrial society (especially under capitalism) that have led to mortal’s estrangement, and there are some ways both creative and destructive in which men and women have responded to that estrangement. What is it in our technological and social environment that leads to alienation? How can we so order society and integrate people that they do not merely exchange their unbearable sense of powerlessness and isolation for spurious togetherness or for new forms of coercion? #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
What does alienation mean? The word has an ancient history, being used in common discourse to identify feelings of estrangement, or of detachment from self and others; and in law to describe the act of transferring property or ownership to another. An illustration of the second usage is the alienation of church property which, after the Reformation, meant a transfer from religious to secular ownership. The two meanings converge in cases of law, now rare, when one sues some third party for alienating the affections of one’s spouse, the affectionate feelings being regarded as property which has been diverted to the third person’s use. In another common usage, alienation has long meant insanity; and in Europe to this day an alienist is one who treats persons suffering from mental disorders. In modern terms, however, alienation has been used by philosophers, psychologists and sociologists to refer to an extraordinary variety of psycho-social disorders, including loss of self, anxiety states, anomie, despair, depersonalization, rootlessness, apathy, social disorganization, loneliness, atomization, powerlessness, meaninglessness, isolation, pessimism, and the loss of beliefs or values. Obviously when we speak of alienation, we are dealing with a word that lends itself to many different meanings. To deal with all of them we would truly need an encyclopedia of the social sciences. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
The prestige of institutional mysticism, like that of official religion, mesmerizes nearly everyone interested in the subject. The independent mystic, who refuses all affiliation with any sect, school, ashram, monastery, group or society, is suspect and finds oneself left almost in isolation. However, although this may seem unfortunate, it is so only in some ways. In other ways, it leaves one entirely free from the bonds of strict and rigid doctrine, free to remain faithful to truth irrespective of all other considerations, free to speak in a voice whose authority comes not from Worldly power but from spiritual status. One should not change one’s chains by going from one master or one sect to another. Rather should one drop all chains. One is entitled to be set free from one’s former dependence on the church so that one may live one’s own individual inner life. How can one bring oneself to join any group, cult, or sect when one believes all of them to be right, only some are more right than others, and all of them to be wrong, only some are more wrong than others? There is not one whose limitations one does not see. One prefers the truthfulness of being uncommitted to any “ism,” and the freedom of being unjoined to any group. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
One is not likely to be a member of any organized movement because one’s mind is too large to be exclusive. One is outside all organized groups because, in spirit, one is inside all of them. Far from the din and disparagements of jarring sects, one lives unlabeled and free. One belongs to no particular named, classified, and indoctrinated group, and this keeps one’s own freedom while excluding none from one’s general goodwill. At the same time one stays open to truth and avoid the closed mind, fixed only on its own strict and rigid doctrine opinions and beliefs. The only group one is likely to be a member of is the human race! One is unwilling to be tired to any sect or coterie, established orthodoxy or organizational unorthodoxy. One may even refuse to fit into any of the any of the accepted patterns. One has to follow a light of one’s own. Such an anarchistic attitude is likely to provoke hostility and create detractors. It is said further that the religious mortal steps before God as one who is single, solitary, and detached insofar as one has also transcended the stage of the ethical mortal who still dwells in duty and obligation to the World. The latter is said to be still burdened with responsibility for the actions of agents because one is and ought, and into the unbridgeable gap between both one throws, full of grotesquely hopeless sacrificial courage, piece upon piece of one’s heart. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
This religious person is supposed to have transcended this tension between World and God; the commandment for one is to leave behind the restlessness of responsibility and of making demands on oneself; for one there is no longer any room for a will of one’s own, one accepts one’s place in the Plan; any ought is dissolved in unconditional being, and the World, while still persisting, has lost its validity; one still has to do one’s share in it but, as it were, without obligation, in the perspective of the nullity of all activity. Thus mortals fancy that God has created his World to be an illusion and one’s mortal to reel. Of course, whoever steps before the countenance has soared way beyond duty and obligation—but not because one has moved away from the World; rather because one has come truly close to it. Duties and obligations one has only toward the stranger: toward one’s intimates one is kind and loving. When mortal steps before the countenance, the World becomes wholly presented to one for the first time in the fullness of the presence, illuminated by eternity, and one can say You in on word to the being of all beings. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
There is no longer any tensions between World and God but only the one actuality. One is not rid of responsibility: for the pains of the finite version that explores effects one as exchanged the momentum of the infinite kind, the power of loving responsibility for the whole unexplorable course of the World, the deep inclusion in the World before the countenance of God. Ethical judgments, to be sure, one as left behind forever: evil people are for one merely those commended to one for a deeper responsibility, those more in need of love; but decisions one must continue to make in the depths of spontaneity unto death—calmly deciding ever again in favor of right action. Thus action is not null: it is intended, it is commanded, it is needed, it belongs to the creation; but this action no longer imposes itself upon the World, it grows upon it as if it were non-action. “For the Lord worketh not in secret combination, neither doth he will that mortals should shed blood, but in all things hath forbidden it, from the beginning of humanity,” reports Ether 8.19. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
Whenever I Found the Living, there I Found the Will to Power—I Have Been through All the World and I Will Take You to Safe Places!
These demons are mindless, immature, and deviant, but I had studied their conduct and I have learned from all the evidence why it is that they rage. They are maddened that they do not have bodies, that that cannot feel as we feel. They make the innocent scream filth because the rites of love and passion are things that they cannot possibly know. They can work the body parts but not truly inhabit them, and so they are obsessed with the flesh that they cannot invade. And with their feeble powers they bump upon objects, they make their victims twist and jump. This longing to be carnal is the origin of their anger, the indication of the suffering which is their lot. Power is essential for all living things. Mortals in particular, cast on this barren crust of Earth aeons ago with the hope and the requirement that one survive, finds one must use one’s powers and confront opposing forces at every point in one’s struggle with the Earth and with one’s fellows. Insecure as one has been through the ages, buffeted by limitations and weakness, laid low by illness and ultimately by death, one nevertheless asserts one’s powers in creativity. One product of this is civilization. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
The word power comes from the Latin posse, meaning to be able. We can see the vicissitudes of the emergence of power as soon as a baby is born into the World—in his cry and in the waving of his arms in demand that he be fed. The cooperative, loving side of existence goes hand in hand with coping and power, but neither the one nor the other can be neglected if life is to be gratifying. Our appreciation of the Earth and the support of our fellows are not gained by abdication of our powers, but by cooperative use of them. The infant’s capacity to cope with necessities becomes, in the growing adult, the struggle for self-esteem and for the sense of significance as a person. This latter is his psychological reason for living in contrast to the infant’s biological one. They cry for recognition becomes the central psychological cry: I must be able to say I am, to affirm myself in a World into which, by my capacity to assert myself, I put meaning, I create meaning. And I must do this in the face of nature’s magnificent indifference to my struggles. It is important that we remind ourselves that we mean neither will nor power in the competitive sense of the modern day, but rather self-realization and self-actualization. If we are freed from thinking of power only in the pejorative sense, we are better able to agree with others. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Far from treating power only as a term of abuse, one which is to be applied to our enemies (for instance, they are power-driven, but we are motivated only by benevolence, reason, and morality), I use it as a description of a fundamental aspect of the life process. It is not to be identified with life itself; there is much in human existence—like curiosity and love and creativity—that may be and normally is related to power but is not to called power in itself. However, if we neglect the factor of power, as is the tendency in our day of reaction against the destructive effects of the misuse of power, we shall lose values that are essential to our existence as human. A great deal of human life can be seen as the conflict between power on one side (for instance, effective ways of influencing others, achieving the sense in interpersonal relations of the significance of one’s self) and powerlessness on the other. In this conflict our efforts are made much more difficult by the fact that we block out both sides, the former because of the evil connotation of power drives, and the latter because our powerlessness is too painful to confront. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Indeed, the chief reason people refuse to confront the whole issue of power is that if they did, they would have to face their own powerlessness. As soon as powerlessness is referred to by its more personal name, helplessness or weakness, many people will sense that they are heavily burdened by it. Indeed, no social emotion is more widespread today then the conviction of personal powerlessness, the sense of being beset, beleaguered, and persecuted. Majority rule, for which mortals have struggled for centuries, has produced a situation in which mortals are more important, more powerless to influence their government then 200 years ago. The juggernaut of the state grinds on with no attention paid to you or me. And now multitudes are having to get used to living without their usual confidence that America is the World’s most powerful nation, a confidence to which, inadequate as it was, many people clung for their past sense of personal status. To admit our own individual feelings of powerlessness—that we cannot influence many people; that we count for little; that the values to which our parents devoted their lives are to us insubstantial and worthless; that we feel ourselves to be faceless others, insignificant to other people, and therefore, not worth much to ourselves—this is, indeed, difficult to admit. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
I cannot recall a time during the last four decades when there was so much talk about the individual’s capacities and potentialities and so little actual confidence on the part of the individual about one’s power to make a difference psychologically or politically. The talk is at least partially a compensatory symptom for our disquieting awareness of our very loss of power. It is, therefore, understandable in this transitional age, when we have at our fingertips the power to blow each other off the face of the planet, that certain persons should purpose we give up the human experiment. We live in times too dangerous to trust to human individual mood or choice…We can no longer control the people in power, and we therefore must resort to pacifying drugs to control our leaders. We can appreciate this despair, especially when we consider the powerlessness of the Blacks, out of which the impetus for this proposal arises. However, this does not prevent our also realizing, as we read with sinking heart of the new discoveries of chemicals that purport to cure modern mortals of their aggressiveness and develop in one a cooperative personality, that use of them goes with depersonalization and loss of our sense of personal responsibility. This alternative would mean, indeed, a gradual abdication of mortal’s humanity. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Other psychologist, noting that we have not done very well in controlling ourselves, propose to do that controlling for us in the form of operant conditioning. We hear of new methods of bringing up our children which will train out of them aggressive tendencies and make them docile and placid. Have everyone forgotten this despair in which people are polarized into two groups, the majority domesticated into docile, sheeplike passivity, their flesh soft and tender, who are then eaten by a tougher group, the engineers of this social program? The failure of nerve theories arise out of the true observation that the exercise of power has done colossal harm in the modern World. The proposals have the double attraction of expressing the reaction against power and promising a utopia in the same breath. They will have a strong following among people threatened by importance and hoping against hope for some substitute for power. American’s concern about the possible misuse of power verges at times on a neurotic obsession. The important question, however, is not whether these theories are right or wrong. