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Here the Spirit Achieves Unity and Freedom–Angles and Blue Skies, Clouds, those the things You Made Me See!
No. He found a way to imitate immortal life. To be one with mortals. He slew only the evildoer, and he painted as mortals paint. When you were telling me, Angels and blue skies, clouds, those are the things you made me see. He created good things. And I see wisdom in him and a lack of vanity. He did not need to reveal himself. He had lived a thousand years and he believed more in the vistas of Heaven that he painted than in himself. You have to suffer through emptiness and find what impels you to continue. There is perfection in life you cannot deny. We are illusions of what is more, and the stage is an illusion of what is real. Do you not see, the color of wine in a crystal glass can be spiritual. The look in a face, the music of a violin. A Paris theater can be infused with the spiritual for all its solidity. There is nothing in it that has not been shaped by the power of those who possessed spiritual visions of what it could be. Seduce the public with voluptuousness. For God’s sake, and the devil’s, use the power of this life and the theater as you will. Can anyone look on the great works of the past and the present and not call them spiritual? Mystics, such as Anne Rice, Sarah Winchester, Meister Eckhart and Jacob Boehme, use the language of the spirit with a greater insight than the rest of us. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
The human spirit can never be satisfied with what light it has but storms the firmament and scales the Heavens to discover the spirit by which the heavens are driven in revolutions and by which everything on the Earth grows and flourishes. The spirit, in knowing, has no use for number, for numbers are of use only within time, in this finite World. No one can strike one’s roots into eternity without being rid [of concept] of number. The human spirit must go beyond all number-ideas, must break past and away from ideas of quantity and then one will be broken into by God—God leads the human spirit into the desert, into one’s own unity—here the spirit achieves unity and freedom. Freedom turns out to be central in the concept of the mystics, probably because they exercise their own freedom so intensively in achieving their inspirations. God does not constrain the will, rather, he sets in free, so that it may chose him, that is to say, freedom. The spirit of the mortal may not will otherwise than what God wills, but that is no lack of freedom. It is true freedom itself. When we considered the curious union of destiny and freedom that characterizes the great religions we see in them that freedom and necessity, or freedom and bondage, are ultimately identical. Your intensions are right and your will is free. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
When we consider art in the great churches, one ponders, is it spiritual or is it voluptuous? Is the Angel in the stained glass caught in the material, or was the material transformed? No matter what on things, one never doubts the beauty of value of the work. I know I do not. And it is the material transformed. It ceases to be a window and becomes magic, just as the blood ceases to be liquid and becomes life. God is fire. Existence is a stream of fire. All life is fire. The fire is the will. Will—freedom—is the principle of all things. Freedom is deeper than and prior to all nature. Freedom is the foundation of being, freedom is to most deeper and more primary than all being, deeper and more primary than God himself. If the love of God it to have any meaning, the wrath of God is necessary. By our own powers we are visually impaired, but through the spirit of God, our own inborn spirit pierces all things. However one judges them, authentic mystics have a source of wisdom that cannot come from learning, but must come from insights that spring out of an immediate participation in the Universe in ways we cannot understand, but surely can admire. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The mystics’ wisdom seems to be a combination of empathy, telepathy, intuition. This shows how far off the mark are those who criticize such things as acupuncture, and placebos of many sorts from a purely left-brain, rationalistic point of view. Such things as placebos may simply represent tangible patterns that act as foci on which a person may project the insights and intuitions that come from different sources. Whatever peculiarity one may have shown in the past one need not look like that today, and does not need to assume theatrical postures. One can be ordinary and inconspicuous, one’s behavior normal, one’s demenour simple. However, one thing one may do and that is cultivate some individuality in one’s attitude toward life. Most mortals live as prisoners of ideas which are not even their own, but which have been suggested to them by other people. Independent thinking is rare. Consciously or unwittingly, most of us are suggestible. We accept the thoughts which other persons want to put in our heads. And we do so to such an extent that we live vicariously: we do not really live our own lives. This is quite fitting and proper to the childhood and adolescent years, but how can it be worth of the adult ones? #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Where is the mortal who has one’s own self, and not one made for one by others? Heredity and environment, society and suggestion, convention and education heavily contribute to forming an “I” that is not one’s own “I,” to making a pseudo-individual that is not oneself but passes for it. As one goes deeper and deeper into oneself, one’s private acts become more and more independent of other people’s suggestions and resistant to their influence. The longer I live the more I am impressed, to the point even of awe, by the tremendous power of suggestion on the human mind. Where is the person who is able to cultivate one’s own intelligence without being conditioned by ideas and examples put into it by one’s environment or by one’s reading, by one’s religion or one’s family, by one’s social tradition, or by the personal fears and desires connected wit others? It is others, whether of the long-dead past or of the living present who partly or wholly imprison one in their thoughts and imaginations, their conflicts. An inner life not entirely directed by or dependent on another person is an adult one. No one is such who has to seek another’s approval of one’s actions or shrink from disapproval of them. We do not have to accept all the burdens which others try to put upon our shoulders. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
We are free to choose and to be sure that we are not merely surrendering our own ego to the other person’s. Of what use is it to ask or accept the opinions of those who are inexpert in this subject because they have yet to study it thoroughly? A truth which is born out of personal knowledge, or hammered out of personal experience, has more value for a mortal than other people’s hearsay. Whatever form our outer life may have to take under the pressure of destiny, one will keep one’s inner life inviolate. It is not necessarily an unstable mind which pushes one from guru to guru, or from belief to belief, or from group to group. It may be that one is really seeking the one Truth and has not by one’s own standards found it in others yet. It is the individual who refuses to be cast in a mold who brings inspiration, inner contact with the divine, not the institution. There are few who rise above the crowd to this level by their own self-ennoblement and self-interiorization. The philosopher is not discouraged because the number of those who adopt philosophical ideas is so small. One is not seeking the success of a movement, group, program, or sect. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Even if one were the only person who held these ideas one is learning and expressing, one would still not be discouraged. For one knows that one has not been put in the World to reform it but to reform oneself. One makes ones own World-view rather than inherits it with one’s body, that is, one thinks for oneself, without inherited bias and prejudice. It is sometimes beneficial to throw away the manuals of spirituality, the textbooks of holiness! There is no justification for invoking the “are one” is obvious for anyone who reads the Gospel according to John without skipping and with an open mind. It is really nothing less than the Gospel of the pure relationship. There are truer things here than the familiar mystic verse: “I am you, and you are I.” The father and the son, being consubtantial—we may say: God and human, being consubstantial, are actually and forever Two, the two partners of the primal relationship that, from God to mortal, is called mission and commandment; from mortal to God, seeing and hearing; between both, knowledge and love. And in this relationship the son, although the father dwells and works in one, bows before one that is grater and prays to one. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
All modern attempts to reinterpret this primal actuality of dialogue and to make of it a relationship of the I to the self or something of that sort, as if it were a process confined to mortal’s self-sufficient inwardness, are vain and belong to the abysmal history of deactualization. However, mysticism? It relates how unity within duality feels. Have we any right to doubt the faithfulness of this testimony? I know not only of one but two kinds of event in which one is no longer away of any duality. Mysticism sometimes confounds them, as I, too did at one time. First, the soul may become one. This event occurs not between mortals and God but in a mortal. All forces are concentrated into the core, everything that would distract them is pulled in, and the being standalone in itself and jubilates in its exaltation. This is mortal’s decisive moment. Without this one is not fir for the work of the spirit. With this—it is decided deep down whether this means preparation or sufficient satisfaction. Concentrated into a unity, a human being can proceed to one’s encounter—wholly successful only now—with mystery and perfection. However, one can also savor the bliss of one’s unity and, without incurring the supreme duty, return into distraction. Everything along our way id decision—intentional, dimly sensed, or altogether secret—but this one, deep down, is the primarily secret decision. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
The other event is that unfathomable kind of relational act itself in which one has the feeling that Two have become One: “one and one made one, bare shineth in bare.” I and You drown; humanity that but now confronted the deity is absorbed into it; glorification, deification, universal unity have appeared. However, when one returns into the wretchedness of daily turmoil, transfigured and exhausted, and with a knowing heart reflect on both, is one not bound to feel that Being is split, with one part abandoned to hopelessness? What help is it to my soul that it can be transported again from this World into that unity, when this World itself has, of necessity, no share whatever in that unity—what does all enjoyment of God profit a life rent in two? If that extravagantly rich Heavenly Moment has noting to do wit my poor Earthly moment—what is it to me as long as I still have to live on Earth—must in all seriousness still live on Earth? That is way to understand those masters who renounced the raptures of the ecstasy of unification. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Which was no unification. Those human being may serve as a metaphor who in the passion of erotic fulfillment are so carried away by the miracle of the embrace that all knowledge of I and You drowns in the feeling of a unity that neither exists nor can exist. What the ecstatic calls unification is the rapturous dynamic of the relationship; not a unity that has come into being at this moment in World time, fusing I an You, but the dynamics of the relationship itself which can stand before the two carriers of this relationship, although they confront each other immovably, and cover the eyes of the enraptured. What we find here is a marginal exorbitance of the act of relation: the relationship itself in its vital unity is felt so vehemently that its members pale in the process: its life predominates so much that the I and the You between whom it is established are forgotten. This is one of the phenomena that we find on the margins where actuality becomes blurred. However, what is greater for us than all enigmatic webs at the margins of being is the central actuality of everyday hour on Earth, with a streak of Sunshine on a maple twig and an intimation of the eternal You. Against this stand the claim of the other doctrine of immersion that at heart the Universe and the self are identical and hence no You-saying can ever grant any ultimate actuality. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
When one rests in deep sleep, without dreams, that is the self, the immortal, the assured, the All-being. In that state, O sublime one, we do not know of our self, we are in unity with God. We, however, are resolved to tend with holy care the holy treasure of our actuality that has been given to us for this life and perhaps for no other life that might be closer to the truth. In lived actuality there is no unity of being. Actuality is to be found only in effective activity; strength and depth of the former only in that the latter. Inner actuality, too, is only where there is reciprocal activity. The strongest and deepest actuality is to be found where everything enters into activity—the whole human being, without reserve, and the all-embracing God; the unified I an the boundless you. It is not true that religious faith is belief in things without evidence. The word evidence means seeing thoroughly. And we are asked to see. We have present with us what we see; therefore, we want to see what we love, what is significant for us. The great people of God wanted to see God; Moses asked this as the highest of all favors of Jahveh. Isaiah was made the most powerful of the prophets after he had seen God in the temple. Jesus blesses the pure in heart as those who will see God. In the Fourth Gospel he says about himself that he has seen the Father, and that whoever has seen him has also seen the Father. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
In pious imagery the Angels and the saints are described as those who see God face to face. And the ultimate fulfillment, the end of all moving and striving, is pictured as the eternal vision of God. However, when we look at our present human predicament, doubts and questions arise. Is faith not the opposite of vision? Must we not believe without seeing? Does Jesus not bless those who have not seen and yet believe? Is not faith defined as the evidence of things not seen? And does not Paul write, “We walk by faith, not by sights”? “We look not at the things which are seen, but at things which are not seen. For the things which are seen are temporal, but the thing which are not seen are eternal”? All this seems to indicate that faith must be based on hearing and not on seeing. You hear about something you do not see. You believe one who tells you. You accept the word of authorities in humility and obedience. You believe what the Bible says because the Bible says it. You accept what the Church teaches because it is taught by the Church. You call the word of the Bible and of the Church “Word of God.” You hear, you believe, you obey, but you do not see. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
Maybe as the years pass, desire will come again to many. We will know appetite again, even passion. Maybe when we meet in another age, these things will not be abstract and fleeting. I will speak with a vigor that matches yours, instead of merely reflecting it. And we will ponder matters of immortality and wisdom. We will take about vengeance or acceptance then. For now it is enough for me to say that I want to see you again. I want our paths to cross in the future. And for that reason alone, I will do as you ask and not what you want. The seeker must be distinctive and not accept conventional views or orthodox religious notions. One must judge all problems from the philosophic standpoint for one should not believe any other will yield true conclusions. This standpoint has the eminent perspective which alone can afford a true estimate of what is involved in these problems. We turn away from a teaching which does not satisfy our inmost spirit, which leaves our deepest thirst unslaked. In this matter our wisest course is to follow the scientist’s example and test the truth of these theories, either by ourselves carrying out experiments or by observing the experiences of other people. “And it came to pass that there was no contention among all the people, in all the land; but there were mighty miracles wrought among the disciples of Jesus,” reports 4 Nephi 1.13. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Without Pain We Would Become a Nation of Zombies—Some Critics Believe We Have Already Arrived at that State!