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Rather it is whether or not we would, by trying to rid ourselves of our tendencies toward aggression, be discarding those values essential to our humanity—our self-affirmation and self-assertion, just to mention two. And would we not then be adding greatly to our feeling of powerlessness and this setting the stage for an eruption of violence that would dwarf everything so far? For violence has its breeding group in impotence and apathy. True, aggression has been so often and so regularly escalated into violence that anyone’s discouragement and fear of it can be understood. However, what is not seen is that the state of powerlessness, which leads to apathy and which can be produced by the above plans for the uprooting of aggression, is the source of violence. As we make people powerless, we promote their violence rather than its control. Deeds of violence in our society are performed largely by those trying to establish their self-esteem, to defend their self-image, and to demonstrate that they, too, are significant. Regardless of how derailed or wrongly used these motivations may be or how destructive their expression, they are still the manifestations of beneficial interpersonal needs. We cannot ignore the fact that, no matter how difficult their redirection may be, these needs themselves are potentially constructive. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness. Violence is the expression of impotence. Confused as to one’s place in the scheme of a World growing each day closer yet more impersonal, more densely populated yet in face-to-face relations more dehumanized; a World appealing ever more widely for one’s concern and sympathy with unknown masses of mortals, yet fundamentally alienating one even from one’s next neighbor, today Western mortals have become mechanized, routinized, made comfortable as an object; but in the profound sense displaced and thrown off balance as a subjective creator and power. This theme of the alienation of modern mortals runs through the literature and drama of two continents; it can be traced in the content as well as the form of modern art; it preoccupies theologians and philosophers, and to many psychologists and sociologists, it is the central problem of our time. In various ways they tell us that ties have snapped that formerly bound Western mortals to themselves and to the World about them. In diverse language they say that mortals in modern industrial societies are rapidly becoming detached from nature, from one’s old gods, from the technology that has transformed one’s environment and now threatens to destroy it. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
From one’s work and its products, and from one’s leisure; from the complex social institutions that presumably serve but are more likely to manipulate one; from the community in which one lives; and above all from oneself—from one’s body and one’s gender, from one’s feelings of love and tenderness, and from one’s art—one’s creative and productive potential. The alienated mortal is every mortal and no mortal, drifting in exercises no power, a stranger to oneself and to others. Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total; it pervades the relationship of mortals to one’s self. An indefinable sense of loss; a sense that life has become impoverished, that mortals are somehow deracinate and disinherited, that society and human nature alike have been atomized, and hence mutilated, above all that mortals have been separated from whatever might give meaning to their work and their lives. Too frequently, there is a tyranny from above, imitated by followers, which forbids any independent thought and does not tolerate any real search. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Mortal’s search for truth cannot be properly carried on unless one as full freedom in it. Where is the religious or religio-mystical institution which is willing to grant that to him? Is there a single one which lets one start out without being hampered by authoritarian doctrines, taboos, limitations, and traditions which it would impose upon one? Lectures, societies, and group-movements are of limited value: they can never replace nor achieve what is gained by one’s own individual efforts made in the right way. The seeker after truth will not find one’s way easy to travel. One may find that an institution, an authority, or an organization is suffocating one mentally or oppressing one emotionally. This may be the hour when one must claim one’s freedom. It is illusory to believe that, by blindly handing or humbly submitting one’s character and credo, one’s standards and values, one’s spiritual purposes and practices, to any organized group or established church, to a teacher, guide, or guru, to form and formulate, a mortal can evade the responsibility of judging them for oneself, accepting or rejecting by oneself. It is required of every fully human being that one be individual, not a parasite, and that one be oneself, not someone else. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
People speak of the religious mortal as one who can dispense with all relations to the World and to beings because the social stage that is allegedly determined from outside is supposed to have been transcended here by a force that works entirely from within. However, two basically different notions are confused when people use the concept of the social: the community built of relation and the amassing of human units that have no relation to one another—the palpable manifestation of modern mortal’s lack of relation. The bright edifice of community, however, for which one can be liberated even from the dungeon of sociability, is the work of the same force that is alive in the relation between mortals and God. However, this is not one relation among others; it is the universal relation into which all rivers pour without drying up for that reason. Sea and rivers—who would make a bold to separate here and define limits? There in only the one flood from I to You, ever more infinite, the one boundless flood of actual life. One cannot divide one’s life between an actual relationship to God and an inactual I-It relationship to the World—praying to God in truth and utilizing the World. Whoever knows the World as something to be utilized knows God the same way. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
One’s prayers are a way of unburdening oneself—and fall into the ears of the void. One—and not the atheist who from the night and longing of one’s garret window addresses the nameless—is God. And so we use them for a kind of pleasure which can be called fun. However, it is not the creative kind of fun often connected with play; it is, rather, a shallow, distracting, greedy way of having fun. And it is not by chance that it is that type of fun which can easily be commercialized, for it is dependent on calculable reactions, without passion, without risk, without love. Of all the dangers that threaten our civilization, this is on of the most dangerous ones: the escape from one’s emptiness through a fun which makes joy impossible. Rejoice! This Biblical exhortation is more needed for those who have much fun and pleasure than for those who have little pleasure and much pain. It is often easier to unite pain and joy than to unite fun and joy. Does the Biblical demand for joy prohibit pleasure? Do joy and pleasure exclude each other? By no means! The fulfillment of the center of our being does not exclude partial and peripheral fulfillments. And we must say this with the same emphasis with which we have contrasted joy and pleasure. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
We must challenge not only those who seek pleasure for pleasure’s sake, but also those who reject pleasure because it is pleasure. Mortals enjoy eating and drinking, beyond the mere terrestrial need of them. It is a partial ever-repeated fulfillment of one’s striving for life; therefore, it is pleasure and gives joy of life. Mortals enjoy playing and dancing, the beauty of nature, and the ecstasy of life. They fulfill some of one’s most intensive strivings for life; therefore, they are pleasure and give joy of life. Mortals enjoy the power of knowledge and the fascination of art. They fulfill some of one’s highest strivings for life; therefore, they are pleasure and give joy of life. Mortals enjoy the community of mortals in family, friendship, and the social group. They fulfill some fundamental strivings for life; therefore, they are pleasure and give joy of life. “And they had power given unto them, insomuch that they could not be confined in dungeons; neither was it possible that any mortal could slay them; nevertheless they did not exercise their power until they were bound in bands and cast into prison. Now, this was done that the Lord might show forth his power in them. And it came to pass that they went forth and began to preach and to prophesy unto the people, according to the spirit and power which the Lord had given them,” reports Alma 8.31-32. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
If the Infinite Power is Everywhere Present, it Can Surely Make itself Known to its Ardent Seeker in Any Place
I was awakened from this irrelevant thought, this obviating thought, by the fact that he was now beside me. He was closing his arm round me, and pressing his forehead against my face. He gave that summons again, not the rich, thudding seduction of that moment in the Palais Royal, but the voice that had sung to me over the miles, and he told me there were things that two of us would know and understand as mortals never could. He told me that if I opened to him and gave him my strength and my secrets that he would give me his. He had been driven to try to destroy me, and he loved me all the more that he could not. That was a tantalizing thought. Yet I felt danger. The word that came unbidden to me was Beware. Still I wondered what could be the difference between joy and happiness? Happiness is a fulfillment of the past patterns, hopes, aims; but those are exactly what many people have to give us. Happiness is mediated, so far as we can tell, by the parasympathetic nervous system, which has to do with eating, contentment, resting, placidity. Joy is mediated by the opposing system, the sympathetic, which does not make one want to eat, but stimulates one for exploration. #RandolpHarris 1 of 16
If a mortal is to remain forever the mere appendage of another mortal, if one’s minds is to echo back only that another mortal’s idea, the question arises: When will one come to oneself? For this is not the final purpose of our life here? One who has reached this stage when one must cease being the shadow of others, will not fall into proud deceptive self-assertion if one humbly yields and follows the inner voice. Happiness relaxes one; joy challenges one with new levels of experience. Joy is a release, an opening up; it is what comes when one is able genuinely to let go. All efforts that take one outside of one’s self are only halting and temporary concessions to human weakness. The soul being inside of the person’s being, one must in the end turn within. Happiness is associated with contentment; joy with freedom and an abundance of human spirit. In joy that is derived from pleasures of the flesh, the thrill of the two persons moving together toward in a climax, is the goal. Welcome truth on whatever horizon it appears, look for it in all four directions, and do not leave any of them unvisited. In short, do not become narrow-minded or fanatical. Let one not be intimidated by history and believe that truth has appeared only in the past, or by geography and look for it only in an Eastern location. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
Joy is new possibilities; it points toward the future. Joy is living on the most advanced stage in the development of life; happiness promises satisfaction of one’s present state, a fulfillment of old longings. Joy is the three of new continents to explore; it is an unfolding of life. In whatever place you find truth, with whatever name it may be labelled, take it. Happiness is related to security, to being reassured, to doing things as one is used to and as our father did them. In one’s endeavours after a better life, one should welcome the help that could come to one from every right source. Joy is a revelation of what was unknown. One should always be receptive to ideas and practices which might enrich those one already knows. Happiness often ends up in a placidity on the edge of boredom. No single path will lead of itself to the full truth. Happiness is success. However, joy is stimulating, it is the discovery of new continents emerging within oneself. There is no one group which has captured the monopoly of truth, for its recognition is a universal experience. Let us refuse to listen to those who insists upon our travelling one way and one way alone. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
Truth is not confined to any sect but fragments of it may be found scattered here and there. Happiness is the absence of discord; joy is the welcoming of discord as the basis of higher happiness. We may learn from everything and everyone, from every event and happening something that is new or a confirmation of something that is old, something affirmative or something negative. Happiness is finding a system of rules which solve our problems; joy is taking the risk that is necessary break new frontiers. Tennyson portrays Ulysses from the point of view of joy; he sees the antiquated man scorning to rust unburnished, not to shine in use! When a teacher of a teaching, a book or mystical exercise is itself being used as the indirection expression of God’s own movements to shed grace, then it is sheer blindness to denounce it as useless. Why limit the help you are willing to receive to a single quarter? All mortals are your teachers. Truth, being infinite, has an infinite number of aspects. Each spiritual guide is inclined to emphasize some only and to neglect the others. The good life, obviously, includes both joy and happiness at different times. What I am emphasizing is the joy that follows rightly confronted despair. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
Inspiration has manifested itself in many lands and in different forms, through widely spaced centuries and various kinds of channels. Why limit culture to one contribution, one land, one form, one century, and one channel alone? This applies not only to intellectual and artistic culture, but also to its religious aspect. We may go even farther in this matter and apply the same idea to personal gurus. Must we always be moored to a single guru? Cannot we respect, appreciate, honor, venerate and receive light from other ones in addition? Joy is the experience of possibility, the consciousness of one’s freedom as one confronts one’s identity. In this sense despair, when it is directly faced, can lead to joy. During his Egyptian studies Pythagoras visited every mortal celebrated for wisdom, so eager was he to learn. He did not follow the Indian custom of sitting sown only at one man’s feet. We all stand on the edge of life, each moment comprising that edge. Before us is only possibility. This means the future is open—as open as it was for Adam and Eve. In the beginning of human consciousness and all of the joys that open to us. Some natural tear they dropped, but wiped them soon; the World was all before them, where to choose their place of rest, and Providence their guide. They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, through Eden took their solitary way. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
Study everything but join nothing is the best counsel. But alas! naïve enthusiasts seldom heed it. One must make a stubborn reservation of one’s ground and run the flag of independence in the quest of truth, of nonattachment in the relationships with the teachers of truth. One will humbly and gladly accept whatsoever good one can find in their teachings, but one will not do so under a contact of pledged discipleship. In this matter one must be eclectic, taking the best from every available source and not shutting out any source that as something worthwhile to offer. It may not be the way for most people, for they cannot walk alone, but it is the only way for one. Self-guidance also leads to the goal. “When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream. Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy; then they said among the nations, ‘The Lord has done great things for them.’ The Lord had done great things for us; we are glad. Restore our Fortunes, O Lord, like the water courses in the Negeb! May those who sow in tears reap with shouts of joy! One that foes forth weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, bringing one’s sheaves with one,” reports Psalm 126. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
It is only through free, independent, truth-seeking research tat there is any hope of success in this Quest for ultimate truth. Naturally each vested interest tries to limit the search to its own fold for obvious reason, but one should refuse to limit one’s studies to any single school. If one keeps one’s intellectual liberty, one is less likely to fall into narrow sectarianism. Today, as in ancient Alexandria, one can study the World’s teachings, taking truth eclectically, but not making oneself a disciple. “Truly, truly, I say to you, you will weep and lament, but the World will rejoice; you will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn into joy. When a woman is in travail she has sorrow, because her hour has come; but when she is delivered of the child, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a child is born into the World. So you have sorrow now, but I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and one will take your joy from you,” reports John 16.20-22. Learn some of the basic truths each system contains without identifying with the system itself. Keep the mind open and free to acquire worthwhile ideas and practices from other cultures and avoid the closed-in sectarian attitude. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
Such an isolated position, outside groups and without labels, offers this advantage, that one is able to take from all, to accept and reconcile fragments of widely different and apparently contradictory teachings. “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full,” reports John 15.11. Take whatever is of value to you personally, in your present mental condition, from all these teachings and discard the rest. This is the eclectic way, and better than the commoner one of entering a single doctrinal cage and staying there. Hesitate well before committing yourself to join this or that organization. Remember that there are more aspects to truth than one, and it may well be worth keeping yourself free to learn something of these others. The Bible abounds in admonitions to rejoice. Paul’s word to the Philippians, “again I will say, Rejoice,” represents an ever-present element in Testaments the lack of joy is a consequence of mortal’s separation from God, and the presence of joy is a consequence of the reunion with God. Joy is demanded, and it can be given. It is not a ting one simply has. It is not easy to attain. It is and always was a rare and precious thing. And it has always been a difficult problem among Christians. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Christians are accused of destroying the joy of life, this natural endowment of every creature. The greatest of the modern foes of Christianity, Friedrich Nietzsche, himself the son of a Protestant minister, has expressed his judgment about Jesus in the words, “His disciples should look more redeemed.” We should subject ourselves to the piercing force of those words and should ask ourselves, “Is our lack of joy due to the fact that we are Christian?” Perhaps we can defend ourselves convincingly against the criticism that we are people who despise life, whose behavior is a permanent accusation of life. Perhaps we can show that this is a distortion of the truth. However, let us be honest. Is there not enough foundation for criticism? Are not many Christians—ministers, students of theology, evangelists, missionaries, Christian educators and social workers, pious laymen and laywomen, even the children of such parents—surrounded by an air of heaviness, of oppressive sternness, of lack of humor and irony about themselves? #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
We cannot deny this. Our Critics outside the Church are right. And we ourselves should be even more critical than they, but critical on a deeper level. I have always recommended to those who feel strong enough to be able to do so, to refrain from joining any organization, to keep their freedom, while at the same time studying the doctrines of whatever organization interests them, whatever religions engage some of their attention. This freedom enables them to look anywhere, to study everything, to question courageously, to keep breadth of view, depth of thought. Only such independence can reach out to the new without losing what is worthwhile in the old; all others are committed, fettered, captive. By remaining open to truths from different sources, and fitting them together like mosaics, we get eventually some sort of pattern. That rotation of the World’s axis which introduces the relational process has been succeeded almost immediately by the nest, which concludes it. Just now the It-World has surrounded the terrestrial being in me, then the You-World radiates from the ground for the length of one glance, and now its light has died back into the It-World. It is for the sake of language of this barely perceptible rising and setting of the spirit Sun that I relate this minute occurrence that happened to me more than once. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
No other event has made so deeply aware of the evanescent actuality in all relationships to other beings, the sublime melancholy in all relationships to other beings, the sublime melancholy of our lot, the fated lapse into It of every single You. For usually a day, albeit brief, separated from the morning and evening of the event; but here morning and evening merged cruelly, the bright You appeared and vanished: had the burden of the It-World really been taken from the terrestrial being and me for the length of one glance? At least I could still remember it, while the terrestrial being had sunk again from its stammering glance into speechless anxiety, almost devoid of memory. How powerful is he continuum of the It-World, and how tender the manifestation of the You! There is so much that can never break through the crust of thinghood! O fragment of mica, it was while contemplating you that I first understood that I is not something in me—yet I was associated wit you only in myself; it was only in me, not between you and me that it happened that time. However, when something does emerge from among things, something living, and become a being for me, and comes to me, near an eloquent, how unavoidably briefly it is for me nothing but You! #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
It is not the relationship that necessarily wanes, but the actuality of its directness. Love itself cannot abide in a direct relation; it endures, but in the alternation of actuality and latency. Every You in the World is compelled by its nature to become a thing for us or at least to enter again and again into thinghood. Think about the morning I walked on the road one dim morning, saw a piece of mica lying there, picked it up, and looked at it for a long time. The day was no longer dim: so much light was caught by the stone. And suddenly, as I looked away, I realized that while looking at it I had known nothing of the object and subject; as unity. I looked at it again, but unity did not return. Then something concentrated my strength, I entered into an association with my object, I raised the piece of mica into the realm of that which has being. And then, Lucas, only then did I feel: I; only then was I. He that had looked had not yet been I; only this, this being in association bore the name like a crown. Now I felt about this former unity as a marble image might feel about the block from which it has been carved: it was the undifferentiated, while I was the unification. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
As yet, I did not understand myself. True unity cannot be found, it can only be done. Can the low tide say I? Or the high tide? However, attribute a spirit to the sea and include in it the unity of low tide and high tide: that could say I. The piece of mica could not; the man looking at it could not; and the undifferentiated state of the initial look was mere material. However, once their tension had taken form, that which had become associated could. What we ordinarily call I is a point of departure and makeshift—a grammatical fact. However, the I of the tension is a work and actuality. Only in one relationship, the all-embracing one, is even latency actuality. Only one You never ceases, in accordance with its nature to be You for us. To be sure, whoever knows God also knows God’s remoteness and the agony of drought upon a frightened heart, but not the loss of presence. Only we are not always there. The love of the Vita Nuova is right in usually saying Ella and only occasionally Voi. The visionary of the Paradiso speaks inauthentically, from poetic constraint, wen he says Colui, and he knows it. Whether one speaks of God as He or It, this is never more than allegory. However, when we say You to him, the unbroken truth of the World has been made word by mortal sense. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
Every actual relationship in the World is exclusive; the other breaks into it to avenge its exclusion. Solely in the relation to God are unconditional exclusiveness and unconditional inclusiveness one in which the Universe is comprehended. Every actual relationship in the World rests upon individuation: that is its delight, for only thus is mutual recognition of those who are different granted—and that is its boundary, for thus is perfect recognition and being recognized denied. However, in the perfect relationship my You embraces myself without being it; my limited recognition is merged into a boundless being-recognized. Every actual relationship in the World alternates between actuality and latency; every individual You must disappear into the chrysalis of the It in order to grow wings again. In the pure relationship, however, latency is merely actuality drawing a deep breath during which the You remains present. The eternal You is You by its very nature; only our nature forces us to draw it into the It-World and It-speech. The It-World coheres in space and time. The You-World does not cohere in either. It coheres in the center in which the extended lines of relationships intersect: in the eternal You. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
In the great privilege of the pure relationship the privileges of the It-World are annulled. By virtue of it the You-World is continuous: the isolated moments of relationships join for a World life of association. By virtue of it the You-World has the power to give form: the spirit can permeate the It-World and change it. By virtue of it we are not abandoned to the alienation of the World and the deactualization of the I, nor are we overpowered by phantoms. Return signifies the re-cognition of center, turning back to it again. In this essential deed mortal’s buried power to relate is resurrected, the wave of all relational spheres surges up a living flood and renews our World. Perhaps not only ours. Dimly we apprehended this double movement—that turning away from the primal ground by virtue of which the Universe redeems itself in being—as the metacosmic primal form of duality that inheres in the World as a whole relation to that which is not World, and whose human form is the duality of attitudes, of basic words, and of the two aspects of the World. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
Both movements are unfolded fatefully in time and enclosed, as by grace, in the timeless creation that, incomprehensibly, is at once release and preservation, at once bound and liberation. Our knowledge of duality is reduced to silence by paradox of the primal mystery. No mortal comes to the knowledge of one’s divinity through a crowd of other mortals. No human entity can discover its own relation to God through any group method. The way to spiritual awareness is entirely individual, essentially lonely, inescapably within oneself. That is to say, it is mystical. Insofar as religion succeeds in showing the way, it ceases to be religion and becomes, or rather, consummates itself in, mysticism. Nothing is final and absolute. All is relative. Nobody need obey any mandate to bind oneself forever to any single group of ideas, need follow any sectarian flag. If one is to surrender one’s allegiance at all, it can only be reasonably done to the perfect synthesis of all that is needed for human living in all its departments. “And behold, it is wisdom in God that we should obtain these records, that we may preserve unto our children the language of our fathers,” reports I Nephi 3.19. If the mortal of letters is to hear and pronounce the word of truth, one must be independent of groups, organizations, parties, and institutions. One must be at liberty to play with many different points of view without committing oneself forever and finally to any of them. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
The Dark Night of the Soul–Pain is Followed by Joy, Separation Followed by Reunion, Death Followed by Renewal, Winter Followed by Spring!