Amazing how the mind works kind of like a puzzle and as it grows, as your neurons produce more synapses which have dendrites. My guidance is what you need. You have only begun your adventure and you have no beliefs to hold you. You cannot live without some guidance. We need to understand the function of illness and health in a culture. The disease itself is not the ultimate enemy. It may actually be a blessing in disguise in that it forces the person, as tuberculosis did to me, to take stock of his life and to reform his style of work and play. Having a disease in one way of resolving a conflict situation. Disease is a method of thinking one’s World so that, with lessened responsibilities and concerns, the person has a better chance of coping successfully. Health, on the contrary, is a freeing of the organism to realize its capacities. I believe that people utilize disease in the same way older generations used the devil—as an object on which to project their hated experiences in order to avoid having to take responsibility for them. However, beyond giving a temporary sense of freedom from guilt feeling, these delusions do not help. Health and disease are part and parcel of our continuous process throughout life of making ourselves adequate to our World and our World adequate to ourselves. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Nor is pain the ultimate enemy. Americans are probably the most pain-conscious people on the face of the Earth. For years we have had it drummed into us—in print, on radio, over television, in everyday conversation—that any hint of pain is to be banished as though it were the ultimate evil. Leprosy is such a dreaded disease because of the fact that the affected person has lost the sense of pain and has no signal to tell one how and when to take care of the infected parts. We consume in this country a fabulous number of tranquilizers in the process of blocking out pain. Has this been the danger all along, the trigger of our fear? Even as we recognize it, we are yielding, and it seems the great lessons of our life have all been learned through the renunciation of fear. Fear is one again breaking the shell around us so that something else can spring to life. The interplay of pain and pleasure, and the dependence of one on the other–never, never in all our existence, not mortal or immortal, have we been threatened with an intimacy quite like this. Many of us, for example, want to know why beauty exists, why nature continues to contrive it, and what is the link between the life of a tree and its beauty, and what connects the mere existence of the sea or a lightning storm with the feelings these things inspire in us? #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
If God does not exist, if these things are not unified into one metaphorical system, the why do they retain for us such a symbolic power. What is the lantern by which we see the Devil’s Road, by what lantern have many traveled it? What have people learned besides devil worship and superstition? What do we know about other humans and how they came into existence? Give that to us, and it might be worth something. And then again, it might be worth nothing. How strange would appear to be this thing that mortals call pleasure! And how curiously is it related to what is thought to be its opposite, pain! The two will never be found together in a mortal, and yet if you seek one and obtain it, you are almost bound always to get the other as well, just as though they were both attached to one and the same head. Wherever the one is found, the other follows up behind. So, in my case, since I had pain in my leg as a result of the fetters, pleasure seems to have come to follow it up. Pain is a sensitizer in life. In running away from pain we lose our vitality, our capacity genuinely to feel and even to love. I am not saying that pain is a good thing in itself. I am saying that pain and the relief from pain paradoxically go together. They are the bow and the string of Heraclitus. Without pain we would become a nation of zombies. Some critics believe we already have arrived at that state. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
There is a common illusion that medical technology is wiping out one disease after another—such original lethal scourges as tuberculosis, which supposedly claimed the life 2nd President of the Winchester Repeating Arms Company, William Wirt Winchester, in 1880. That is why in memory of her husband, Mrs. Sarah Winchester donated over $1,00,000.00 ($25,053,725.49 adjusted for inflation) to the General Hospital Society of Connecticut, for the care and treatment of tuberculosis patients. The clinic still proudly exists today as part of the Yale New Haven Medical Center. Infantile paralysis along with tuberculosis being among the recent examples—that we need only to wait, hoping we live long enough until medicine vanquishes all diseases. However, this illusion rests on a serious misunderstanding of the functions of illness and health in any human society. However, physicians must resist the idea that technology will some day abolish disease because as long as humans feel threatened and helpless, they will seek the sanctuary that illness provides. And as the population grows and we cure more diseases, other symptoms will pop up to cure the disease that overpopulation is causing the planet to suffer from. We have to cure ourselves of the itch for absolute knowledge and power. We have to close the distance between the push-button order and the human act. We have to touch the people. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Not only do physicians need to resist this illusion, but even more do play people, to whom the idea that medical technology will ultimately save them is the most powerful rationalization for evading their own responsibility for their health. For human beings live—it is their destiny to do so—delicately balanced between health and illness, and this balance is what is important. There is no doubt that we, as a race, are getting healthier. However, will I be misunderstood when I affirm that the possibilities of illness get proportionately greater at the same time? Certainly, there is just as much consulting with doctors as there was one hundred years ago. What seems to be occurring is the shift in the kinds of illness from infectious diseases—which attack the person from the outside—to internal diseases like heart attacks, hypertension, and strokes—which are intimately related to anxiety and stress. The latter are the greatest killers of our day. Illness and health are complexly balanced in each of us, and taking responsibility, so far as we can, gives us some possibility of restoring the balance when it goes awry. It is not by accident that so many of our greatest persons have struggled with diseases all their lives. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Noting the large number of important creative human beings who have had tuberculosis, a physician some years ago wrote a book entitled Tuberculosis and Genius in which he argued that the tubercular bacilli must eject some serum into the blood to produce the genius. This explanation seems to me absurd. It makes much more sense to hold that they way of life of the genius—intensive work, unquenchable enthusiasm, the fire in the brain—puts too much of a strain on the balance, and hence the individual becomes ill as a necessary way of withdrawing into oneself for a times. The struggle between health and illness is part of the source of creativity. Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Mary Baker Eddy, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust and Elizabeth Barrett Browning all suffered severe illness and met in constructively. George Pickering, who suffered from his own osteoarthritic hips as an ally, which he puts to bed when they get painful; and in bed he cannot attend committee meetings or see patients or entertain visitors. However, these the ideal conditions for creative work: freedom from intrusion, freedom from the ordinary chores of life. #RandolpHarris 6 of 13
Sometimes when in pain or under the weather, one way to treat it I by becoming aware that you are involved in a fight and to pray for a cure. For ten minutes each day, focusing on your body being healed. That is a way to be conscious of and handle the consciousness of your illness or pain without letting it overcome you. One will be better, but in order to contrive with one’s body, to impose one’s wishes upon it or to cede prudently to its will. It is important to devote as much as one can into regulating one’s World, in building the being who you are, and in embellishing one’s life. What am I? Is such an ancient and perennial question only because it has to be answered by each individual for oneself. If one finds the true answer, one will find also that one cannot really transfer it to another person but only its idea, its mental shadow. That too may be valuable to others, but it is not the same. Surely the human race has by this time, by this late century in history found the truth? Why, then, does the mortal who wants it have to make one’s own personal search all over again? It is because one must know it for oneself within oneself. You yourself are your own guru. Be that. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
One who seeks the truth about these matters will discover that it is contrary to current opinion, and therefore one will have to discover it by oneself and for oneself. One should verify the truth not by reference to book or bible but by reference to one’s own private experience. There is no room in this school for those who are ready to dispose of life’s problems with secondhand judgment. The need of individual thinking is vital here. Humanity will not be saved in groups or by organizations. It will be saved individual by individual. Being true to oneself brings happiness. Being indifferent to the criticisms of those who misunderstand brings freedom from anxiety on their account. Walking the streets in a spirit of independences, enables us to walk as a billionaire! If they will, let others sacrifice themselves to snobbery; let us be free. Only when the feet rest can we bring the mind to rest—unless we are Attained Ones! We can be devout and dignified but we need not therefore be dull. I do not deny that the drift of several movements which are in the World’s eye today, is toward this idea of greater spirituality. However, whereas they are confined in their search by attachment to a set creed, or a particular philosophy, or even some one person, we propose to pursue an absolutely independent quest—one limited in its width by no qualifications or conditions. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
There are not concrete threats against life and well-being, there is not a depressing guilt feeling or a despair about ourselves. There is not a disintegrating doubt or an intolerable emptiness. There is not an extreme situation. Does this mean that there is no desire to ask for a word from the Lord? Are the situations which are not extreme situations, deprived of a word out of the dimension of the eternal? Is God silent if the foundations of our existence are not shaken? A hard question, and answered in many different ways! How would we answer? I shall never forget the word of a wise old man who said to my grandfather when I was still a child, “I need somebody who I can than when a great joy is given to me.” Can we share this experience? Do we remember such moments in which the eternal made itself felt to us through the abundance or greatness or beauty of the temporal? I believe that none of us is completely without such experiences. However, did we not say that a word from the Lord is the eternal cutting into the temporal does not mean negating it. This can mean, and this is does mean whenever we are driven into an ultimate situation. There are in everybody’s life such situations, and they are frequent in mortal’s tragic history. However, the eternal can also cut into the temporal by affirming it, by elevating a piece of it out of the ordinary context of temporal things and events, making it translucent for the Divine glory. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Without such moments, life would be poor and sad; there would be on creations in which the greatness of life is expressed. However, they exist, and the eternal shines through them; they can become a word from the Lord to us. However, still some of you are thinking: All this may be as you say, but it remains strange to us. Neither in ultimate situations nor in moments of a great elevation has the eternal cut into our temporal existence. We never got a word from the Lord. Maybe you did not hear it. However, certainly it was spoken to you. For there is always a word from the Lord, a word that has been spoken. The problem of mortals is not that God does not speak to one: God does speak to everyone who has a human countenance. For this is what makes one a human. One who is not able to perceive something ultimate, something infinitely significant, is not a mortal. Mortals are human because one is able to receive a word from the dimension of the eternal. The question is not that humankind has not received any word from the Lord; the question is that it has been received and resisted and distorted. This is the predicament of all of us. Human existence is never without that which breaks vertically into it. Mortals are never without a manifestation of that which is ultimately serious and infinitely meaningful. One is never without a word from the Lord and one never ceases resisting and distorting it, both when one has to hear it and when one has to say it. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Every Christian, and especially every Christian minister, should be aware of this: We resist and distort the word from the Lord not only when we hear it, but also when we say it. When we ask why our message of the Word of God is rejected, we often find that one does not reject that for which we stand, but the way in which we stand for it. Many of those who reject the Word of God reject it because the way we say it is utterly meaningless to them. They know the dimension of the eternal, but they cannot accept our names for it. If we cling to their words, we may doubt whether they have received a word from the Lord. If we meet them as persons, we know they have. There is always a word from the Lord, a word that has been spoken. The Christian Church believes that this word has a central content, and that is has the name Jesus the Christ. Therefore, the Church call not his words but his Being the Word of God. The Church believes that in his Being, the eternal has broken into the temporal in a way which once for all gives us a word, nay, the word from the Lord. It believes that whatever word from the Lord has been said in all history and in every individual life, is implied in this Word, which is not words but reality, a new reality, the reality of the eternal in the temporal, conquering the resistance and the distortions of the temporal. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
So we have not a, but the word from the Lord? As Christians we can boast that we have it? Can we really? Did we not receive the message through mortals, and are not we who heard it mortals? And does that not mean that the message, while it went through the mouths of those who said it and through the ears of us who heard it, lost is power to cut into our World and our soul? It is supposed that God will enter the being that ha been freed of I-hood or that at that point one merges into God; the other view supposes that one stands immediately in oneself as the divine One. Thus the first holds that in a supreme moment all selfishness ends because there is no longer any duality; the second, that there is no truth in selfishness at all because in truth there is no duality. The first believes in the unification, the second in the identity of the human and the divine. Both insist on what is beyond I and You: for the first this comes to be, perhaps in ecstasy, while for the second it is there all along and reveals itself, perhaps as the thinking subject beholds its self. Both annul relationship—the first, as it were, dynamically, as the I is swallowed by the soul, which then becomes a united being; the second, as it were statically, as the I is freed, becomes a self, and recognizes itself as the only being. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
The doctrine of dependence considers the I-supporter of the World-arch of pure relation as so weak and insignificant that one’s ability to support the arch ceases to be credible, while the one doctrine of immersion does away altogether with the arch in its perfection and the other one treats it as a chimera that has to be overcome. The doctrines of immersion invoke the greater epigrams of identification—one of them above all the Johannine “I and the Father are one,” and the other one the doctrine of Sandilya: “The All-embracing is my self in the inner heart.” The paths of these two epigrams are diametrically opposed. The former (after a long subterranean course) had its source in the myth-sized life of a person and then unfolds in a doctrine. The second emerges in a doctrines and culminates (provisionally) in the myth-sized life of a person. On these paths the character of each epigram is changed. The Christ of the Johannine tradition, the Word that has become flesh but once, takes us to Eckhart’s Christ whom God begets eternally in the human soul. The formula of the coronation of the self in the Upanishads—“That is the actual, it is the self, and you are” takes us far more quickly to the Buddhistic formula of deposition: “A self and what pertains to the self are not to be found in truth and actuality.” Beginning and end of both paths have to be considered separately. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
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I Roamed with My Mortal Attendants through a Paradise of Material Wealth, Claiming Everything that I Wanted!