I came into a brightly illuminated eighteenth-century Cresleigh Home in Rocklin Trails. The stone walls had been covered in fine rosewood paneling with framed mirrors rising to the ceiling. There were the usual painted chests, upholstered chairs, dark and lush landscapes, porcelain clocks. A small collection of books in the glass-doored bookcases, a newspaper of recent date lying on a small table beside a brocaded wing chair. High narrow French doors opened onto the stone terrace, where banks of white lilies and red roses gave off their powerful perfume. And there, with his back to me, at the stone railing stood an eighteenth-century man. It was Marius, when he turned around and gestured me to come out. Marius told me about this link between despair and joy, and how it is so important that the ancient Greeks, whp devoted one of their central legends to it, that of Persephone and Demeter. Persephone was picking flowers with her friends one day when Hades, god of the Underworld, saw her and was stricken with love. He seized her and carried her off to his underworld. When her mother, Demeter, goddess of fruit and grain and other produce of the fields, heard Persephone’s cries, she rushed around the World trying to find her. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
Learning that Hades had carried Persephone off to the underworld with Zeus’ connivance, Demeter was filled with a terrible and savage grief. Demeter left Olympus and wandered about the Earth incognito. Meeting two young women who sympathized with her story that she had been captured by pirated and had escaped, Demeter was taken to their home to meet their mother, Metaneira. Demeter continued to be so sad that a long time she sat upon the stool without speaking, never smiling, because of her sorrow…tasting neither food nor drink, because she pinned for her deep-bosomed daughter. Metaneria and her daughters proclaimed to Demeter, “Mother, what the gods send us, we mortals bear perforce though we suffer.” What an acknowledgment of destiny, an adjuring of Demeter to accept fate! Its importance is shown in the fact that it is repeated later to make sure we have heard it. Metaneria then asked Demeter to be nurse to her newborn son. Demeter came to life and bestowed love upon the infant, who then grew amazingly. Meanwhile, in her grief and rage Demeter had caused the land to bear no more fruit and grain, and a cruel famine covered the Earth. Zeus finally was moved to command Hades to let Persephone return to Earth, though Hades fed his shy mate a pomegranate seed. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
Persephone returned to Demeter who welcomed her with great joy. When Persephone confessed she had unbeknownst eaten a pomegranate seed, Demeter knew that he daughter would have to return to Hades for one-third of each year—the Winter—but could remain on Earth the rest of the time. However, this small flaw was quickly drowned in their joyousness. “So did they then, with hearts at one, greatly cheer each other’s soul and spirit with many an embrace; their hearts had relief from their griefs while each took and gave back joyousness. And straightway made fruit to spring up from the rich lands, so that the whole Earth was laden with leaves and flowers.” Demeter’s great grief, to the extent of speaking to no one, refusing all comfort and all food and drink, pining with longing for her daughter, amounts to a profound despair. It was a despair which carried over to humankind in the cruel famine on Earth. However, Demeter’s despair soon became a creative state, shown in her love for Metaneria’s infant son and his amazing growth. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
Demeter’s suffering is followed by this intense joy, which is stronger than she would have felt had the sorrow not preceded it. In other words, despair is a prerequisite to the birth of joy. Persephone’s fearful descent into the underworld is followed not only by joyful ascension, but the Earth’s periods of barrenness is followed by an eruption of fruit and flowers. The legend shows pain followed by joy, separation followed by reunion, death followed by renewal, Winter followed by Spring. Winter—the part of the year Persephone must go back to the underground—is often considered the dreaded part of the year, the time when despair would be most prevalent. However, Winter is the purifier, as the Magee Indians call it. The snow and the ice purify the ground. They cover over the myriad creatures from insects to deer who have lived out their span of life; and the ground, being enriched, springs forth with new life after the purification. This is the gestation before creativity. Out of such abyss, from such severe sickness one returns newborn, having shed one’s skin, ore ticklish and malicious, with a more delicate taste for joy, with a more tender tongue for all good things, with merrier senses, with a second dangerous innocence in joy, more childhood and yet a hundred times subtler than one has ever seen before. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
A similar linking despair and joy is the death and resurrection in Christian theology—and all resurrections, seen in the prototype of the resurrection of flowers and leaves on the trees in the Spring. This pattern runs through all of life. It is destiny, the design of the Universe, the form in which all of existence is encompassed. In Europe at Easter time, people turn out en masse for the sacrament of Good Friday, since they want to make sure Jesus is dead. The celebration of his death is a necessary precursor to any rising from the tomb. The renewal requires the death beforehand. Only if he has been really does do the fact that Christ has risen have meaning. In America there is a scant attendance on Good Friday, but the churches are filled to capacity on Easter. This is indicative of our lack of belief in tragedy in this country. It is a demonstration of our endeavor to overlook the death that must occur before the resurrection, the suffering that precedes creativity. Henry Miller refers to the same thing in terms of emotional death the resurrection, when he writes “those who are dead may be restored to life.” For Miller this occurs in the emotional release, after despair, of the creative process. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
Despair before joy is the meaning of the dark night of the soul of which the mystic Saint John of the Cross writes. Or, it could be the slough of despondence must be gone through before we can arrive at the gates of the Celestial City. If one is determined to achieve the Holy Grail, the hero must be willing to endure trial and dismemberment, even a species of death. Those whom claim to live in a perpetual state of ecstasy or in a never-interrupted state of love are either deluding themselves or settling for a mediocre state of existence. In mystic tradition the state of ecstasy is only second state and by no means the goal. Persons of lesser devotion or commitment often want to slide back into this second stage and have to be cautioned against selling the mystic experience short. Gethsemane is not at all an admission of failure on the part of the ministry of Jesus, but a necessary stage that cannot be avoided. It turns out not to be possible to let this cup pass from me. Without the despair, no resurrection. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
One of the mystics of history encourages would-be explorers of the mystic path to endure the pains and the discomfort. For behind this nothingness, behind this dark and formless shape of evil is Jesus hid in his joy. “Like wise the Spirit helps us in our weakness; for we do not know how to pray as we ought, but the Spirit himself intercedes for us with sights too deep for words. And one who searches the hearts of mortals know what is in the mind of the Spirit, because the Spirit intercedes for the saints according to the will of God,” reports Romans 8.26-27. This passage represents a mysterious saying of St. Paul. It expresses the experience of a mortal who knew how to pray and who, because he knew how to pray, said that he did not know how to pray. Perhaps we may draw from this confession of the apostle the conclusion we could find much evidence in our daily experience. Ministers are used to praying publicly on all kinds of occasions, some of which offer themselves naturally to prayer, other only artificially and against good taste. It is not unimportant to know the right how for praying and the right hour for not praying. This is a warning, on the periphery of what Paul wants to say, but a necessary warning, especially to ministers and laymen who are leaders in the Church. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
The next step leads us nearer to the center of Paul’s problem: There are two main types of prayer, the fixed liturgical and the free spontaneous prayer. Both of them show the truth or Paul’s assertion, that we do not know to pray as we ought. The liturgical prayer often become mechanical or incomprehensible or both. The history of the Church has shown that this was the fate even of the Lord’s prayer. Paul certainly knew the “Our Father” when he wrote that we do not know how to pray when we make a liturgical law out of the example of praying which Jesus gave to his disciples. However, if we turn from the formulated to the spontaneous prayer, we are not better off. Very often the spontaneous prayer is an ordinary conversation with somebody who is called God, but who is actually another mortal to whom we tell things, often at great length, to whom we give thanks and of whom we ask favors. This certainly does not prove that we know how to pray. The liturgical Churches which we use classical formulas should ask themselves whether they do not present the people of our time rom praying as they honestly can. And the non-liturgical Churches who give the freedom to make up prayers at any moment, should ask themselves whether they do not profane prayer and deprive it of its mystery. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
And now let us take a third step, int the center of Paul’s thought. Whether at the right time or not, whether a formulated or a spontaneous prayer, the question is decisive whether a prayer is possible at all. According to Paul it is humanly impossible. When we pray, this we should never forget: We do something humanly impossible. We talk to somebody who is not somebody else, but who is nearer to us than we ourselves are. We address somebody who can never become an object of our address because he is always subject, always acting, always creating. We tell something to him who knows not only what we tell him but also all the unconscious tendencies out of which our conscious words grow. This is the reason why prayer is humanly impossible. Out of this insight Paul gives a mysterious solution to the question of the right prayer: When we pray, it is God himself who prays through us. God himself in us: that is what Spirit means. Spirit is another word for God present, with shaking, inspiring, transforming power. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
When we pray something in us, which is not we ourselves, intercedes before God for us. We cannot bridge the gap between God and ourselves even through the most intensive and frequent prayers; the gap between God and ourselves can be bridged only by God. And so Paul gives us the surprising picture of God interceding for us before himself. If taken literally, such symbols—like all symbols concerning God—are absurd. If taken as genuine symbols, they are absurd. They symbol of God interceding before himself for us says that God knows more about us than that of which we are conscious. He searches the hearts of mortals. These are words which anticipate the present-day insight, of which we are rightly proud, that the small light of consciousness rises on a large basis of unconscious drives and images. However, if this is so, who else can bring our whole being before God expect God himself, who alone knows the deep things in our soul? This may help us also to understand the most mysterious part of Paul’s description of prayer, namely, that the Spirit intercedes with sighs too deep for words. Just because prayer is humanly impossible, just because it brings deeper levels of our being before God than the level of consciousness, something happens in it that cannot be expressed in words. Words, created by and used in our conscious life, are not the essence of prayer. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
The essence of prayer is the act of God who is working in us and raises our whole being to himself. The way in which this happens is called by Paul sighing. Sighing is an expression of the weakness of our creaturely existence. Only in terms of wordless sighs can we approach God, and even these sighs are his work in us. This finally answers a question often asked by Christians: Which kind of prayer is most adequate to our relation to God? The prayer in which we thank or the prayer in which we beg, the prayer of intercession or of confession or of praise? Paul does not make these distinctions. They are dependent on words; but the sighing of the Spirit in us is too deep for words and for the distinction of kinds of prayer. The Spiritual prayer is elevation to God in the power of God and it includes all forms of prayer. A last word to those who feel that they cannot find the words of prayer and remain silent towards God. This may be lack of Spirit. It also may be that there is silent prayer, namely, the sighs which are too deep for words. Then God who searches the hearts of mortals, knows and hears. “Wherefore, let us be faithful in keeping the commandments of the Lord; therefore let us go down to the land of our father’s inheritance, for behold he left gold and silver, and all manner of riches. And all this he hath done because of the commandments of the Lord,” reports 1 Nephi 6.17. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
All that one needs for the management of life can be had from within. The eyes of an animal have the capacity of a great language. Independent, without any need of the assistance of sounds and gestures, most eloquent when they rest entirely in their glance, they express the mystery in its natural captivity, that is, in the anxiety of becoming. This state of the mystery is known only to the animal, which alone can open it up to us—for this state can only be opened up and not revealed. The language in which this is accomplished is what it says: anxiety—the stirring of the creature between the realms of plantlike security and spiritual risk. This language is the stammering of nature under the initial grasp of spirit, before language yields to spirit’s cosmic risk which we call mortals. However, no speech will ever repeat what the stammer is able t communicate. I sometimes look into the eyes of a cockatiel or a dog. The domesticated animal has not by any means received the gift of the truly eloquent glance from us, as a human conceit suggests sometimes; what it has from us is only the ability—purchased with the loss of its elementary naturalness—to turn this glance upon us brutes. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
In this process some mixture of surprise and question has come into it, into its dawn and even its rise—and this was surely wholly absent from the original glance, for all its anxiety. Undeniably, this bird or dog began this glance by asking me with a glance that was ignited by the breath of my glance: “Can it be that you mean me?” Do you actually want that I should not merely do tricks for you? Do I concern you? Am I there for you? And I there? What is it about me? What is that?!” (“I” is here a paraphrase of a word of I-less self-reference that we lack. “That” represents the flood of a mortal’s glance in the entire actuality of its power to relate.) There the glance of the animal, the language of anxiety, had risen hugely—and set almost at once. My glance, to be sure, endured longer; but it no longer retained the flood of mortal’s glance. Once own inner self has the capacity of makings its own revelations to one. These got, one will find oneself increasingly independent of those which come from outside, from the hearsay of other mortals or the writings of strict and religious doctrines. What a number of mortals can no longer get from church or temple, they must get from their own selves through mysticism. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
One needs to realize that one’s greatest power will come to one through one’s own God and not through any other source, such as the overshadowing by spirits, and so on. Through this eventual realization, one will attain to greater progress and render much deeper service. Thus one will fulfill one’s owns highest destiny. Let one stand in one’s own place, and not seek to occupy that of another. Let one find a life that is real, and not copied. However, such admonitions are good only so far as one has already come to communion with God. Ultimately, there is only one real Master for every spiritual seeker, and that is one’s own divine God. The human teacher may assist one to the extent of giving one a temporary emotional uplift or a temporary intellectual perception, but one cannot bestow permanent divine consciousness on another individual. All that the teacher can do is to point out the way through the labyrinth; the journey must be made by the seeker oneself. For example, an individual living alone on a desert island could travel through all the stages of the Quest and attain the highest realization even though one had no visible teacher. God will give one all the guidance and help one needs. However, one is likely to mistakenly believe that one’s own ego is making the progress. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
I Will Take Fate By the Throat, it Shall Not Wholly Overcome Me: Oh, it is So Beautiful to Live—to Live a Thousand Times!
When I awoke, I was on board a ship. I could hear the creak of the boards, smell the sea. I could smell the scent of those who manned the ship. And I knew that it was the galley because I could hear the rhythm of the oars under the low rumbling of the giant canvas sails. I could not open my eyes, could not make my limbs move. Yet I was calm. I did not thirst. In fact, I experienced an extraordinary sense of peace. My body was warm as if I had only just fed, and it was pleasant to lie there, to dream waking dreams on the gentle undulation of the sea. The mind began to clear. I knew that we were slipping very fast through rather still waters. And that the Sun had just gone down. The early evening sky was darkening, the wind was dying away. And the sound of the oars dipping and rising was as soothing as it was clear. My eyes were open now. I did not turn away from life toward some mystical Nirvana. I forgot none of the joy, the effort, or the pain. I abandoned nothing. What I achieved was something much more wonderful than an old man’s serenity. I will take fate by the throat. It shall not wholly overcome me. Oh, it is so beautiful to live—to live a thousand times! #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
God is the only true sense of the World: he does not have to copy others, only to express one’s own individuality, most his higher spirituality. God takes care to remain what he is, he is true to himself, high holy self. However, insofar as we let our happiness depend on another person and lose our independence, one becomes weakened. Even if the other gives one knowledge or love or support, one should still not cease to look within as deeply as one can for the idyllic Peace. In the end a mortal must come to oneself, one’s diviner self, one’s essential being. And where shall one look for it if not there where Jesus pointed within? Not outside, not to some other mortal, however high one’s repute as guru, not to some book, however sacrosanct its scriptural authority. Both mortal and book must, if loyal to the highest, also direct one inward. The Kingdom is within you, not somewhere else, not in an ashram, not even at the feet of a guru: Jesus’ declaration is literally accurate. One of the reasons we are so reluctant to confront the aspects of destiny called fate is that we are afraid it will lead us into despair. We Americans are taught always to wear a garment of optimism, and we believe that with despair all hope is lost. So we cling to any false hope we can conjure up to serve as a bulwark against despair, unaware that a hope that has to be striven for is no hope at all. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Wait without hope, for hope would be hope for the wrong things. This beginning for some hope opens us to exploitation by any psychoreligious charlatan who appears on the horizon. All to escape the demon of despair! However, suppose that despair were basically a constructive emotion? Suppose despair is often a necessary prelude to the greatest achievement? Not all seeing has this character of union. If we look at things and observe them merely to control and to use them, no real union takes place. We keep them at a distance. We try to bring them into our power, to use them for our purposes, as means for our ends. There is no long in this kind of seeing. We glimpse the beings that shall serve us coldly; we have for those which we use a look, curious or indifferent, sensational or aggressive, hostile or cruel. There is abuse in the looking at those which we use. It is a seeing that violates and separates. This is the look of masses who in medieval paintings are looking at the Crucified. However, even this kind of seeing creates some union, though union through separation. However, it is the seeing that really unites is different. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Our language has a word for seeing that really unites: Intuition. This means seeing into. It is an intimate seeing, a grasping and being grasped. It is a seeing shaped by love. Plato, the teacher of the centuries, whose visions and words have deeply influenced the Fourth Gospel and the Church, knew about the seeing which unites. He called the love which drives us to a genuine intuition the child of poverty and abundance. It is the love which fills our want with the abundance of our World. However, it fills us in such a way that the disrupted multitude is not the last we see—a view which disrupts ourselves. The last we see lies in that which unites, which is eternal in and above the transitory things. Into this view Plato wanted to initiate his followers. The individual seeker should take one’s own soul—one’s higher self—as one’s guide. By prayer and reading of the holy scriptures, one may attain glimpses of it occasionally and receive the needed guidance. This is safer than bonding oneself to any institution or a so-called master. If one can put as much faith in the existence and power of one’s soul as most seekers put into their blind following of these masters, one’s efforts should prove sufficiently effective. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
When we annul suffering, it is a way of saying we are becoming and passing away—the salvation from the wheel of rebirth. Henceforth there is no recurrence is to be the formula for those who had liberated themselves from the desire for existence and thus from the compulsion to become again ceaselessly. We do not know whether there is a recurrence; the line of this dimension of time in which we live we do not extend beyond this life; and we do not try to uncover what will reveal itself to us in its own time and law. However, if we do not know that there is recurrence, then we should not seek to escape from it: we should desire not crude existence but the chance to speak in every existence, in its appropriate manner and language, the eternal I of the destructible and the eternal You of the indestructible. Whether people will obtain the goal of redemption from having to recur, we do not know. Certainly one leads to an intermediate goal that concerns us, too: the unification of the soul. However, one leads there not only, as is necessary, away from the jungle of opinions, but also away from the deception of forms—which for us is no deception but (in spite of all the paradoxes of intuition that make for subjectivity but for us simply belong to it) the reliable World. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
One’s path, too, is a way of ignoring something, and when one bids us become aware of the processes in our body, what one means is almost the opposite of our sense-assured insight into the body. Nor does one lead the unified being further to that supreme You-saying that is open to it. One’s inmost decision seems to aim at the annulment of the ability to say You. Saying You to a mortal—that is clear from one’s greatly superior, but also greatly direct, intercourse with one’s disciples—but one does not teach it: to this love, which means boundless inclusion in the heart of all that has become, the simple confrontation of being by being remains alien. In the depths of one’s silence one certainly knows, too, the You-saying to the primal ground, transcending all the gods whom one treats like disciples; it was from a relation process the became substance the one’s deed came, clearly as an answer to the You; but of this one remains silent. One’s following among the nations, however, the great vehicle, denied one gloriously. They addressed the eternal You of mortals—using the name of God. And they expect as the coming of God, the last one of his eon, him, that shall fulfill love. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
All doctrines of immersion are based on the gigantic delusion of human spirit bent back into itself—the delusion that spirit occurs in mortals. In truth it occurs from mortal—between mortal and what one is not. As the spirit bent back into itself renounces this sense, this sense of relation, one must draw into mortal that which is not mortal, one must psychologize World and God. This is the psychical delusion of the spirit. In this fathom-sized, feeling-afflicted ascetic’s body dwell the World and the origin of the World and the annulment of the World and the path that leads to the annulment of the World. That is true, but ultimately it is no longer true. Certainly, the World dwells in me as a notion, just as I dwell in it as a thing. However, that does not mean that it is in me, just I am not in it. The World and I include each other reciprocally. This contradiction for thought, which inheres in the It-relation, is annulled by the You-relation which detaches me from the World in order to relate me to it. The self-sense, that which cannot be included in the World, I carry in myself. The being-sense, that which cannot be included in any notion, the World carries in itself. However, this is not a thinkable will but the whole Worldliness of the World, just as the former is not a knowing subject but the whole I-likeness of the I. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
No further reduction is valid here: whoever does not honor the ultimate unities thwarts the sense that is only comprehensible but not conceptual. The origin of the World and the annulment of the World are not in me; neither are they outside me; they simply are not—they always occur, and their occurrence is also connected with me, with my life, my decision, my work, my service, and also depends on me, on my life, my decision, my work, and my service. However, what it depends on is not whether I affirm or negate the World in my soul, but how I let the attitude of my soul toward the World come to life, life that affects the World, actual life—and in actual life paths coming from very different attitudes of the soul can cross. However, whoever merely has a living experience of one’s attitude and retains it in one’s soul may be as thoughtful as can be, one is Worldless—and all the games, arts, intoxications, enthusiasm, and mysteries that happen within one do not touch the World’s skin. As long as one attains redemption only in one’s self, one cannot do any good or harm to the World; one does not concern it. Only one that believes in the World achieves contact with it; and if one commits oneself one also cannot remain Godless. Let us love the actual World that never wishes to be annulled, but love it in all its terror, but dare to embrace it with our spirit’s arms—and our hands encounter the hands that hold it. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
I know nothing of a World and of Worldly life that separate us from God. What is designated that way is life with an alienated It-World, the life of experience and use. Whoever goes forth in truth to the World, goes forth to God. Concentration and going forth, both in truth, the one-and-the-other which is the One, are what is needful. God embrace but is not myself. On account of this which cannot be spoken about, I can say in my language, as all can say in theirs: You. For the sake of this there are I an You, there is dialogue, there is language, and spirit whose primal deed language is, and there, in eternity, the word. Let us look at the experience of a young man named Britain. He came into therapy feeling sad, hopeless, lonely, lost. He felt everybody had died—his mother, his sister Britney—and the relation with Celeste was nearly dead, and now, at the end of therapy, the relation with the therapist was dying. He was in clear, unadulterated despair. However, halfway through the session he began his recovery. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
The despair was essential in bringing Britain to the point where he could give up his previous neurotic ways of behaving in his overwork and in his failure to have full relationships with other people. This experience when he had been a young man had been one turning point in his life, just as he and I believed this therapy, ten concluding, would be a turning point in one’s overcoming his love bind with Celeste. Thus, despair can lead to highly constructive action. It can be a flushing out of the Augean stables. Despair can be a giving up and a letting go of neurotic problems that had been solidifying since one was an infant. In this sense despair plays the constructive role reserved for it in every psychotherapy. I am speaking of despair not as a cosmic pout nor as any kind of intellectual posture. If it is a mood put on to impress somebody or to express resentment toward anybody, it is not genuine despair. Authentic despair is that emotion which forces one to come to terms with one’s destiny. It is the great enemy of pretense, the foe of playing ostrich. It was once thought that when an ostrich was in danger it hid its head in the ground believing that if it could not see anyone, no one could see it. That has led to the idea that is people refuse to face painful facts or unpleasant truths, they play ostrich. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