He watches. Sometimes he lets himself be seen. However, when he discovers what is really going on here, only God knows what he will do. Of the countless empirical studies which bear this out, I will cite an article from the Journal of the American Medical Association, which was reported in the daily press under the caption “Nice Patients Die Faster.” This was a study of how two groups of women dealt with terminal breast cancer. “Feisty, combative women survived longer than trusting, complacent women” was the conclusion. The women who survived longest were, as a group, more anxious, depressed, hostile, and alienated about their illness tan those who succumbed faster. The feisty women seemed to maintain a combative posture rather than being hopeless victims. “They were going down fighting!” wrote Dr. Derogatis, the psychologist who made the study. “The women who survived longer had mechanisms of externalizing their conflicts, fears and angers about the disease. They were more demanding of physicians, less satisfied with treatment and were rated as less well adjusted. By contrast, the other woman—who died sooners—felt less anxious and more optimistic towards their doctors, and rated themselves as more content on a self-evaluation. I believed they has divested themselves of the responsibility of fighting the disease.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
Now breast cancer does indeed seem to be a blow of fate. Yet the women who could assert their freedom and take responsibility for the illness—and this for fighting it—have a better chance of living. I do not wish my emphasis on responsibility to be confused with that of expressed sequence tag (a unique stretch of DNA within a coding region of a gene that is useful for identifying full-length genes and serves as a landmark of mapping). Is the unborn baby the cause of its brain defect because of its mother’s malnutrition? To hold that we are responsible for everything that happens to us is to show to what absurdities when we have no understanding of our destiny. Our freedom—and, therefore, our sense of responsibility—exists only as we acknowledge and engage our destiny. Norman Cousin’s book Anatomy of an Illness excellently describes his own encounter with a vital problem of health. Cousins was pronounced incurably ill of a rare disease of the collagen tissues which he had developed in Russia. Possessing a remarkably strong will to live, he asked himself the question: “If negative emotions produce negative chemical changes in the body would not the beneficial emotions produce beneficial chemical changes? It is possible that love, hope, faith, laughter, confidence, and the will to live have therapeutic value?” #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
Norman Cousins tells us how, when the specialists pronounced him doomed, he summoned his own concern with the problem and his will to health. He moved out of the inhospitable hospital and into a hospitable hotel and began a new regimen, in consultation with his own physician. Cousins went on a program consisting of large quantities of vitamin C and equally large amounts of health-giving laughter. His story is the documentation of how one individual asserted his limited freedom and his responsibility for confronting his destiny, cruel and unfair as that destiny was. When asked by a friend whether he had not been terribly discouraged, Cousins answered that he was, “especially at the start when I expected my doctor to fix my body as though it were an automobile engine that needed mechanical repair, like cleaning out the carburetor, or reconnecting the fuel pump.” When one discusses the need for the individual to take responsibility for one’s own health, the tendency of listeners is to interpret the discussion as an attack on modern medicine. An address of Roll May’s called, “Personal Freedom and Caring,” before the convention of the American Occupational Therapy Association was reported in a newspaper under the caption “Caring Physicians Rob Patients of Their Freedom, Responsibility.” This was, if anything, directly opposite to the meaning of his address. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
Rollo May was not attacking medicine as such. None of us can escape marveling at and valuing the tremendous progress of modern medicine in the development of medical technology and the new drugs. Among his friends who are advocates of holistic medicine, his task is to caution against viewing the medical profession as the enemy. “Talk of enemies does not sit well,” Norman Cousins says, “in a movement in which spiritual factors are no less vital than practical ones.” In does no good furthermore, to refuse on principle to take a prescribed drug because one wants to preserve one’s freedom, nor to refuse to go to a doctor when such is indicated. We cannot withdraw from the contemporary World, hermitlike, to contemplate our own navels. Furthermore, such revolt smacks too much of the Luddites, eighteenth-century workers who, realizing the threat to their livelihood in the industrial revolution, armed themselves with crowbars and pickaxes and attached the machines. This rebellion does no good beyond the self-righteous feelings it gives the rebels themselves. In a given illness I believe one’s responsibility to oneself is to get the best medical advice available. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
However, they very progress of modern medicine makes our emphasis here all the more necessary, since this progress increases the mystification and authoritarianism that people have thrust upon the medical profession the medical profession has assumed all too readily. When I lived in a large metropolis, I found myself, when I needed medical service, phoning my own physician to find out which specialist I should go to. The “laying on of hands,” which has classically been central in the healing profession, has now become all too often the laying on of techniques. Since assuming the role of priest, as doctors began to do as early as Paracelsus in the sixteenth century, the tendency has been for people to see in the physician the god who has power over life and death. However, as long as physicians are made god on people’s conscious level, they will also be made the devil on an unconscious level. The rash of malpractice suits in the last fifty years shows the disillusionment and rage that people feel as this belief in the devil begins to surface. When I told my present physician of my intention to work also with an acupuncturist on the problem of tachycardia, he well remarked, “Western medicine is on the verge of a great revolution.” He did not mean in the sense of new discoveries in techniques. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
The doctor meant, rather, a revolutionary change in the philosophical and ethical basis of medicine, a change in the cultural context in which doctors operate. This revolution is seen most dramatically in the incursion of Eastern insights into Western medical treatment. The complete acceptance of philosophy involves a complete reordering of a mortal’s life. One’s conduct will be motivated by new purpose which will themselves be the result of one’s new values. One will stop acting impulsively and start acting rationally. However, in actual practice we find that the acceptance of philosophy is never so complete as this. The individual will bring it into a part of life but not into the whole of their lives. It is only gradually absorbed and the ideals which are sought to be realized are only gradually set up. Those whom embark on the quest must pay for their journey with personal self-denial and unceasing self-struggle. Knowledge of the higher laws, consciousness of the higher self, bring special obligations. To apply them carries new responsibilities to live according to them. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
There will be murmurings, complaints, and disheartenment; there may even be short or long lapses; but one will understand sooner or later that one will have to go through with this quest till the very end. Something that is certainly not one’s ordinary self drives one to do so. Indeed, one power of choice or freedom of will have become irrelevant to this particular matter. Is there any word from the Lord? This is a question asked by mortals in all periods of history. It has been asked by kings in moments of danger. They asked it of priests and prophets. It has been asked by people in all ages and places in times of unrest. They asked it of extraordinary men and women, often of those considered to be abnormal, of ecstatics and hysterics. It has been asked by individuals in moments of great personal decisions. They asked it of holy Scriptures which should give a special word to them, from saints and inner voices. What about ourselves? Have we never asked for a word from the Lord? Many, certainly, will answer with a definite “No.” They will tell us that they always decided for themselves, using their own reasonable judgment, based on experience, knowledge, and intelligence. Perhaps they impress us. Perhaps we are ashamed to confess that sometimes we have asked for a word from the Lord. However, let us wait with out answer until we have found out what these words mean. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
We should not be misled by the phrase, “word from the Lord.” It sounds as if we turned to a Heavenly authority after all others, including the authority of reason, have failed. It sounds as if we asked the Lord of providence to give us for a moment a glimpse into what he plans for us, individually and in history. However, such a favor is not granted. The answers given by seers, ecstatics, books and inner voices are mostly ambiguous, open to different interpretations, so that we would have to ask for a second Divine word to interpret the first, and so on indefinitely. Or, these answers are clear and agree with the best wisdom we can have without them. Therefore, I repeat: Let us not be misled by the phrase “word from the Lord.” It is not an oracle-word telling us what to do or to expect. Then what is it? It is the voice from another dimension than that in which we ordinarily live. It cuts into the dimension of things and events which we call our World. It does not help us to manage things within this dimension more successfully than before. It does not add to our knowledge of the factors which influence a situation, it does not remove the responsibility for our decisions. It does something else. It elevates the situation in which we have to decide, into the light of a new dimension, the dimension of that which is ultimately important and infinitely significant and for which we use the word “Divine.” #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
So it was in the case of the king Zedekiah and of the false prophets with whom Jeremiah had to fight. The king came to Jeremiah in a hopeless situation, in a situation into which he had brought himself and his people through guilt and error and disregard of the warnings of the prophet. He was supported in his wrong decisions by nationalistic politicians who called themselves prophets without having received a word from God. They did not interpret the situation of Judah in the midst of threatening empires in its seriousness. They lacked the realism which is the quality of true prophetism. They were not able to look beyond political chances and military calculations. And so disaster attempts to get a consoling or helping word from the prophet. However, he did not get it. Out of his prison Jeremiah tells him the only thing he did not want to hear: You shall be delivered into the hand of the king of Babylon! God will not say you! And the king felt: So it is! He did not slay the prophet of doom, as present-day dictators or nationalistic mobs would do. On the contrary, he helped him out of his miserable prison. However, he did not do anything to change the situation. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
It was too late for this politically and psychologically, and the threat of the prophet, the word he has received from the Lord for Zedekiah, became a terrible reality. Yet it was spoken in vain. It has been remembered ever since, not as an interesting historical report but as an event in which the eternal gives ultimate meaning to an historical catastrophe. The many words from the Lord which are recorded in the Old Testament have the same quality. They are not promises of an omnipotent ruler replacing political or military strength. They are not advices of a Heavenly counselor, replacing intelligent human counsel. However, they are manifestations of something ultimate breaking into our existence with all its preliminary concerns and insights. They do not add something to our situation, but they add a dimension to the dimension in which we ordinarily live. The word from the Lord is the word which speaks out of the depth of our situation. It is, one could say, the deepest meaning of the situation, of every situation which comes to us in such words. It is also the depth of our own situation that speaks to us when we receive a word from the Lord. Let us imagine an hour in which we have to make an important decision, but it the choice of a vocation, be it the choice of a mate for life. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
We know most of the factors. Nevertheless, we cannot decide. The anxiety of the possible consequences in each of them. We ask friends, counsellors; we seek for counsel in ourselves. However, the anxiety of having to decide increases. And a longing grows in our souls, a longing for something that liberates us from the anxiety of the possible and gives us the courage toward the real. It is the question of our text: Is there a word from the Lord? And perhaps an answer has been received. However, it was not an oracle-word pointing to the right vocation to choose, or the right man or woman to join with. It was a voice out of the depth of our situation, elevating our concrete problems into an ultimate perspective. In doing so, it probably has devaluated some factors determining our decision and has stressed others. Or it has left the balance of possibilities unchanged, but has given us the courage to make a decision with all the risks of a decision, including error, failure, guilt. The word from the Lord, the voice out of the depth of our situations, ends the anxiety of the possible and gives the courage to affirm the real with its many questionable elements. Some of you may say: If this is what “word from the Lord” means, how can it help me in moments of decision? However, would you really want me to tell you where to turn for an oracle which would liberate you from the burden of decision? #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
Certainly, that which is weak in you would like it. However, that which is strong in you would reject it. The Lord from whom you derive a word wants you to decide for yourselves. He does not offer you a safe way. You may be wrong in your decision. However, if you realize that in you would reject it. The Lord from whom you derive a word wants you to decide for yourselves. He does not offer you a safe way. You may be wrong in your decision. However, if you realize that in relation to God mortals are always wrong. Your wrong may turn out to be right. If in the presence of the eternal you risk defeat, through your very defeat a word from the Lord has come to you. One aspect of the perfect love is our Heavenly Father’s involvement in the details of our lives, even when we may not be aware of it or understand it. We seek the Father’s divine guidance and help through heartfelt, earnest prayer. When we honor our covenants and strive to be more like our Savior, we are entitled to a constant stream of divine guidance through the influence and inspiration of the Holy Ghost. The scriptures teach us, “For your Father knoweth what things ye have need of, before ye ask him, and God “knoweth all things, for all things are present before God’s eyes.” The prophet Mormon is an example of this. He did not live to see the results of his work. Yet he understood that the Lord was carefully leading him along. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
When he felt inspired to include the small plates of Nephi with this record, Mormon wrote: “And I do this for a wise purpose; for thus is whispereth me, according to the workings of the Spirit of the Lord which is in me. And now, I do not know all things; but the Lord knoweth all things which are to come; wherefore, he worketh in me to do according to his will.” Although Mormon did not know of the future loss of the 116 manuscript pages, the Lord did and prepared a way to overcome that obstacle long before it occurred. The Father is aware of us, knows our needs, and will help us perfectly. Sometimes that help is given in the very moment or at least soon after we ask for divine help. Sometimes our most earnest and worthy desires are not answered in the way we hope, but we find that God has greater blessings in store. And sometimes our righteous desires are not granted in this life. Sometimes God has a greater blessing prepared for us than we initially anticipated. And sometimes our righteous petitions to God will not be granted in this life. Faith also includes trust in God’s timing. We have the assurance that his own way and in his own time, Heavenly Father will bless us and resolve all of our concerns, injustices, and disappointments. “And thus the Lord did pour out his blessings upon this land, which was choice above all other lands,” Ether 9.20. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
I roamed with my mortal attendants through a paradise of material wealth, claiming everything that I wanted. Couches and chairs, china and sliver plate, drapery and statuary—all things were mine for the taking. And in my mind I transformed the castle where I had grown up as more and more good were carried out to be crated and shipped south immediately. To little kids I sent toys of which they had never dreamed—tiny ships with real sails, dollhouses of unbelievable craft and perfection. I learned form each object I touched. And there were moments when all the color and texture became too lustrous, too overpowering. I wept inwardly. After all, where did I spend my time now? At the grandest theaters in Paris. I had the finest seats for the ballet and the opera, for the dramas of Moliere, Corneille, and Racine—it was in tragedy that two of the three great dramatist of seventeenth-century France excelled. I was hanging about before the footlights gazing up at the great actors and actresses. I had suits made in every color of the rainbow, jewels on my fingers, hairstyles of the latest fashion, shoes with diamond buckles as well as gold souls. And I had eternity to be drunk on the poetry I was hearing, drunk on the singing and the sweep of the dancer’s arms, drunk on the organ throbbing in the great cavern of the Winchester Mansion and drunk on the chimes that counted out the hours to me, drunk on the snow falling soundlessly on the gardens of the estate. And each night I was becoming less wary among mortals, more at ease with them. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
My God—What Have We Done?