We have imposed on us a demand to face the reality of one’s life. The letting go that we noted in despair is a letting go of false hopes, of pretended loves, of infantilizing dependency, of empty conformism which serves only to make one behave like sheep huddling in a flock because they fear the wolves outside the circle. Despair is the smelting furnace which melts out the impurities in the ore. Despair is not freedom itself, but is a necessary preparation for freedom. The Grand Inquisitor is right: we would not choose to go into despair if we consulted only our rational choices. However, there is no denying destiny or fate, and reality comes marching up to require that we drop all halfway measures and temporary exigencies and ways of being dishonest with ourselves and confront our natural lives, uninhibited by external influences, which may be toxic. It is well known that in successful therapy sessions, that organizations which are far and away the most effective in treating people, state frankly that the assistant for the injured or disabled or an individual with special needs cannot be cured until he or she is in complete despair. It is only then that the individual can give up the need for the source of their dependence as a solace for his or her forlorn hopes or to bolster his or her false expectations. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Those who have been through a rehabilitation program and then help new members simply laugh outright at the predespair of unrealistic grandiosity, one’s pompous I-am-the-master-of-my-fate-attitude, and one’s vain resolutions to control one’s dependency by one’s own will power, come to understand that one has to find a higher faith in the power of God to resolve and heal situations. Then the Lord will let one see why there is none upon the Earth that can speak to my condition, namely, that one might give God all the glory. Because sometimes we hope for the wrong things, and hopes themselves can become the most seductive delusions. When a person reached the lowest point, state, or condition, for instance, when one has reached ultimate despair—one can then surrender to eternal forces; this process as giving up the delusion of false hopes and, thus, acknowledging fully the facts of destiny. Then and only then can this person begin to rebuild oneself. It is superb demonstration of the hypothesis that freedom begins only when we confront destiny. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
The same was true of Synanon, the drug rehab turned violent cult, as the system became a nest for fraud. There was failure to define and enforce clear ethical standards governing their business practices, an it rendered the treatment program to become field of predator’s paradise. Synanon started in Santa Monica, California by Charles Dederich, and morphed into a utopian community, then a religion and a cult with more than $30 million in assets and upward of 1,300 followers. True believers shaved their heads, wore overalls, and lived together at Synanon compounds, professing and almost slavish obedience to Charles Dederich, no matter how brutal his methods. They were said to even kidnap people. Despite all the high idealistic talk of oneness, fraternity, and egolessness, each of us is still an individual, still has to dwell in a body of one’s own, to use a mind of one’s own and experience feelings of one’s own. To forget this is to practice self-deception. Each will come to God in the end but one will comes as a purified transformed and utterly changed person, lived in and used by God as one will live in and be conscious of the presence of God. “And Christ hath said: If ye will have faith in me ye shall have power to do whatsoever thing is experiment in me,” Moroni 7.33. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
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One Must Know What the Struggle Between Self and Soul Really Feels Like through One’s Own Experience!
We even went in search of haunted houses together—a newfound pastime that excited us both. Of course, most of the time we found nothing in the empty buildings where spirits were supposed to appear. And those wretched persons supposed to be supposed to by possessed by the devil were often no more than commonly insane. What, then, shall we do? The only answer is: Be compassionate. The universality of evil makes human compassion necessary. I often remark to the parents who are sad about the part they are played in the problems of their children. You and I—all of us who are human—are on the same yacht. Platitude through this is it often helps relieve them of the solitary, pariahlike quality that makes them feel they are alone in their mistakes and solitary in their evil. Mere rationalism can never solve the problem of life for the intellect no longer knows is from the ought, or known from the known—that is to say, ascents to Heaven; only the dead can be forgiven; but when I think of that my tongue’s a stone. However, there is an act of harmony between the two. I am content to follow to its source every event in action or in thought; measure the lot; forgive myself the lot! When such as I cast out remorse so great a sweetness flows into the heart, we must laugh and we must sing, we are blest by everything, everything we look upon is blest. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
This is an exquisite description of what happens in the deeper sense of forgiveness toward oneself. The forgiveness extends, in the case of parents and children, to the sons and daughters as well; for the regrets are often bound up with what seems to be their opposite, resentment on the part of the parents at the son or daughter for causing him or her such perplexity and sufferings. Thus forgiveness of oneself permits one to forgive others. Forgiveness, which is one phase of compassion, puts deeper meaning into our human comedies, and enables us to get insight from our tragedies so that they become bearable. Forgiveness means to overcome the resentment—to cast out remorse—which is the curse that accumulates in most human relationships. Forgiving ourselves as well as others may be the only way of transcending this resentment. The health-enhancing aspect of the forgiving of others is that it helps wipe away the resentment toward oneself at the same time. Compassion gives us fresh perspective on what it means to be human, and helps us judge less harshly ourselves as well as the persons who impinge upon us. Paradoxical as it sounds, this gives us a point outside our remorse from which we can do more to correct it. We stop, then, condemning ourselves for being human, and we can at the same time stop condemning others for the same condition. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
All my brilliantly colored birds given away, probably for sale in the bazaar. Gray African parrots that live to be as old men. Nicolas de Lenfent lived to be thirty. Two hundred years ago, the people of Paris would have got him. He would not have had to burn himself. Got me too maybe. But I doubt it. No, there never would have been any witches place for me. He lives on in my mind now. Pious mortal phrase. And what kind of life is that? I do not like living here myself! What does it mean to live on in the mind of another? Nothing, I think. You are not really there, are you? This means that everybody needs all the clarity they can muster regarding their ignorance and finiteness, and all the support they can obtain in order to face the upsetting implications of what their clarity reveals to them. A compassionate person is one who, by virtue of accepting this situation, can provide others as well as self with such support. As a mortal walks through life keeping a secret loyalty to one’s inner spiritual self, one is likely to make a few friends among those who are keen-sighted enough to perceive this loyalty, and a few enemies among others who misconstrue one’s actions and misunderstand one’s motives. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
And because one firmly believes in complete payment for all deeds by God sets over humankind, one will remain indifferent without resentment and without hatred to the latter, while silently returning a benign love to one’s friends. Freedom without compassion is demoniacal. Without compassion, freedom can be self-righteous, inhuman, self-centered, and cruel. The less affluent and the rich are both equally free to sleep under the bridges of Paris at night—this illustrates how freedom can turn into cruelty toward the less fortunate. Many of the crusades under the banner of freedom—and not merely the ones we read about in history books—have consisted of requiring the other person to accept one’s own concept of freedom. Thus, they have turned out to be tyrannical. This can be seen in some experiences of psychotherapy. The therapist may be convinced that one’s own form of freedom is the only thing that is good for the client, which then makes for coldness, rigidity, inhumanness in the therapist even though what one does may be technically correct. Mysticism is not concerned with those who depend on traditional forms of worship and current religious creeds for the satisfaction of all their inner needs. It is not for them and could do nothing for them. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
However, those to whom such dependence is mere incidental or mostly provisional may find further nutriment in mystical teachings and practices. Spiritual pride can take different forms. One of them is a studied intellectual independence, a refusal to be committed, the maintenance of a so-called open mind which never comes to a decision. Any good thing overdone becomes a bad thing and although independent judgment and thinking for oneself, if pushed to an extreme it merges into mere pride—egoistic pride. It is only as one gets released from all the self-pictured, self-made, much limited imaginations provided for one by less educated but well-meaning mortals that one can begin to let in the grace-bestowed new understanding of God. The person, young or mature, who has one’s mind set on higher things than pleasures of the moment and is willing to sacrifice a fragment of time, attention, and interest of such studies and such prayers, will find one’s refusal to conform to other people’s ways is repaid in inner growth on the quest. Attainment of sanctity may not be bought at the price of relinquishment of sanity. I once supervised a psychiatrist whose patient, a young woman of nineteen, was giving him a good deal of trouble. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
The patient was constantly being irritated, changing the subject, and in general angry and petulant. I remarked in the supervisory hour that the young woman might be trying to get some sign of affection from the therapist. The psychiatrist in the next session, when the young woman was playing out her petulant drama, interrupted her with “You know, I like you.” The patient stopped talking, paused a moment and then said, “I guess that is what it is all about.” When the therapist reported this to me, I asked, “Do you like her?” And he answered, “No, I really do not.” There flashed before my mind a glimpse of the whole treatment collapsing, for there is no doubt that patients in therapy can sense this presence of lack of compassion, despite all pretenses. Surely enough, she broke off the therapy after a couple of sessions. Compassion on the part of the therapist is the essence of any psychotherapy which deserves the name. When the level is basic as compassion, even if though they may not speak of it, patients will see through any pretense, since they are taught in our culture to pretend that they do not see such negative things. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
If people would learn to accept the authority of the Voice of Inspiration whenever and wherever it spoke to them, they would not need to cramp and confine themselves within the narrowing walls of any sect or section, any cult or organization. The Real Self dwells above time and space, matter and form, inviolable in its perfect liberty. If that be the goal of ideal state, one must sooner or later make a beginning to come into closer relations to it and to grow by the radiance of its light. Therefore one does no wrong in standing aloof from the confinements of discipleship to one particular mortal, and the restrictions of membership in one organized group. No longer is one willing to accede to the World’s demand for one’s loyalty, for one’s conformity, for one’s surrender. One is recovering one’s own individual identity and is determined to keep it. It is to God that one must give one’s ultimate allegiance. If one’s mind is filled with other people’s teachings, it may give no attention to God’s teachings, leading, and intuitions. There is a teaching principle in every mortal which can provide one with whatever spiritual knowledge one needs. However, one must first take suitable measures to evoke it. These include cleansing of body and mind, aspiration of feeling and thought, silencing of intellect and ego. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
As an expression of the divine life-power, one is unique. In the end, one will always have to take one’s guidance from within, that is to say, direct from that life-power which has made one what one is. The independent seeker, uncommitted to any cult, may be a sheep without a fold but one is not necessarily without a shepherd. The inner voice can guide and care for one no less than a mortal in the flesh. A therapist colleague of mine was seeing regularly a patient whose manner was generally bombastic and insolent. One day the therapist’s daughter had been seriously hurt. Nothing was said by the therapist in the session about the accident, but the patient that day, as we heard on the tape, was tender, kind, and completely without his usual bombast, as though he were aware of the therapist’s tragedy—which he could not have known. Does this presuppose some degree of mental telepathy in therapy or some capacity to pick up the tiny cues such as the sound of one’s voice? I believe both are probably true. Dr. Freud was right, in my judgment, in his mortal theory of telepathy, stating that he had learned not to lie in therapy because he hand often enough experienced the fact that the patient would see through the lie n matter how hard Dr. Freud tried to cover it up. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Some refuse to claim unity exists or does not exist. One who has passed though all the trials of immersion will persist in unity after death or one will not persist in it. This refusal, this noble silence, has been explained in two way. Theoretically: because perfection is said to elude the categories of thought and assertion. Practically: because the unveiling of such truths would not assist salvation. In truth both explanations belong together: whoever treats being as the object of an assertion, pulls it down into division, into the antitheses of the It-World—in which there is no salvation. When the view prevails that soul and body are identical, there is no salvation; when the view prevails that the soul is one and the body is another, then also there is no salvation. In the envisaged mystery, even as in lived actuality, neither this it is nor thus it is not prevails, neither being nor not being, but rather thus-and-otherwise, being and not-being, the indissoluble. To confront the undivided mystery undivided, that is the primal condition of salvation. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
We may follow the faithful to the truth of our encounter; going further would involve a betrayal of the actuality that we do not fetch from our own depths but that has been inspired in us and apportioned to us, we know: if this is merely one of the foals, then it cannot be ours; and if it is the goal, then it has been misnamed. And: if it is one of the goals, then the path may lead all the way to it; if it is the goal, then the path merely leads closer to it. Jesus says, “I came into this World, that those who do not see may see.” And the apostle says, “That which we have seen with out eyes, which we have looked upon—we proclaim to you.” Both speak not about the future, but about something they have seen and still see. And they certainly do not feel as do old and new theologians that there is a conflict between seeing and hearing, between seeing and believing. “That which we have seen and heard,” writes the apostle. “Everyone who see the Son and believes in him,” says Jesus. And most important and surprising: That which we have seen with our eyes according to our gospel is the Word, the eternal Word or Logos in whom God speaks, who can be seen through the words of creation and who is visible in the man Jesus. The Word can be seen, this is the highest unity of hearing and seeing, that is the truth which can bridge the Protestant and the Catholic half-truths. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
The technique of treatment must be in yourself for the best therapist is one who has problems one’s self, but is aware of them and is working on them. In psychotherapy one cannot have compassion for another if one never has experienced psychological problems of one’s own. Note that I do not ay the same psychological problems as the clients—that is not necessary. However, the therapist must know what the struggle between self and soul really feels like through one’s own experience. This is why, in interviewing and selecting candidates for two different psychoanalytic training institutes, I would never consider the candidate who was “well adjusted” and who had not endured the wresting with one’s own destiny. I assumed—and I believe rightly so—that such persons would not empathize with and feel compassion for the patient or client. The two greatest therapists I ever knew personally, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and Harry Stack Sullivan, had, individually, almost every problem you can imagine, and both had fantastic insight into the problems of their patents and corresponding compassion. One of the obvious and central functions of the didactic therapy that the trainee is required to go through is to sensitize oneself to the problems within oneself in order to have compassion for the other persons one is to work with. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
The person who lack compassion does not grasp the whole circuit in one’s human relationships. When we speak of the importance of art, poetry, religion, and other right-brain functions, unassisted consciousness must always tend toward hate; not only because it is good common sense to exterminate the other fellow, but for the more profound reason that, seeing only arcs of circuits, the individual is continually surprised and necessarily angered when one’s hardheaded policies return to plague inventor. The inadequacy of a solely ration point of view, for reason is pliable to every sense, and in practice reason is often a matter of truth on this side of the Pyrenees, error on that. It is our destiny to live always in some form of community. Even the frontiersman who counted it a matter of pride that all of twenty miles separated one from one’s nearest neighbor was still bound to that neighbor by a language no matter how rarely one spoke it, by one’s memory, by every thought, ad infinitum. The wolf child is an anomaly and, indeed, is a proof of what I am saying in that one became human only when one exhibited a communal morality. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
The fact that we belong to a community as well as being individual persons requires that we acknowledge this destiny and relate to each other with compassion. Compassion limits our freedom, but it renders freedom human at the same time. As we have seen, the refusal to admit destiny is to cut ourselves off from other. And now we can see its cruelty. Surely it is relevant: If I do not take care of myself, who else will? However, if one takes care only of oneself, one’s freedom can become cruelty to others. Love, of which compassion is the first step, keeps freedom from becoming tyrannical. The universality of evil also makes necessary human mercy, the gentle virtue, as Shakespeare, in The Merchant of Venice, rightly insisted. Mercy not only drops like a soft Spring rain, but it is like forgiveness in that it blessed one who gives and one wo takes, Mercy is the attribute to awe and majesty, wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings; but mercy is above this sceptered sway, it is enthroned in the hearts of kings, it is an attribute to God himself, and Earthly power doth then show likest God’s when mercy seasons justice. Evil will not disappear of shrink away during the night. We will never wake up in the morning to find that evil has vanished from the face of the Earth. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
The purpose of human life is not to avoid mistakes, nor to show an unblemished escutcheon, but to rise to meet the challenges as our destiny reveals itself and to search out in freedom the challenges we wish to engage in. As I read the human tragicomedy, we will go on struggling, avoiding complete nuclear catastrophe by the skin of our teeth, trying to become aware of the pitfalls in ourselves and our society, so that we can make constructive choices whenever possible. In this tragicomedy forgiveness and mercy will season justice and make life bearable with the presence of beauty, the emotion of love, and the occasional experience of joy. Seeing is the most astonishing of our natural powers. It receives the light, the first of all that is created, and as the light does it conquers darkness and chaos. It creates for us an ordered World, things distinguished from each other and from us. Seeing shows us their unique countenance and the larger whole to which they belong. Whenever we see, a piece of the original chaos is transformed into creation. We distinguish, we recognize, we give a name, we know. I have seen—that means in Greek I know. From seeing, all science starts, to seeing it must always return. We want to ask those who have seen with their eyes and we ourselves want to see with our eyes. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
Only the human eye is able to see in this way, to see a World in every small thing and to see a Universe of all things. Therefore the human eye is infinite in reach and irresistible in power. It is the correlate to the light of creation. However, seeing means more than the creation of a World. Where we see we unite with what we see. Seeing is a kind of union. As poetry has described it, we drink colors and forms, forces and expression. They become part of ourselves. They give abundance to the poverty of our loneliness. Even when we are unaware of them they stream into us; but sometimes we notice them and welcome them and desire more of them. Those bewildered by the doctrinal differences between the established or traditional creeds, theologies, liturgies, and customs, yet still seeking some mental satisfaction, finding similar differences between the religious heresies, the non-established or modern cults, have a way out of their problem. This is to apply themselves to direct personal practices which can give them their own experience, their own teaching, from within. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
These standard practices include self-purification and prayer. For this inner work they do not have to join any group or organization, do not have to search for, follow or cling to any guide. The God within them becomes, with faith, patience, persistence, and practice, the light on their path. If one finds the same tenet in ten different religious creeds or metaphysical codes one is glad to get their repeated confirmation. However, in the end one must get it for oneself from within one’s own self—God. It is the firmest base of life. Although it is quite true that each quester must travel the path for oneself, must move on one’s own two feet, this does not mean that one is travelling completely along, or on one’s own. If one has no personal guide to accompany one, God is still there, within one, pulling, drawing, leading, or pointing, if only one can learn how to recognize it. One wants to be faithful to the Glowing Light within, not subjected to or obstructed by an outside authoritarianism. If the Infinite Power is everywhere present, it can surely make itself known to is ardent seeker in any place, even though that place be bereft of masters. “It is by faith that miracles are wrought; and it is by faith that Angels appear and minister unto mortals; wherefore, if these things have ceased wo be unto the children of mortals, for it is because of unbelief, and all is vain,” reports Moroni 7.37. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Why Do I Harm the Very Person I Love?