Torches blazed ahead, and over a chorus of mourful wails, there came other cries, distant but filled with pain. Yet something beyond these puzzling cries had caught my attention. Amid all the foulness, I sensed a mortal was near. It was Nicolas and he was alive and I could hear him, the warm, vulnerable current of his thoughts mingled with his scent. And something was terribly wrong with his thoughts. They were chaos. Also, when I exercised my freedom and vice versa the anxiety engulfed me like a tidal wave. The anxiety came in the person of this figure whom I identified as my enemy-friend, a kind of figurative devil. It is the anxiety that comes, in varying intensity, whenever one leaps into the field of new possibilities, whenever one moves into the area of new idea or new compositions in music or a new style in art. It comes after such subconscious thoughts as “Ah, there is a new vision—nobody ever painted a scene like this before.” Then there comes the feeling “Do I want to venture out so far?” And I remind myself of all the dangers in venturing into that no man’s land. In such situations the person finds oneself adjuring oneself to calm down, not to get too excited, when getting excited in the sense of becoming inspired is exactly what, on the deepest level, one wants. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Freedom and anxiety are two sides of the coin—there is never one without the other. The anxiety is part and parcel of the vision or an idea that, in the particular form it comes to us, no one has ever thought of before. This anxiety—or dread, if we wish to translate angst that way—is a function of the freedom of imagination we must exercise in order to get any idea of significance. The dread comes with the new possibility and the risk that this leap requires. We might, like the scientists who split the atom, break through into a new land, where the usual mooring places by which we have oriented ourselves no longer even exist. Hence, the sense of alienation and bewilderment—and even the experience of intense human aloneness—that such a breakthrough brings in its train. I am told that when the scientists stood behind their glass barrier near Los Alamos and saw the first atomic explosion, the faces of a number of them turned white. One cried aloud, “My God, what have we done?” There is a rational explanation for this anxiety. We must keep in mind that the anxiety comes not from the possibility that the new idea or discovery might be wrong and useless (then it can simply be discarded), but from the possibility that it might be true, as it was, for example, with atomic fission or with Armin van Buuren’s new idea about musical harmonies. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Then one’s colleagues, the professors at one’s university, will be jolted, will be required to change their lecture notes because the possibility that there are new truths has been proven to be correct. This causes upset, which was very great indeed with the splitting of the atom. Or if one is a Nicolas Copernicus with new theory that the Earth moves around the Sun, or a Karl Marx with a radically new approach to the economic life of humankind, the uproar that accompanies the shaking of the foundations will be that much more catastrophic. Although the examples above are of great mortals, we are illustrating something that we all experience, though to a lesser degree. When he or she exercises the freedom to move out into the real World of possibility, every human being experiences this anxiety. Only by not venturing—that is, by surrendering our freedom, we can escape the anxiety. I am convinced that many people never become aware of their most creative ideas since their inspirations are blocked off by this anxiety before the ideas even reach the level of consciousness. A pressure toward conformism infuses every society. One function of any group or social system is to preserve homeostasis, to keep people in their usual positions. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The danger of freedom to the group is possessed exactly at that point: that the nonconformist will upset the homeostasis, will use one’s freedom to destroy the tired and true ways. Sokratis was condemned to drink hemlock because, so the good citizens of Athens believed, he taught false daimones (moral philosophy that defines right action as that which lead to the well-being of the individual, thus holding good behavior as an essential value) to the youth of Athens. Jesus was crucified because he upset the accepted religion of his day. Joan of Arc heard voices and was burned at the stake. Aaliyah choose the material and images she liked best and perished in a mysterious plane crash. These extreme examples are of person whose idea later become the cornerstones of our civilization. However, the fact only confirms my point. The persons whose insights are too disturbing, who bring too much of the anxiety that accompanies freedom, are put to death by their own generation, which suffers the threat caused by the Earthquake of the news ideas. However, when their ideas are crystallized into the strict and rigid doctrines of the new age and there is no chance of the dead figures rising from their silent graves to disturb the peace a new, they are worshipped by subsequent generations. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
The prototype of the person who produces something new is found in Prometheus, who created fire—or, as the myth presents it, stole it from the gods—and gave it to humankind as the beginning of human civilization. No one envies his punishment in being chained to a mountainside, where an eagle would eat away at his liver all day. At night, the liver would grow back, and the same grisly process would begin all over again the next day. This accompanies his great act of defiance, which was one aspect of Prometheus’ personal freedom. The denying of the dizziness of freedom is shown in the phrase pure spontaneity. For no one can seek that without succumbing to the dreadful implications of freedom. Even John Lilly, in his experiencing pure spontaneity in one’s stimulus-free tank, describes the great dangers therein, and one’s own great anxiety in one’s experience hovering on the edge of nonbeing, death. One may envy one’s colleagues who claim to exist in pure spontaneity and who seem to be on a perpetual high. Yes, we may envy them, but we do not love them for that. We love them for their vulnerability—which means their accepting and owning the dizziness of their freedom, their destiny which always stalks their freedom. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The legend of Icarus presents a picture of a young man refusing to accept the dizziness, or the anxiety, of freedom. Icarus that day must have felt a sense of great adventure—to be the first person who could sail high and taste the ecstasy, the sheer freedom from the bonds of the Earth, with no limits at all. For this one afternoon he was completely subject, not limited even by the distant reaches of the sky. One could order one’s Universe as one wished, could live out one’s whim and desire born in one’s own imagination. Here, indeed, was pure spontaneity. No longer part of the World, no longer subject to the laws of Earth or its destiny or the requirements of community. What exhilaration there must have been in the young man’s heart! A great dream comes true, an experience of complete freedom, pure spontaneity at last. One needs only the self-preoccupation, the refusal to consider compromise. He is like humanists of previous decades who insisted that there was no evil they need bother to consider. Human kind had done such great things in the past; why could we not overcome any and all difficulties in the future? Icarus remained as spontaneous as a child and burst into the sea to drown not as a young man, but as a child. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
When they hear these truths concerning the inward life and Universal laws, how sad, how foolish that so many people turn their heads away in indifference, in apathy, and in inertia! They believe that, even if there were any truth in them, these ideas are only for a handful of dreamers, for an esoteric cult with nothing better to do with its times and thought than to entertain them. There does not seem to be any point of contact between these ideas and their own lives, no applicability to their personal selves, and hence, no importance in them at all. How gross this error, how great this blindness! The mystic’s knowledge is full of significance for every other mortal. The mystic’s discoveries are full of value for one. Mortal’s hope for a happier existence and need of faith in Universal meaning has led one to try so many wrong turnings which brought one only father from them, that it is understandable why cynicism or indifferentism should claim so many votaries. However, this is not yet the end result. The few who today have found both hope and need adequately satisfied are presages of what must happen to the others. Even those mortals who do not believe in God are unknowingly seeking to find him or waiting for him. Every mortal has within one this divine possibility. However, if one refuses to believe it, or puts one’s faith in a hard materialism, or fails to seek for it, it will remain only latent. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
It is the thought of attaining happiness in some way which induces mortals to commit most crimes, just as it is the thought of attaining truth which induces them to hold the most materialistic beliefs. Although they see both happiness and truth from a wrong angle and so are given this deceptive result, still the essential motivation of their lives is the same as that of the questers. The segregation in thought of a spiritual elite as being the only seekers is valid only for a practical view, not for an ultimate one. Like people who are visually impaired, they seek the unseen. Like mystics they want the unknow centre of their being, but the conscious mind does not yet share in this desire. Everything else they try must in the end fail them, since life itself fails them at death. Those who do not choose to tread the path of mysticism need not therefore tread the path of mysticism need not therefore tread the path of misunderstanding it. This wisdom is latent in the bad as well as the good mortal. Any moral condition will suffice as a starting point. Jesus spoke to sinners as freely as to those of better character. One’s words were not wasted as the sequence showed. Even to those who had committed great crimes, as they as they repent and understand what repentance entails, Jesus promised salvation. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Was it for the sake of a small withdrawn spiritual elite that Jesus walked in Galilees, that Buddha wandered afoot across India, that Sokratis frequented the Agora in Athens? There is hope for all, benediction for the poor and the rich, the good and the bad, for every mortal may come into this great light. However—some mortals may come more easily, more quickly, while others may drag their way. “If anyone among you thinks that one is wise in this age, let one become a fool that one may become wise. For the wisdom of this World is folly with God,” reports 1 Corinthians 3.18-19. When a speaker in a morning chapel service used this as his text, I got a written question in class: “What do you think about this morning’s sermon?” And this was the implication: How can philosophy stand in view of Paul’s deprecating words? I want to answer by trying to interpret what I believe Paul means, not only in the passage above but in the whole context. At the end of his discussion he gives the key by saying: Let no one boast of mortals. For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the World or life or death or the present of the future, all are yours; and you are Christ’s and Christ is God’s. (I Corinthians 3.21-23.) #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Paul has asked, “Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the World?” And now he exclaims, “World and life and Apollos are yours.” This means that the wisdom of the World is ours also. How could it be otherwise? We could not even read Paul’s words without the wisdom of the World which enables us to understand ancient texts, which gives us the technical tool to spread the Christian message all over the Earth, which produces and sustains the political and educational and artistic institutions which serve and protect the Church. All this is ours. And even the different theologies are ours: the more dialectical one of Paul, the more ritualistic one of Peter, the more apologetic one of Apollos. There is only one type of theology which Paul dislikes—that which wants to monopolize the Christ and call itself the party of Christ. For each of these theologies wisdom of the World is needed; scribes are needed, debaters are needed, philosophers are needed, a language is needed to which everybody contributes. It is impossible to deny all this. However, it is possible to discredit through loose talk what one cannot avoid using at the same time. There is a deep dishonesty in the accusation against the use of historical research and philosophical thought in theology. In daily life one calls somebody dishonest who bring defamation upon those whom one uses. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
We should not commit this dishonesty in our theological work. And we cannot escape using the wisdom of this World. If we say “let us use a little of it, but not much in order to escape the dangers implied in it, this is no escape. This is certainly not what Paul means. The whole World is yours, he says, the whole life, present and future, not parts of it. These important words speak of scientific knowledge and its passion, artistic beauty and its excitement, politics and their use of power, eating and drinking and their joy, pleasures of the flesh and its ecstasy, family life and its warmth and friendship with its intimacy, justice with its charity, nature with its might and restfulness, the mortal-made World above nature, the technical World and its fascination, philosophy with its humility—daring only to call itself love of wisdom—and its profundity—daring to ask ultimate questions. In all of these things is wisdom of this World and power of this World and all these things are ours. They belong to us and we belong to them; we create them and they fulfill us. However, and this “but” of Paul’s is not one of those prepositions in which everything is taken back that was given before. The great preposition to the World which is ours gives both the foundation and the limit of the World that is ours: “And you are Christ’s,” namely, that Christ whose Cross is foolishness and weakness to the wisdom of the World. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
The wisdom of this World in all its forms cannot know God, and the power of this World with all its means cannot reach God. If they try it, they produce idolatry and are revealed in their foolishness which is the foolishness of idolatry. No finite being can attain the infinite without being broken as one who represented the World, and its wisdom and its power, was on the Cross. This is the foolishness and the weakness of the Cross which is ultimate wisdom and which is the reason that Christ is not another bearer of wisdom and power of this World but that he is God’s. The Cross makes him God’s. And out of this foolishness we win the wisdom to use what is our, the wisdom of the World, even philosophy. If it be unbroken, it controls us. If it be broken, it is ours. “Broken” does not mean reduced or emaciated or controlled, but it means undercut in its idolatic claim. Paul’s courage in affirming everything given, one’s openness towards the World, his sovereignty towards life should put to shame each of us as well as all our Churches. We are afraid to accept what is given to us: we are compulsive self-seclusion towards our World, we try to escape life instead of controlling it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
We do not behave as if everything were ours. And the Churches do so even less. The reason for this is that we and out Churches do not know as Paul did what it means to be Christ’s and because of beings Christ’s, to be God’s. Those who feel no call to develop themselves spiritually, no obligation to follow the quest, are nevertheless unwittingly doing both. Only, they are doing so at so sow and imperceptible a pace that they do not recognize the activity and the moment. All the experience of life are in the end intended to induce us to seek wholeheartedly for God. That is, to lead us to the very portal of the Quest. The vision of the tree of life shows us how the effects of casualness can lead us away from the covenant path. Consider that the rod of iron and the strait and narrow path, or the covenant path, led directly to the tree of lie, where all the blessings provided by our Savior and his Atonement are available to the faithful. If we are not careful in living our covenants with exactness, our casual efforts may eventually lead us into forbidden paths or to join with those who have already entered the great and spacious building. If not careful, we may even drown in the depths of a filthy river. “The Spirit of Christ is given to every mortal, that one may know good from evil and is sent forth by the power and gift of Christ; wherefore ye may know with a perfect know it is of God,” reports Moroni 7.16. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Blessed are the Eyes Which See the things that We See–We Can Exercise Our Freedom Even Against Destiny!