Do you think we find our destiny somehow, no matter what happens? I mean, do you think even as immortals we follow some path that was already marked for us when we were alive? We have said that human freedom gives birth to the human spirit and that spirit is necessary if there is to be freedom. However, are not human spirit and freedom also the sources of evil? What did do we really mean when we say the wrath of God is necessary if there is to be any love of God? In the course of my therapeutic experience I have met and talked with a number of parents whose son or daughter happened to be in treatment with me. When the parents let their hair down, their attitudes varied from tearful regret on the part of a clergy member high up in the ecclesiastical hierarchy about his son’s depression to the genuine, if sad, puzzlement of a mother whose psychotic episode when her daughter was born had a good deal to do wit the latter’s present promiscuity to the boisterous instructions of a Wall Street executive who adjured me to hurry and get his son to shape up. The boisterousness of the executive only served to emphasize his subconscious realization that his authoritarianism had a good deal to with his son’s perpetual failures in everything he tired. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
If these parents could have spoken out of the depths of their feelings, each one of them—even the Wall Street executive—would have cried out, “Why do I harm the very person I love?” When we see the evil we do, scarcely any of us can remain unaffected, mostly unintentionally, to those in our own family and to people we love by our inability to understand what is going on in the other’s thoughts. Oscar Wilde’s line “Yet each man kills the thing he loves” may relieve us to some extent in that it presents the universal quality of the problem of evil; we are not alone in the harm we partly cause. However, Oscar Wilde also makes it impossible for us to forget that each of us participates in the inhumanity to other human beings. The inevitability of evil is the price we pay for freedom. And the denial of evil is also the denial of freedom. Since we have some margin of freedom, we have to make some choices; and this means the chance of making the wrong choice as well as the right one. Freedom and evil presuppose each other, whether we accept responsibility for our freedom and evil or not. Possibility is possibility for evil as well as good. We can pretend innocence, but such retreating to childhood ignorance does not help anyone. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
There is an inescapable egocentricity in all of us, leading to the absolutizing of our own perceptions, which then become destructive to those closest to us. There is a tendency in each one of us to be absolute in one’s self. Each of us is bound up in one’s own skin, each of us sees life through one’s own eyes, and none of us can escape doing some violence to those we long most to understand. The good that I would I do not, and the evil that I would not do, that I do. There is no evading this dilemma. This is the original sin: each of us speaks out of one’s separate individuality and thus inexorably runs roughshod over yearnings and perceptions that are precious to people we love. And if one tried very hard not to do this, if one makes every effort to do good, one succeeds only in adding an element of self-righteousness to the ways one confronts one’s fellows. The problem of evil has been a stumbling block for philosophers and theologians for millennia. Those who represent the rational approach to evil, from Aristotle through Aquinas to the rational philosophers of today, hold that the more we solve our problems, the less evil will exist. Evil is thus a lack of goodness. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The more our science progresses, the argument goes, the more mysterious of life and nature are solved, and the less evil there is in this would. However, I believe this point of view is wrong. I heard this judgment much more in my earlier days before the advent of Adolph Hitler, before the Second World War with all its newly technologized ways of killing, before the use of concentration camps as an accepted political arm of the government, and before hydrogen bomb, with its unutterably cruel mass maiming and slaying. This depressing list should make clear the fact that the progress of science and technology has not resulted in our being less evil. Human cruelty and capacity for evil increase neck and neck with technological progress, just look at how many of the TV news stations lie, distort facts, and ruin lives for fun. Our ways of killing are made more efficient as well as our ways of living. In fact it is thought, people who are terrorized for fun should be beautiful in person so the insult to God might be greater when the Dark Tick is done. When the World of mortals collapses in ruin, beauty will take over. The trees shall grow again where there were streets; the flowers will again cover the meadow that is now a dank field of hovels. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
That shall be the purpose of the Satanic master, to see the wild grass and the dense forest cover up all trace of the once great cities until nothing remains. And why call this Satanic? Why not call it chaos? That is all it is. However, mortals invented Satan, did they not? Satanic is merely the name they give to the behavior of those who would disrupt the orderly way in which mortals want to life. Satan is mortal’s invention, a name for the force that seeks to overthrow the civilized order of things. The first man who made laws—be he Moses or some ancient Egyptian king Osiris—that lawmaker created the devil. The devil meant the one who tempts you to break the laws. And we are truly Satanic in that we follow no law for mortal’s protection. So why not truly disrupt? Why not make a blaze of evil to consume all the civilizations of Earth? The main example of the evil that is present in technology along with the good is, of course, nuclear power. If we had any doubts about the dangers to health and even life itself in radiation, nuclear residue, as well as the nuclear bombs per se we have only to listen to the Union of Concerned Scientists to shock us out of our delusions. Not only can nuclear fission destroy the World population many times over, but there is evidence that radiation and strontium 90 may already be seeping into the bodies of an unknown number of us. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
In any case, we walk a razor’s edge in dealing with nuclear fission. Science and technology deal with the how of life, and not the why or what for—which truth reputable scientists by the score tell us. Science increases the possibilities for good and the possibilities for evil, which many esteemed scientists have been shouting to us from the housetops. There is also another group of philosophers and the theologians who take a different approach. This group includes Heraclitus, who said “war is both king of all and father of all,” through Sokratis, Augustine, Pascal, Boehme, and down to Kierkegaard and Bateson. These thinkers directly face the fact that freedom makes evil inevitable. As long as there is freedom there will be mistake choices, some of the catastrophic. However, to relinquish the capacity to make choices in favor of the dictatorial segment of us called our reason is to surrender what makes us human in the first place. The modern form of the Grand Inquisitor’s plan leads people to hand over their responsibility to the scientists in the white coat or to the psychotherapist in the comforting office or to the priest in the church or to the anonymous environment all about us. If we could do these things, we would have the temporary facsimile of evading evil. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
However, while we are no longer committing evil, we also are no longer committing goodness; and the age of the robot will be upon us. The ultimate error is the refusal to look evil in the face. This denial of evil—and freedom along with it—is the most destructive approach of all. To take refuge with the Moonies, or with Jonestown, or any others of the hundreds of cults, most of which seem to spring up in California, is to find a haven where our choices will be made for us. We surrender freedom because of our inability to tolerate moral ambiguity, and we escape the threat that one might make the wrong choice. The mass suicides at Jonestown seem to me to be the terrible, if brilliant, demonstration of the ultimate outworking of the attitudes with which the adherents joined in the first place. They committed spiritual suicide in surrendering their freedom to evade the partial evil of life, and they end up demonstrating to the World in their own mass suicides the final evil. Religious people have for millennia fervently asked, “How could a God of love permit evil?” An answer is given by that tributary of Christianity, Gnosticism: God allowed evil to exist, woven into the texture of the World, in order to increase mortal’s freedom and one’s will to prove one’s moral strength in overcoming. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
However, the question the religious people above ask is simplistic. Let us recall the words of Boehme, above, that God is a fire and it is necessary to confront the wrath of God if the love of God is to have any reality. A Hassidic saying points toward the same thing: God is not nice, God is no uncle. God is an Earthquake. We note that some saints through history have spoken of themselves as the “Chief of sinners.” Obviously, this cannot mean sinner in the sense of committing overt, objective crimes. However, it can mean that the saints, being more highly developed spiritually than ordinary people, have a correspondingly deeper awareness of their pride, vanity, hardness of heart, and obtuseness of understanding. If we look at sin from the inside, we see that there is indeed, sound meaning to their claim. It is impossible to have a sensitive conscience and a good conscience at the same time. If one has a sensitive conscience one will be aware of the evils of the World in which we as human beings participate. Hence, there is no clear, good conscience, but an active concern about the evils. It is not at all surprising, then, that in the Garden of Eden myth, the knowledge of good and evil comes by virtue of the evil of rebellion against God. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
If Adam and Eve are to have any freedom, any true autonomy or true independence, they must defy the orders of God; and whether Yahweh is benevolent or destructive does not at that moment matter. This defying of the orders of God is essential for this development of their own consciousness. Otherwise they will forever be the inert appendage of God. Is this alienating? Anxiety-creating? Guilt-producing? Of course. However, what become available with these “curses” are the blessings of love, responsibility, and the passion and power to create. Still, after meeting with certain people, one may complain about a sense of depression which comes to one’s mind. One should reduce such meetings to the least number possible, and where it is necessary to deal with them, to do so by correspondence as much as one can. It does not matter that such people may have spiritual interests and many also on the Quest. The Quest is an individual matter; it is not a group Quest. One finds God by oneself, alone in the privacy of one’s heart and life, not with the help of a group nor in public associations. Be yourself, your own divine self. Why play a part? Why be an echo? Why follow the World in its pursuit of the trivial, the stupid, the pain bringing? #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
One should not permit oneself to be re-entangled by others in past contacts which have out served their purpose and which now will only keep one down. This freedom to search for and find truth as well as to select one’s own path of approach toward it, is a precious prerogative. One refuses to accept a label; one feels oneself to be outside all the common categories. The divergence of opinion among leading individuals on every subject is extraordinary and emphasizes one again the necessity of thinking for oneself. Remember that custom and habit are the great tyrants who enslave the mass of humankind. Only when one is true to one’s own self, real freedom is possible. Do not permit yourself to be hypnotized by the common indifference to these high matters, but be loyal to the promptings of the spirit. With this decree one runs up one’s personal declaration of independence. No school can hold one. One’s loyalty is henceforth given to global thought. Nor is this all. The mystic life depends on no institution, no tradition, no sectarianism. It is an independent and individual existence. Without falling into the vacuity of skepticism, the intelligent and independent seeker shuns strict and rigid doctrines sectarian intellectual or emotional positions. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
However, this openness of mind, one’s semi-detached stand, do not prevent one’s forming favourable appreciations or accommodating unflattering impressions. “All this is the genius of Our Divine Violinist, but we must now be with him every waking moment. To force him to write we tie him to a chair. We put ink and paper in front of him. And if this fails, we make him dictate as we write down plays.” If you do not feel any affinity with it, let others follow whatever path attracts them, but do not let them impose their path upon you. The unified I: for (as I have said earlier) the unification of the soul occurs in lived actuality—the concentration of all forces into the core, the decisive moment of mortals. However, unlike that immersion, this does not entail ignoring the actual person. Immersion want to preserve only what is pure, essential, and enduring, while stripping away everything else; the concentration of which I speak does not consider our instincts as too impure, the sensuous as too peripheral, or our emotions as too fleeting—everything must be included and integrated. What is wanted is not the abstracted self but the whole, undiminished mortal. This concentration aims at and is actuality. The doctrine of immersion demands and promises penetration into thinking the One, that by which the World is thought, the pure subject. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
However, in lived actuality no one thinks without something being thought; rather is that which thinks as dependent on that which is thought as vice versa. A subject that annuls the object to rise above it annuls its own actuality. A thinking subject by itself exists—in thought, as the product and object of thought, as a limit-concept that lacks all imaginable content; also in the anticipatory determination of death for which one may also substitute its metaphor, that deep sleep which is virtually no less impenetrable; and finally in the assertions of a doctrine concerning a state of immersion that resembles such deep sleep and is essentially without consciousness and without memory. These are the supreme excesses of It-language. One has to respect its sublime power to ignore while at the same time recognizing it as something that can at most be an object of living experience but that cannot be lived. In the former centuries there was a long-lasting struggle in the Church about the religious significance of hearing and seeing. First, seeing prevailed, but then hearing became more and more significant. Finally, in the days of the Reformation hearing became completely victorious. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
The typical Protestant church-building bear witness to the victory. They are halls to hear sermons, emptied of everything to be seen of pictures and sculptures, of lights and stained windows, of most of the sacramental activities. Around the desk of the preacher a room was built to listen to the words of the law and gospel. The eye could not find a place to rest in contemplation. Hearing replaced seeing, obedience replaced vision. Truth is knowledge of things as they are, and as they were and as they are to come. Truth looks backward and forward, expanding the perspective of our small point in time. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” Truth shows us the way to eternal life, and it comes only through our Savior, Jesus Christ. There is no other way. Jesus Christ teaches us how to life, and, through his Atonement and Resurrection, he offers us forgiveness from our sins and immortality beyond the veil. This is absolutely true. Our mortal quest is to strengthen our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, to choose good over evil, and to keep his commandments. While we celebrate the innovations of science and medicine, the truths of God go far beyond these discoveries. We can know things of God as we seek them spiritually. The things of God knoweth no mortal, except one as the Spirit of God for they are spiritually discerned. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Randolph Harris II International Institute 