I was too anxious and miserable to play with them! I was too dazed. I shouted the old questions, “Who are you, speak to me!” The glass panes rattled in the nearby windows. Mortals stirred in their little chambers. There was no cemetery here. “Answer me, you pack of cowards. Speak if you have a voice or once and for all get away from me!” And then I knew, though how I knew, I cannot tell you, that they could hear me and they could answer me, if they chose. And I knew that what I had always heard was the irrepressible evidence of their proximity and their intensity, which they could not disguise. However, their thoughts they could cloak and they had. I mean, they had intellect, and they had words. I let out a long low breath. I was stung by their silence, but I was stung a thousand times more by what had just happened, and as I had done so many times in the past, I turned my back on them. The length of time of the pause is, in principle, irrelevant. When we look at what actually happens in people’s experience, we note that some pauses can be infinitesimally small. When I am giving a lecture, for example, I select one word rather than another in a pause that lasts for only a millisecond. In this pause a number of possible terms flash before my mind’s eye. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
If I want to say the noise of loud, I may consider in this fraction of a second such words as deafening, startling, or overwhelming. Out of these I select one. All this happens so rapidly—strictly speaking, on the preconscious level—that I am aware of it only when I stop to think about it afterward. Note in this last sentence I say “stop to think.: This habitual phrase is another proof of the importance of pause. There is a necessity of stopping to think—in other words, pausing is essential to the process of reflection. However, something else, even more interesting, occurs in those small, multitudinous pauses as one speaks. This is the time when I “listen” to the audience, when the audience influences me, when I “hear” its reaction and ask silently, What connotations are they taking from my words? For any experienced lecturer the blank spaces that constitute the pauses between the words and sentences is the time of openness to the audience. At such times I find myself noting: There someone seems puzzled; here someone listens by tipping his head to one side so as not to miss any word; there in the back row—what every speaker dreads to see—is someone nodding in sleep. Every experienced speaker than I know is greatly helped by the cultivation of one’s awareness of facial expressions and other subtle aspects of unspoken communication from the audience. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Walt Whitman once remarked that “the audience writes the poetry,” and in an even clearer sense the audience gives the lecture. Hence, a lecture delivered from the same notes, sat once to a social club and then again to graduate students at a large university, will often seem to be two entirely different speeches. The pause for milliseconds while one speaks is the locus of the speaker’s freedom. The speaker may mold one’s speech this way or that, one may tell a joke to relax the audience, or—in a thrilling moment of which there cannot be too many in a lecturer’s career—one may even be aware of a brand-new idea coming to one from Heaven knows where in the audience. Cassandra, we are told in Aeschylus’ drama, foretold the doom of Mycenae. A prophetess, she was sensitive to communications on many different levels of which the average person is unaware. This sensitivity caused her much pain, and if she could have, she would gladly have given up her role. She was doomed, or destined to listen on these different levels; she could not escape hearing the messages coming in her pauses. Quite apart from the roles of prophetess or mystic—which we see also in Tiresias and Jeremiah and Isaiah—it would seem that multitudes of us have such capacities, but we train ourselves (a process abetted by much contemporary education) to suppress this sensitivity to the pauses. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
And we may suppress the sensitivity to the pause in the hope of avoiding the pain. The difference between the charlatan and the genuine prophet may well be the sense of pain the latter experiences in one’s prophecies. The pause may be longer, for instance, wen one is answering questions after a lecture. In response to a question, I may silently hem and haw for a moment while different possible answers flash through my mind. At that time I do not usually think of Soren Kiekegaard’s proclamation “Freedom is possibility,” but that is what I am living out in those moments of pause. The thrilling thing is that at such a time a new answer that I have never thought of may suddenly emerge. It is often said that intellectually creative people—like John Dewey, for example—are a strain to listen to and are not good public speakers, because the time they pause to consider different possibilities requires a capacity to wait that most people find tedious. One’s freedom may involve still larger pauses. When one is making important decisions like buying a house, “Let me sleep on it” is a not infrequent remark. These are the situation in which a longer interval between stimuli is desired; there may be many different houses available, or one can decide not to buy at all. The decision then requires complex consideration, pondering, setting up the possibilities for choice, and playing “as if” games with oneself to assess various factors like view and design and so on. Freedom consists of these possibilities. The pauses are the exercise of one’s freedom to choose among them. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
We recall that Jesus Christ, following his own inner guidance, went off into his separate wilderness to engage in his quest. If the records are to be believed, he paused for forty days. These were assumedly times of intense concentration, times of considering possibilities, of listening to whatever voices were available on deeper levels within themselves, voices from nature, voices from what we now term archetypal experiences, voices from what Jesus called God, and I would call Being. These assumedly were periods in which they experienced their visions and integrated themselves around their message. However, students tell me that they have professors who pause permanently. These teachers make a career our of pausing. The pause is then not a preparation for action but an excuse for never acting at all. It has been remarked that the academic profession is the only one in which you can make your living by questioning things. How much it is still true in academia that persons substitute talking for decision or rationalize lack of commitment by calling it “judicious pausing” I do not know. Nevertheless this is a tendency that confronts us all: to use pausing as a substitute for committed action. In our action-oriented life in America this misuse of pausing is a not infrequently found neurotic reaction. However, this dilemma is not overcome by acting blindly, without consciousness and without reason. When it is necessary to act if one’s freedom is to be actualized at all, to be free obviously requires the courage to act. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
A person may ponder for months and years or all life long, never finding satisfactory answers. This occurs particularly with the question of death. When he stated his concerns with what might happen beyond death, Hamlet spoke for many of us. “When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, it must give us pause.” However, in our personal freedom can be actualized regardless of whether we find satisfactory answers or not, or even if there are no answers at all. We can exercise our freedom even against destiny. Indeed, in the long run to “know that he dies,” as Blaise Pascal said, is the most essential and triumphant experience of freedom possible for a human being. In the It-World causality holds unlimited sway. Every event that is either perceivable by the senses and physical or discovered or found in introspection and psychological is considered to be of necessity caused and a cause. Those events which may be regarded as purposive form no exception insofar as they also belong in the continuum of the It-World: this continuum tolerates a teleology, but only as a reversal that is worked into one part of causality without diminishing its complete continuity. The unlimited sway of causality in the It-World, which is of fundamental importance for the scientific ordering of nature, is not felt to be oppressive by the mortal who is not confined to the It-World but free to step out of it again and again into the World of relation. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Here I and You confront each other freely in a reciprocity that is not involved in or tainted by any causality; here mortals finds guaranteed the freedom of one’s being and of being. Only those who know relation and who know of the presence of the You have the capacity for decision. Whoever makes a decision is free because one has stepped before the countenance. The fiery matter of all my capacity to will surging intractably, everything possible for me revolving primevally, intertwined and seemingly inseparable, the alluring glances of potentialities flaring up from every corner, the Universe as a temptation, and I, born in an instant, both hands into the fire, deep into it, where the one that intends me is hidden, my deed, seized: now! And immediately the menace of the abyss is subdued: no longer a coreless multiplicity at ply in the iridescent equality of its claims; but only two are left alongside each other, the other and the one, delusion and task. However, now the actualization commences within me. Having decided cannot mean that the one is done while the other remains lying there, an extinguished mass, filling my soul, layer upon layer, with its dross. Only one that funnels all the force of the other into the doing of the one, absorbing into the actualization of what was chosen the undermined passion of what was not chosen, only one that serves God with the evil impulse, decides—and decides what happens. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
Once one has understood this, one also knows that precisely this deserves to be called righteous: that which is set right, toward which a mortal directs oneself and for which one decides; and if there were a devil he would not be the one who decided against God but one that in all eternity did not decide. The mortal to whom freedom is guaranteed does not feel oppressed by causality. One knows that one’s mortal life is by its very nature an oscillation between You and It, and one senses the meaning of this. It suffices one that again and again one may set foot on the threshold of the sanctuary in which one could never tarry. Indeed, having to leave it again and again is for on an intimate part of the meaning and destiny of this life. There, on the threshold, the response, the spirit is kindled in one again and again; here, in the unholy and indigent land the spark has to prove itself. What is here called necessity cannot frighten it; for there one recognized true necessity: fate. Fate and freedom are promised to each other. Fate is encountered only by one that actualizes freedom. That I discovered the deed that intends me, that, this movement of my freedom, reveals the mystery to me. However, this, too, that I cannot accomplish it the way I intended it, this resistance also reveals that mystery to me. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
One that forgets all being caused as one decides from the depths, one that puts aside possessions and cloak and steps bare before the countenance—this free human being encounters fate as the counter-image of one’s freedom. It is not one’s limit but one completion; freedom and fate embrace each other to form meaning; and given meaning, fate—with its eyes, hitherto severe, suddenly full of light—looks like grace itself. No, the mortal who returns into the It-World, carrying the spark, does not feel oppressed by causal necessity. And in healthy ages, confidence flows to all the people from the mortals of the spirit; to all of them, even the most obtuse, the encounter, the presence has happened somehow, if only in the dimension of nature, impulse, and twilight; all them have somewhere felt the You; and now the spirit interprets this guarantee to them. However, in sick ages it happens that the It-World, no longer irrigated and fertilized by living currents of the You-World, severed and stagnant, becomes a gigantic swamp phantom and overpowers mortals. As one accommodates oneself to a World of objects that no longer achieve any presence for one, one succumbs to it. Then common causality grows into an oppressive and crushing doom. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
The freezing temperature of those snowy peaks of thought frightens away some who might otherwise venture on the Quest. It is the ego which is so frightened, knowing that its own end would come with the end of the journey into this elevated region. A mortal may stay at one’s present level or try to rise in character to a better one than one was born with. It ideals and values do not stir one, if one is ruled by undisciplined animal appetites, these truths will not appeal to one. Even if one is qualified to receive truth one may not be in the mood to do so, that is, one is not ready and willing to meet the cost. One’s interest or one’s desire or one’s emotions at that particular time as elsewhere possessed. When they learn the price—disciplining and reducing the fattened ego—that will have to be paid for this higher consciousness, they are more hesitant to embark on the Quest. Mortals who are uninterested in affairs other than their own personal ones, in matters other than their own work and pleasure, position and fortune, mortals who are preoccupied with the trivial round of external, selfish activities only, will naturally regard the study of philosophy as a waste of time, the practice of meditation as a form of indolence, and the endeavour after self-improvement as a needless trouble. No higher yearings enter their hearts, no reverent feelings touch them. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Because of their unwillingness either to look within or to think more deeply for any higher purpose or obligation that they might have, people live largely in delusion and deception, especially self-deception. “Why am I here on Earth?” is a question for which they can only find one answer: to satisfy their own material desires. This question is as old as the Christian message itself and the answer is equally old, as our text indicate. Jesus takes his disciples aside and speaks privately to them when he praises them because they see what they are seeing. The presence of the Messiah is a mystery; it cannot be said to everybody, and it cannot be seen by everybody, but only by those like Simeon who are driven by the Spirit. There is something surprising, unexpected about the appearance of salvation, something which contradicts pious opinions and intellectual demands. The mystery of salvation is the mystery of a child. So it was anticipated by Isaiah, by the ecstatic vision of the sibyl and by the poetic vision of Virgil, by the doctrines of mysteries and the rites of those who celebrated the birth of a child. A child is real and not yet real, it is in history and not yet historical. Its nature is visible and invisible, it is here and not yet here. And just this is the character of salvation. Salvation has the nature of a child. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
As Christendom remembers every year, in the most impressive of its festivals, the child Jesus, so salvation, however visible it may be, remains always also invisible. One who wants a salvation which is only visible cannot see the divine child in the Manger as one cannot see the divinity of the Man on the Cross and the paradoxical ways of all divine acting. Salvation is a child and when it grows up it is crucified. Only one who can see power under weakness, the whole under the fragment, victory under defeat, glory under suffering, innocence under guilt, sanctity under sin, life under death can say: Mine eyes have seen thy salvation. It is hard to say this in our days. However, it always has been hard and always will be hard. It was and is and will be a mystery, the mystery of a child. And however deep the World might fall, even into utter self-destruction, as long as there are mortal they will experience this mystery and say: “Blessed are the eyes which see the things that we see.” Not everyone is prepared by temperament, or past history, to seek the higher truth, much less has the time and will for it. Not everyone among the seekers is ready to make the sacrifices that a conscientious re-adjustment of character and behavior wants from one. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
I believe in a high power behind the Universe. I call it God. I believe this same higher power is behind mortals. Call it the soul, if you like to. Such beliefs do not appeal to the cocktail-soaked cynics and sophisticates of our era. Such teachings are ignored or rejected as being of interest only to dreamers, idlers, or misfits. There is some truth in this criticism, some basis for this attitude. Plain normal people who have to make a living, who are body with the World’s work, politics, and economics, who have personal and family problems most of the time, find all this to be unrealistic out of touch with things as they are, humanity as it is and has been. So long as the objects of their existence remain small and circumscribed, selfish and materialistic, so long will the meaning of their existence be denied them. It is not that they are contemptuous of truth but that they are indifferent to it. The opinions of most people about mysticism are either totally or partially worthless. This is because they are not informed either by accurate or by sufficient knowledge of the subject. They know next to nothing of its true history, nature, and results. Lack of concern for higher values reveals mortal’s frailty or malice. To the diseased mentality, mysticism is an attempt to cripple progress by weakening intellect and inhibiting needed action. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Justice Without Love is Always Injustice Because it Does Not Do Justice to the Other One, Nor to Oneself, Nor to the Situation in Which We Meet!
I stood on the hilltop in the Moonlight and I tried not to see this paradise. I tried to picture those I loved. Were they gathered still together in that fairy-tale wood of beautiful trees? If only I could see their faces or hear their voices. I looked on these verdant green valley, now patched with beautiful contracted Cresleigh homes, a picture book World with flowers blooming in profusion, the red poinsettia as tall as trees. And the clouds, ever changing, borne like the tall sailing ships on brisk winds. What had the first Europeans thought when they looked upon this fecund land surrounded by the sparkling sea? That this was the Garden of God? Even the most uneducated people would not dare to affirm that compassion, gratitude, love of the beauty of the World, love of religious practices, and friendship belonged exclusively to those centuries and countries that recognize the Church. These forms of love are rarely found in their purity, but it would even be difficult to say that they were met with more frequently in those centuries and countries than in the others. To think that love in any of these forms can exist anywhere Christ is absent is to belittle him so grievously that it amounts to an outrage. It is impious and almost sacrilegious. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
These kinds of love are supernatural, and in a sense they are absurd. They are the height of folly. So long as the soul has not had direct contact with the very person of God, they cannot be supported by any knowledge based either on experience or reason. They cannot therefore rest upon any certainty, unless the word is used in a metaphorical sense to indicate the opposite of hesitation. In consequence it is better that they should not be associated with any belief. This is more honest intellectually, and it safeguards our love’s purity more effectively. On this account it is more fitting. In what concerns divine things, belief is not fitting. Only certainty will do. Anything less than certainty is unworthy of God. During the period of preparation, these indirect loves constitute an upward movement of the soul, a turning of the eyes, not without some effort, toward higher things. After God has come in person, not only to visit the soul as he does for a long time beforehand, but to possess it and to transport its center near to his very heart, it is otherwise. The chicken has cracked its shell; it is outside the egg of the World. These first loves continue; they are more intense than before, but they are different. One who has passed through this adventure has a deeper love than every for those who suffer affliction and for those who help one in one’s own, for one’s friends, for religious practices, and for the beauty of the World. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
However, one’s love in all these forms had become a movement of God himself, a ray merged in the light of God. That at least is what we may suppose. These indirect loves are only the attitude toward beings and things here below of the soul turned toward the Good. They themselves have not any particular good as an object. There is no final good here below. Thus strictly speaking we are no longer concerned with forms of love, but with attitudes inspire by love. In the period of preparation the soul loves in emptiness. It does not know whether anything real answers its love. It may believe that it knows, but to believe is not to know. Such a belief does not help. The soul knows for certain only that it is hungry. The important thing is that it announces its hunger by crying. If we suggest to a child that perhaps there is no bread, the child does not stop crying. It goes on crying just the same. The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry. It can only persuade itself of this by lying, for the reality of its hunger is not a belief, it is a certainty. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
We all know that there is no true good here below, that everything that appears to be good in this World is finite, limited, wears out, and once worn out, leaves necessity exposed in all its nakedness. Every human being has probably had some lucid moments in one’s life when one has definitely acknowledged to oneself that there is no final good here below. However, as soon as we have seen this truth we cover it up with lies. Many people even take pleasure in proclaiming it, seeking a morbid joy in their sadness, without ever having been able to bear facing it for a second. Mortals feel that there is a mortal danger in facing this truth squarely for any length of time. That is true. Such knowledge strikes more surely than a sword; it inflicts a death more frightening than that of the body. After a time it kills everything within us that constitutes our soul. In order to bear it we have to love the truth more than life itself. Those who do this turn away from the fleeting things of time with their souls. They do not turn toward God. When they are in total darkness, how could they do so? God himself sets their faces in the right direction. He does not, however, show himself to them for a long time. It is for them to remain motionless, without averting their eyes, listening ceaselessly, and waiting, they know not for what; deaf to entreaties and threats, unmoved by every shock, unshaken in the midst of every upheaval. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
If after a long period of waiting God allow them to have an indistinct intuition of his light or even reveals himself in person, it is only for an instant. Once more they have to remain still, attentive, inactive, calling out only when their desire cannot be contained. If God does not reveal this reality, it does not rest with the soul to believe in the reality of God. In trying to do so it either labels something else with the name of God, and that is idolatry, or its belief in God remains abstract and verbal. Such a belief prevails wherever religious doctrines are taken for granted, as is the cause with those centuries and countries in which it never enters anyone’s head to question it. The state of nonbelief is then what Saint John of the Cross calls a night. The belief is verbal and does not penetrate the soul. At a time like the present, if the unbeliever loves Go, if one is like the child who does not know whether there is bread anywhere, but cries out become one is hungry, incredulity may be equivalent to the dark night of Saint John of the Cross. When we are eating bread, and even when we have eaten it, we know that it is real. We can nevertheless raise doubts about the reality of bread. Philosophers raise doubts about the reality of the World of the senses. Such doubts are however purely verbal; they leave the certainty intact and actually serve only to make it more obvious to a well-balanced mind. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
In the same way one to whom God has revealed his reality can raise doubts about this reality without any harm. They are purely verbal doubts, a form of exercise to keep one’s intelligence in good health. What amounts to criminal treason, even before such a revelation and much more afterward, is to question the fact that God is the only thing worthy of love. That is a turning away of our eyes, for love is the soul’s looking. It means that we have stopped for an instant to wait and to listen. Queen Akasha did not seek Lestat, she waited for him. When she was convinced that he no longer existed, and that nowhere in the whole World was there anything that could be Lestat, she did not on that account return to her former associates. She drew back from them with greater aversion than ever. She preferred the absence of Lestat to the presence of anyone else. Lestat awakened her from her statue state, from her cold slumber. She no longer hoped for that. However, never for an instant did dream of employing another method which could obtain a luxurious and honored life for her—the method of reconciliation with her kith and kin. Akasha did not want wealth and consideration unless they came with Lestat. She did not even give a thought to such things. However, she wanted to turn Earth into a Heaven. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
At that moment Lestat could hold out no longer. He could not help declaring himself. He gave certain proof that he was Lestat. Akasha saw him, she heard him, she touched him. There would be no more question for her not as to whether her savior was in existence. One who has had the same adventure as Akasha, one whose soul has seen, heard, and touched for itself, one will recognize God as the reality inspiring all indirect loves, the reality of which they are as it were the reflections. God is pure beauty. This is incomprehensible, for beauty, by its very essence, has to do with the senses. To speak of an imperceptible beauty must seem a misuse of language to anyone who has any sense of exactitude: and with reason. Beauty is always a miracle. However, when the soul receives an impression of beauty which, while it is beyond all sense perception is no abstraction, but real and direct as the impression caused by a song at the moment it reached our ears, the miracle is raised to the second degree. Everything happens as though, by a miraculous favor, our very sense themselves had been made aware that silence is not the absence of sound, but something infinitely more real than sounds, and the center of a harmony more perfect than anything which a combination of sounds can produce. Furthermore there are degrees of silence. When compared with the silence of God, there is a silence in the beauty of the Universe which is like noise. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
God is, moreover, our real neighbor. The term of person can only be rightly applied to God, and this is also true of the term impersonal. God is one who bends over us, afflicted as we are, and reduced to the state of being nothing but a fragment of inert and bleeding flesh. Yet at the same time he is not some sort of victim of misfortune as well, the victim who appears to us as an inanimate body, incapable of thought, this nameless victim of whom nothing is known. The inanimate body is this created Universe. If we were able to attain it, the love we owe to God, this love that would be our crowning perfection is the divine model both of gratitude and compassion. God is also the perfect friend. So that there should be between him and us, bridging the infinite distance, something in the way of equality, he had chosen to place an absolute quality in his creatures, the absolute liberty of consent, which leaves us free to follow or swerve from the God-ward direction he has communicated to our souls. He has also extended our possibilities of error and falsehood so as to leave us the faculty of exercising a spurious rule in imagination, not only over the Universe and the human race, but also over God himself, in so far as we do not know how to use his name aright. He has given us this faculty of infinite illusion so that we should have the power to renounce it out of love. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
In fact, contact with God is the true sacrament. We can, however, be almost certain that those whose love of God has caused the disappearance of the pure loves belonging to our life here below are no true friends of God. After the soul has had direct contact with God, our neighbor, our friends, religious ceremonies, and the beauty of the World do not fall to the level of unrealities. On the contrary, it is only then that these things become real. Previously they were half dreams. Previously they had no reality. “In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of Heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all peoples, nations, and mortals of every language worshipped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed,” reports Daniel 7.11. Could God possibly forgive people without at least demanding their conversation and some ritual observances? People, at any time, can return and be accepted by God. God can at any time forgive those who repent. Many people say we live in a sick society—and the quality of life might be changed radically by the development of a new sense of community. If every person returns from one’s evil way and from the violence on one’s hands, who knows, God may return. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
Modern mortals are voracious readers who have never learned to read well. Part of the trouble is that one is taught to read drivel that is hardly worth reading well. (There was a time when children learned to read by reading the Bible.) One ends up by reading mainly newspapers and magazines—ephemeral, anonymous trash that one scans on its way to the garbage can. One has no wish to remember it for any length of time; it is written as if to make sure that one will not; and one reads it in a manner that makes doubly sure. There is no person behind what one reads; not even a committee. Somebody wrote it in the first place—if one can call that writing—and then various other people took turns changing it. For the final result no one is responsible; and it rarely merits a serious response. It cries out to be forgotten soon, like the books on which one is learned to read, in school. They were usually anonymous, too; or they should have been. In adolescence students are suddenly turned loose on books worth reading, but generally do not know how to read them. And if, untaught, some instinct prompts them to read well, chances are that they are asked completely tone-deaf questions as soon as they have finished their assignment—either making them feel that they read badly after all or spoiling something worthwhile for the rest of their lives. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
We must learn to feel addressed by a book, by the human being behind it, as if a person spoke directly to us. A good book or essay or poem is not primarily an object to be put to use, or an object of experience: it is the voice of You speaking to me, requiring a response. “So whatever you wish that mortals would do to you, do so to them; for this is the law and the prophets,” reports Matthew 7.12. Recently I have had to think about the relation of love to justice. And it occurred to me that among the words of Jesus there is a statement of what is called the “Golden Rule.” The Golden Rule was well known to Christians and Greeks, although mostly in a negative form: What you do not want that mortal should do to you, do not so to them. Certainly, the absolute for is richer in meaning and nearer to love, but it is not love. It is calculating justice. How, then, is it related to love? How does it fit the message of the kingdom of God and the justice of the kingdom as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount where the Golden Rule appears? Let us think of an ordinary day in our life and of occasions for the application of the Golden Rule. We meet each other in the morning, we expect a friendly face or word and we are ready to give it although our minds are full of anxious anticipation of the burdens. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
Somebody wants a part of our limited time, we give it, having asked somebody else to give us a part of one’s time. We need help and we give it if we are asked, although it includes sacrifice. We are frank with others, expecting that they will be frank with us even if it hurts. We are fair to those who fight against us expecting fairness from them. We participate in the sorrows of our neighbors, certain that they will participate in ours. All this can happen in one day. All this is Golden Rule. And if somebody has violated this rule, consciously or unconsciously, we are willing to forgive as we hope to be forgiven. It is not astonishing that for many people the Golden Rule is considered as the real content of Christianity. It is not surprising that in the name of the Golden Rule criticism is suppressed, independent action discouraged, serious problems avoided. It is even understandable that statesmen ask other nations to behave toward their own nations according to the Golden Rule. And does not Jesus himself say that the Golden Rule is the law and the prophets? However, we know that this is not the answer of the New Testament. The great commandment as Jesus repeats it and the descriptions of love in Paul and John’s tremendous assertion that God is love, infinitely transcend the Golden Rule. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
The Golden Rule must be transcended, for it does not tell us what we should wish that mortal would do to us. We wish to have freedom from heavy duties. We are ready to give the same freedom to others. However, someone who loves us refuses to give it to us, and one oneself refuses to ask us for it. And if one did, we should refuse to give it to one because it would reduce our growth and violate the law of love. We wish to receive a fortune which makes us secure and independent. We would be ready to give a fortune to a friend who asks us for it, if we had it. However, in both cases love would be violated. For the gift would ruin us and the other individual. We want to be forgiven and we are ready to do the same. However, perhaps it is in both cases an escape from the seriousness of a personal problem, and therefore against love. The measure of what we shall do to mortals cannot be our wishes about what they shall do to us. For our wishes express not only our right but also our wrong and our foolishness more than our wisdom. This is the limit of the Golden Rule. This is the limit of calculating justice. Only for one who knows what one should wish and who actually wishes it, is the Golden Rule ultimately valid. Only love can transform calculating justice into creative justice. Love makes justice just. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
Justice without love is always injustice because it does not do justice to the other one, nor to the oneself, nor to the situation in which we meet. For the other one and I and we together in this moment in this place are unique, unrepeatable occasion, calling for a unique unrepeatable act of uniting love. If this call is not heard by listening love, it is not obeyed by the creative genius of love, injustice is done. And this is true even of oneself. One who loves listens to the call of one’s own innermost center and obeys this call and does justice to one’s own being. For love does not remove, it establishes justice. It does not add something to what justice does but it shows justice what to do. It makes the Golden Rule possible. For we do not speak for a love which swallows justice. This would result in chaos and extinction. However, we speak for a love in which justice is the form and structure of love. We speak for a love which respects the claim of the other one to be acknowledged as what one is, and the claim of ourselves to be acknowledged as what we are, above all as persons. Only distorted love, which is a cover for hostility or self-disgust, denies that which united love. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
Love makes justice just. The divine love is justifying love accepting and fulfilling one who, according to calculating justice, must be rejected. This justification of one who is unjust is the fulfillment of God’s creative justice, and of God’s reuniting love. Knowing that the ultimate meaning of freedom will elude us, let us still endeavor to define the term as best we can. The first definition is on the psychological level, the domain of everyday actions: Freedom is the capacity to pause in the face of stimuli from many directions at once and, in this pause, to throw one’s weight toward this response rather than that one. This is the freedom we experience in a store when we pause over the purchase of a necktie or a shirt. We summon up in our imaginations the image of how we will look in this or that tie, what so-and-so will say about it, or how the color will fit such and such a suit. And then we buy the tie or we move on to something else. This is freedom of doing, or existential freedom. This freedom is shown most interestingly in the supermarket, when we push our carts through the aisles between the tumultuous variety of packages and cans of food on the shelves, each one silently shouting through its bright-colored label “Buy me!” We see the shoppers with expressions of hesitancy, vacuity, wonder, pausing for some inspiration as to which of all these foods will be good for dinner tonight. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
The shopper seems hypnotized, charmed, preoccupied. Like patients on a ward in a mental hospital, they do not see me as I walk directly across their line of vision. The expressions of wonder and hesitancy are a readiness, an invitation, an openness to some stimulus on the shelves to persuade them to throw the balance this way of that in making their choice. This first freedom is experienced by each of us hundreds of times every day. It is decked up in respectable terms like decision/choice when we discuss freedom in psychology classes—if we ever discuss freedom in psychology classes at all. The most profound illustration of this kind of freedom is our ability to ask questions. Take, for example, my asking a question after listening to a lecture. The very fact that the question comes up in my mind at all implied that there is more than one answer. Otherwise there would be no point in asking the question in the first place. This is freedom; it implies that there is some possibility, some freedom of selection in what I ask. The speaker then pauses for a few seconds after I have asked it, turning over in his or her mind the possible answers. We sense that there is, in asking and answering questions, a good deal more going on, and it is of a richer nature, than the mere responding to various stimuli and selecting a response. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Each person who lights this candle within one’s own mind will soon begin to attract other mortals like moths to a flame burning by a fire—not all mortal nor many mortals but only those who are groping for a way out of their darkness. Can a scrupulously impartial search through World-thought and experience lead to discovery of truth? “Wilt thou be made whole?” asked Jesus. Questioning implies some value judgment, some investment of the person’s life, some invitation to share, to make contact, some challenge to consider a new idea. Regrettably, in recent decades our very idea of freedom has been diminished and grown shallow in comparisons with previous ages; it has been relegated almost exclusively to freedom from outside pressure, to freedom from state coercion—to freedom understood on the juridical level, and no higher. Only when this search for a higher life has becomes an absolute necessity to a mortal, has one found even the first qualification needed for the Quest. “And the Lord God doth work by means to bring about his great and eternal purposes; and by very small means the Lord doth confound the wise and bringeth about the salvation of many souls,” reports Alma 37.7. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
There Other Two Persons Seemed a Million Miles Away—Hold Infinity in the Palm of Your Hand and Eternity in an Hour
The air so emotionally frigid that when going to be at night, there was a feeling that no other person was in the house. I never in a thousand years would have imagined that would come out. Often times in human beings there is an early attachment of imprinting behavior, where people seem to follow their attachment with a similar blind fidelity. And this behavior may be made stronger by punishment or other difficulties put in their path. Some people spend a lifetime looking for someone to make up for their losses, to bring them justice for their less than pleasant childhoods or adult life. They go through life lonely, yearning for a love that will fill the large area of emptiness in their hearts. However, the struggles these individuals are engaged in is bound to be self-defeating. The first and fundamental challenge is to confront one’s fate as it is, reconcile one’s self to the fact that one did receive a bad deal, know that justice is irrelevant, no one will ever make up for the emptiness and the pain of those years. The past cannot be changed—it can only be acknowledged and learned from. It is one’s destiny. It can be absorbed and mitigated by new experiences, but it cannot be changed or erased. An individual only adds insult to injury by going on the rest of one’s life knocking one’s head against the same stone wall. Fortunately, psychotherapy can be a vehicle through which human beings may become more aware of and compensate for such implanted destiny. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Some people hang on to the past as a way of hanging on to someone they cared deeply about. It is an expression of the hope that someday this coveted individual will reward one, someday one will find the Holy Grail. Now one will get the original care one was missing; now one will get that restored! However, there is no way to restore it, no matter how much of a loss it is. Bad fate, yes. Yet, that is just the way it is. The lost idol image, the lost change, the great emptiness within one—they are all going to remain there. These things are the past; there is no way of changing them. You can change your attitude toward these tragic happenings, as the ultimate freedom is a command over one’s own attitude. However, you cannot change the experiences themselves. If you hang on to an illusion of such change, always hoping for pie in the sky by and by and by you cut off your possibilities. You then become rigid. You do not let yourself take in the new possibilities. You trade your freedom for a mess of emotional pottage. And this way, as a corollary, you never use your anger constructively. You lose a tremendous amount of power, energy, and possibility. In short, you lose your freedom. However, is there no constructive value in coming to terms with one’s early fate? Yes, there is—and a value potentially greater than what one gives up. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
The struggle to come to terms with acrimonious relationships and lifestyles has much to do with the emergence of creativity. For example, a man who had an unpleasant childhood ended up developing talents which led to his high status in the World of architecture. Because he had such a disturbed family life, that the creativity was compensation for such an early trauma. We know that creative people often come out of such unfortunate family backgrounds. Why and how they do is still one of the mysteries the answer to which the Sphinx of creativity has not revealed. We do know that some people have been unfortunate and never have been able to take life lightly. They learn from the hour of birth that it is best to take life easily, as many may. They cannot coast along or rest on their laurels. This exceptional achievement following a disturbed childhood or adulthood had been documented in many cases. Such freedom of the artist is not born. It is made in the pain of adolescent loneliness, the isolation of physical disability, or, perhaps, the smug superiority of inherited title. The freedom that permits generation of possibilities is the beginning of a creative product. Many of our most valuable people have come from the most calamitous situations. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
Investigations of the childhoods of eminent people expose the fact that they did not receive anything like the kind of child rearing that a person in our culture is led to believe is healthy for children. Whether in spite of or because of these conditions, it is clear that these children not only survived, but reached great heights of achievements, many after having experienced the most deplorable traumatic childhoods. The tension in these personalities between high aspiration and disappointment may well be the necessary matrix out of which creativity—and, later, civilization—is born. This type cannot slide into any well-adjusted syndrome. There is the outstanding exception of J.S. Bach, but his contentment—if it was that—seems to have been a combination of fortunate social conditions. The well-adjusted person rarely make great painters, sculptors, writers, architects, musicians. Coming out of such a confused early childhood allows the creative capacity to be considered a later compensation. The question is: Can a person seize these possibilities—these new reaches of freedom not without cruel fate, but despite fate—and weld them into a significant building, house, a statue, a painting, or some other creative product? #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
If one can accept the deprivation of the care one rightfully expected, if one can engage this loneness face to face, one will have achieved a strength and a power that will be a foundation more solid than one ever could have achieved otherwise. If one can accept this aspect of one’s destiny, the fates will work rather than against one. In this way one lives with the Universe rater than against it. One must learn to engage and accept these cruel things in one’s background. It is, therefore, inevitable that the questions “Is there a need for self-control” arises when a way of life is being espoused that encourages freedom of thought and action. And it is vital that no glib, easy answer be given, for it is an important question. Situations do exist where it can be said without equivocation “Yes, do exercise self-control.” Wen, for example, individuals have the desire to destroy the life or property of others or when they have the urge to take their own lives or act in obviously self-destructive ways, it is important that they control these impulses. Society has found it necessary and desirable, when it has the opportunity, to impose control on such persons by limiting their freedom by restraining them. One of the most painful tragedies in American life today is the suicides that occur among high school and college students—frequently those of great promise. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
It could be said those planning to end their own lives to please, please, hold on! Life may seem painful and meaningless. Perhaps you feel suddenly and terribly disillusioned. However, at least bear with the struggles and give yourselves the perspective of a few more years before you make such an irrevocable decision. It is not enough simply to develop self-control, even though we may need to use it to curb destructive impulses. The ultimately satisfying answer is to deal effectively with problems that underlie our destructive impulses so that we can move beyond the need for self-control. The basic problem is self-hate, for self-destructiveness and destructiveness directed toward others go hand and hand. The nation, for example, that sets out to destroy other nations is bent on a self-destructive course. The personal who assaults another person and follows one’s impulses is not benefiting one’s self. And, of course, one’s self-hate is evident in the obvious lack of confidence on one’s ability to relate to individuals in other ways that would be more pleasant. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
So let us be clear about one thing. The violent or destructive acts we are so often afraid we will do if we do not control ourselves are not the result of true freedom or spontaneity. The murderer is not free. One is an enslaved, tormented person who is driven by pent-up feelings of self-hate that have been projected outward onto other individuals or onto society at large. The superheated steam of this hatred builds up in one’s internal pressure cooker until whatever self-control one possesses is bypassed in an explosion of violence. To exhort such a person to control one’s self may be a necessary stop-gap measure, although it is likely to be futile. Any thorough-going help must deal with the mortal’s self-hate. Most of us may feel some impulses within ourselves to be destructive to others or to ourselves, which we sense the seen to curb by self-control. Often the inner pressure is not too great and we can be successful in this control if we choose to go that route, but the more such self-control we need to impose on ourselves the less able we will be to be carefree and spontaneous. And spontaneity is a deliciously desirable way of living. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
If we can discover why we feel destructive and through this exploration reduce the self-hate to the point where we have relatively little need for self-control, it will be a far more freeing experience. A professional therapist can often be very helpful here, for one can provide a relatively secure environment where hatreds (both toward the self and others) can be expressed and explored with a minimum of danger. Often in therapy people discover that they are not nearly as dangerous to themselves or others as the feared. They find they had been so frightened of freedom that they had imagined themselves far more potentially harmful than they were as a way of keeping themselves rigidly controlled. However, some people like to deceive themselves. To be rejected makes a better excuse—to tell everyone how misunderstood they are, and how they triumphed over great odds. The misunderstood genius, nobody to help them, and so on. We all live in the old state of things. We belong to the Old Creation, and the demand made upon us by Christianity is that we also participate in the New Creation. We have known ourselves in our old being, and we shall ask ourselves in this hour whether we also have experiences something of a New Being in ourselves. The union with God is when the New Reality is present. God is the ultimate truth and demands complete devotion. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
It is important to experience the birth in consciousness of a new—though old—part of the self. One may consider it a dawning of awareness of new possibilities which have in effect been there all the time. This is a giant step toward personal freedom. This New Creation is manifest in Jesus who is called Christ. And it is actually the beginning of accepting acceptance, the uniting of one’s self with that early self that one had had to lock up in a dungeon in order to survive when life was not happy but threatening. Although this does not alter the original lack of basic trust, it does surmount it in the literal meaning of that term. We hear about the psychology of anger and how it clouds our vision, causes us to misunderstand each other, and in general interferes with the calm necessary for a rational, clear view of life. People point out that their anger curtails one’s freedom. All this is true. However, it is one-sided; it omits the constructive side to anger. In our society, we confuse anger with resentment, a form of repressed anger that eats steadily away at our innards. In resentment we store up ammunition to get even with our fellows, but we never communicate directly in a way that might resolve the problem. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
This transformation of anger into resentment is the sickness of the middle class. It corrodes our stature as human beings. Or we confuse anger with temper, which is generally an explosion of repressed anger; with rage, which may be a pathological anger; with petulance, which is immature resentment; or with hostility, which is anger absorbed into our character structure until it infects every act of ours. I am not referring to these kinds of hostility or resentment. I am speaking, rather, of the anger that pulls the diverse parts of the self together, that integrates the self, keeps the whole self alive and present, energizes us, sharpens our vision, and stimulates us to think more clearly. This kind of anger brings with it an experience of self-esteem and self-worth. It is the healthy anger that makes freedom possible, the anger that cuts one loose from the unnecessary baggage in living. However, people who are romantically involved with others that do not share their values will find there is a conflict of two different value systems, and it will feel like a red hot poker being shoved into your heart. Some people take their issues they have with their absentee parents out on their partner or a family member of the same gender as the parent they have an issue with. They take revenge by punishing innocent people as a whole. The individual being targeted has to admit one’s own cruelty—cruelty to one’s self most of all for allowing someone like that to be in one’s life. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
Do not cover up what you really feel and become deceitful just to survive. Do not surrender your freedom. Many people always try to foresee that the other person’s reaction will be before they speak. These types of individual hide behind such laudable words as responsibility, dutiful, noble member of society, and so on. However, one must hate these roles they play with people who are taking advantage of them. Occasionally being honest with people and venting your anger will give you partial freedom. At least one starts to know one can say what one feels. However, it may still be a freedom within a jail. There is the lacking surge of anger that leads to a changing of one’s life, the willingness to cut loose all the barges one is pulling, to throw aside all one’s luggage and one’s overscrupulous cares. It is not a good idea to always prefer to be hurt rather than to take care of yourself even if it hurts someone else. Another vital question remains to be discussed in regard to living spontaneously. Can we be deeply involved in a love relationship and still be free to be spontaneous? A great many people act as though love and spontaneity are incompatible. There are two frequent feelings that contribute to this reaction that love and freedom cannot coexist. And, of course, they help to make love that much more frightening to us. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
One of these feelings has to do with the idea that the revealing of ourselves, which intimacy involves, gives the other person power over us, thereby limiting our freedom to do what we want to do. Have you noticed that when you talk to people sometimes it is like you have an invisible wall between your eyes and theirs—a wall that has never been absent in all the time you have know them? Well, some of us are always on guard. There is the feeling that one can never let anyone see one completely—know all about who we are. That is because it would give the other person too many strings on one. It would allow one to become their puppet. Many develop these defenses of withdrawing into one’s self and permitting others to see as few of one’s real feelings as possible as a way of avoiding manipulation by them. This is because some feel if one allows others to really know one, one will be helpless to avoid being manipulated. The other feeling that leads us to shy away from love because it appears to threaten our freedom is probably even more common. This is the idea that love is inescapably tied up with obligation and responsibility. Among other ways in which this duty theme operates is the idea that if we really love another we will cease doing what we want to do and concentrate on pleasing the one we love. Such feelings often strike a death blow to the experience and expression of love. Men and women talk about their lack of freedom to do what they would like to do because of the necessity of providing adequately for their families. So work becomes noxious, tolerated duty. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
We also hear could saying their partner would not like it if they did this or that and that they would like to go out, but the children have to come first, you know. So all of life become hedged about with responsibilities and the necessity of pleasing others brought about by love. And virtually everything in life, from daily work, fidelity, pleasures of the flesh, and second honeymoons to family picnics, walking in the park, and holding hands in the movie, becomes a dutiful and essentially joyless act that we do in hope that spouse and children will be pleased. When approached this way, it is no wonder that love seems like slavery and many splendored things! When so many people view love this way, it is not surprising that a playboy (and playgirl) philosophy would develop in our culture in which physical intimacy without emotional intimacy would become very attractive to us as a way of life. The essential message of the philosophy seems to be, “As long as I can remain indifferent to my pleasures of the flesh partners I can retain my freedom and individuality. Once I begin to allow myself to care for someone, I have had it! I am on my way to becoming a slave.” The joker in this deck is that the moment we embrace this philosophy we have walked out on the freedom to have the most deeply satisfying fun of all—a love relationship freely experienced and expressed. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
The basic problem underlying our feeling that love and freedom are incompatible is our old nemesis, self-hate. If we act freely and do what we want to do, we assume, and often we have been taught to assume, that we will destroy relationships that are important to us. However, this involves a colossal distrust of ourselves. We are, in effect, saying to ourselves, “If you do not watch yourself carefully, you are such a miserable creature and so self-destructive that you will alienate everyone you care for and end up all alone.” The reality is that one of the quickest ways of alienating another person is to put every effort into pleasing them. When we try to put their wishes foremost, we are likely to become a nonentity in their eyes. It is not particularly pleasing to attempt to relate to a person who has no apparent desires of one’s own, who always bends to accommodate our wishes, and who makes an uncomplaining doormat of one’s self for us to walk upon. Furthermore, when we deny our own desires, we quickly come to resent that person for talking advantage of us. That resentment will then likely be expressed in any number of ways. Perhaps we begin to take on martyr posture and express by word or attitude the feelings: “After all I have done for you, the least you could do would be to try to please me once in a while.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
It is much more straightforward and ultimately satisfying to be what we want to be and do what we want to do. As we learn that we can value ourselves and respond to our own desires, it is unlikely we will act in ways that destroy relationships with those for whom we care—because this will be destructive toward ourselves, too. It is true that more flare-ups of disagreements and anger may occur, because our wishes and those of others will not always agree, but two individuals in this situation are likely to respect each other for being sufficiently independent to express feelings openly, and the way is then clear to battle through to some agreements. If we do find ourselves acting in ways that constantly hurt those we love and destroy our relationships with them it would be advisable to seek professional help, for it would be an indication that we have so much self-hate that we have a need to hurt ourselves, since hurting others is self-destructive. Love God and do as you please. This is a profound idea, but it can be carried an additional step and be developed into a philosophical phrase which is more complete. If you truly value yourself, love yourself and do as you please for you will not hurt people unnecessarily. To do so would be to hurt yourself. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
This seems too good to be true to most of us. We are so connived that to live spontaneously is to live dangerously toward others and ourselves, but if we can begin, perhaps a little at a time, to be more responsive to our inner selves, we will discover that living spontaneously is exciting and rewarding to ourselves and to those we care for. Once having made that discovery we will not be content with less than an ever-increasingly spontaneous life. Moving toward the right attitude is passionate and infinite longing. The New Being is not something at simply takes the place of the Old Being. However, it is a renewal of the Old which has been corrupted, distorted, split and almost destroyed. Yet, not wholly destroyed. Salvation does not destroy creation; but it transforms the Old Creation into a New one. Therefore we can speak of the New in terms of a re-newal: The threefold “re,” namely, re-condilation, re-union, re-surrection. The message of reconciliation is: Be reconciled to God. Crease to be hostile to the Lord, for God is never hostile to you. The message of reconciliation is not that Good needs to be reconciled. How could he be? Since God is the source and power of reconciliation, who could reconcile the Lord? The sacred is here and now. God is present in all elements. Hold infinity in the palm of your hand and eternity in an hour. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
One Who Knows the Secrets of All Hearts Alone Knows the Secret of the Different Forms of Faith—One Has Never Revealed this Secret
It is no longer good for you to be around us. I fear we have all become too enamored of you and would sweep you off your feet and take you away from these things which you have set out to do. You will forgive us for leaving so suddenly. I am confident that this is best for you. I have arranged for the car to take you to the airport. Be assured I love you more than words can say. In all departments of life, love is not real unless it is directed toward a particular object; it becomes universal without ceasing to be real only as a result of analogy and transference. It might be said in passing that the knowledge of what analogy and transference are, a knowledge for which mathematics, the various branches of science, and philosophy are a preparation, also has a direct relationship to love. Many people find their way into some form of psychotherapy or counseling as a way of interrupting the rejection cycle. They seek professional help for all kinds of reasons, of course. Some are aware, at least vaguely, of their lack of self-acceptance and how it interferes with their relationship with other people and are not content to live out their lives on that level. More often individual find their way into psychotherapy because of some symptom of their self-hate and its corollary fear of love. They may be having marital problems of issues dealing with pleasures of the flesh, anxiety attacks, vocational problems, physical illness caused by emotional factors, or any numerous symptoms. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
When it is effective in helping a person achieve a more satisfying life, what takes place in psychotherapy? This is a profoundly significant question to which many answers have been given, each involving differing theories of the human personality and its development. Although there is room for disagreement about many details of the process, one change that appears to occur in successful psychotherapy is that the person has a growing sense of one’s own worth as a person. And it seems likely that one of the best ways to describe the process behind this growing sense of one’s value is to see it as a cycle of acceptance. The therapist working with Jesse in his own unique way somehow coveys to her his feelings that she is a person of worth with intensely green eyes and the thick curly red hair pouring down over her shoulders. Jesse then gradually comes to feel that she is basically accepted and respected as an individual. She begins to understand that the therapist sees through whatever annoying traits she has and the things she does that tend to destroy herself and others. She grasps that he recognizes that all of these things are symptoms of her self-hate and have nothing to do with her basic worth. She begins to sense that he cares for her. This does not mean that the therapist remains benignly acquiescent to every reaction of the client. He may become annoyed and express his annoyance; he may feel hurt or angered by something the client says or does and express his feelings. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
However, the very fact that the therapist is willing to enter into the relationship this honestly and intensely, revealing his own humanness, will be an expression of trust in the client’s basic ability to handle the situation. And through it all he somehow conveys the feeling, perhaps not expressed directly, that he values the client for the individual one is because everyone is unique. In such a relationship the client is gradually freed to be aware of more and more of one’s feelings that one has not allowed oneself to fully experience. One becomes more free to reveal facets of one’s personality to this accepting human being that one has hitherto revealed to no one for fear of experiencing further rejection. Gradually, with the assistance of the therapist’s teachings, and encouraged by the feeling of acceptance, the client discovers oneself being more honest and open as an individual and with the therapist. As one discovers that nothing destroys the therapist’s basic attitude toward one, one begins to allow oneself to have glimmerings of one’s own value as a person. This is often a discouraging process. The fear of emotional intimacy is ever-present and there will be frequent setbacks as the clients begins to reveal oneself, becomes frightened, and withdraws into the shell of one’s defenses against closeness. Later, as one gives up one defense against intimacy one is likely to adopt another in its place, with little or nor awareness of what one is doing. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
The client is almost certain to have doubts about the genuineness of the therapist’s acceptance. If these doubts remain unexpressed, they constitute a serious block to the therapeutic process. When they are expressed openly they can often be dealt with effectively. They take many forms. One person may say, “It is your job to accept me when no one else would possibly do so.” Another may say, “I cannot help feeling that sooner or later you will find out something about me that will cause you to have nothing more to do with me.” Such ideas are very persistent because our feelings of self-hate are so persistent. One woman had been in therapy for many months and had made many gains in growing self-acceptance, which were reflected in much more satisfying relationships with people. Even so, on one occasion just before a session with her therapist, when she was feeling particularly low, she rose from her chair, from which she had been talking with a group of friends, and blurted out, “I am going to the one person in the World who accepts me, and I pay him to!” However, as the client’s confidence in the therapeutic relationships grows, one can begin to deal directly with one’s self-hate and its sources. In one therapy session, a young woman, Maharet, was making remarks that indicted she was feeling critical of herself. In order to help her experience her emotions more intensely, the therapist asked her to imagine that the self she was criticizing was sitting in the chair opposite her and to talk directly to the self. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
Maharet paused for a few moments, and then said, “The first thing that comes to my mind is that I want to gradually think about what I want to say and let it dawn on my how I feel about myself.” She then said with deep feeling, “I guess I really want to tell you I love you, but it seems somehow selfish.” As she finished, she was crying as the relief of knowing that she could care for herself flooded over her. At the same time tears rolled won the therapist’s cheeks, for he knew the same feeling from his own experience. For many moments, thereafter, Maharet and the therapist sat in silence, enjoying their sense of closeness to each other and to themselves. As the individual in therapy gradually develops this sense of self-acceptance, one will have less need to escape into the various defenses one has used in the past. One will gain ability to be more open and self-revealing to the therapist as another human being who consistently care for one regardless of whatever emotional interchanges they may experience together. Sometimes one will become very frightened, but gradually the awareness of the satisfactions of being one’s self will be so rewarding and so productive of growing feelings of self-worth that former patterns of living will seem too unrewarding to continue. No attempt is being added here to explain every movement in the direction of emotional health that can occur in psychotherapy. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
It is being suggested that perhaps the most important thing that can happen is that they cycle of rejection in the client’s life is broken and a cycle of acceptance is begun. This process is as follows: Feelings of rejection lead to feelings of worthlessness, self-hate, then escape into defenses against intimacy, and further feelings of rejection as others react to our defenses. However, with therapy, there is an interruption of cycle through psychotherapy, followed by feelings of unconditional acceptance by therapist who sees through client’s defenses against intimacy, growing feelings of self-worth, growing love of self, an increasing openness and genuineness and less need for escape hatches, and further feelings of acceptance as others react favorably to our openness. Not every therapist, of course, is equal in the ability to be authentic and genuinely accepting in relationship with clients. Therapists are human, too, an inevitably have experienced some degree of rejection and self-hate. Most of them have at one time been in therapy themselves in order to become more effective persons and more capable of direct and open relationships. However, in common with all of humanity, therapists remain somewhat afraid of love and only relatively able to be genuine. Perhaps it is likely to be a sign of the effective therapist that one can afford to experience one’s own humanness and limitations, freely admitting that one’s adventure with each client is one in which one, too, hopes to grow as a person. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
This discovery may take time. There may be emotions that take more effort to cope with. However, gradually awareness comes that the more depth of emotion they reveal to each other, the more similarity of feeling they find among themselves, and the more emotionally intimate they come to feel. The mutual acceptance and enjoyment they find in each other gradually translates itself into increased feelings of self-worth and growing courage to be one’s self with group members and with people in general in spite of the fears that still exist. Humans demean themselves by not caring for the dignity of their status the ideals they ought to honour. Our daily lives become mechanical, obedient to the World’s demands, and our daily activities a constantly turning treadmill; but this only happens if there are no spiritual aims, spiritual aspirations, and spiritual practices to provide a resistance to this course. In Europe today, and perhaps even the whole World, the knowledge of comparative religion amounts to just about nothing. People have not even a notion of the possibility of such a knowledge. Even without the prejudices which get in our way, it is already very difficult for us even to form an idea of it. Among the different forms of religion there are, as it were, partial compensations for the visible differences, certain hidden equivalents which can only be caught sight of by the most penetrating discernment. Each religion in original combination of explicit and implicit truths; what is explicit in one is implicit in another. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
The implicit adherence to a truth can in some cases be worth as much as the explicit adherence, sometimes even a great deal more. One who knows the secrets of all hearts alone knows the secret of the different forms of faith. One has never revealed this secret, whatever anyone may say. Because we trouble our heads with search for intangible reality, we are regarded as odd people. However, it never occurs to our critics that it is much more odd that they should go on living without pausing to inquire if there by any purpose in life at all. When one knows that one must put aside the trivialities of life and come to terms with the demands made upon one by one’s higher nature, a time comes in the intellectual growth of a mortal. To put one’s own purpose in harmony with the Universe’s purpose is the most sensible thing one can do. Therefore there is nothing unpractical, irrational, or eccentric in the Quest. Only the unthinking crowd, who suffer blindly and drift tragically, may believe so. No one who has felt the inner peace, received the deep wisdom, and touched the rocklike strength which mark the more advanced stages, could ever believe so. The virtue of religious practices is due to contact with what is perfectly pure, resulting in the destruction of evil. Nothing here below is perfectly pure except the total beauty of the Universe, and that we are unable to feel directly until we are very far advanced in the way of perfection. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Moreover, this total beauty cannot be contained in anything tangible, though it is itself tangible in a certain sense. Religious things are pure by right, theoretically, hypothetically, by convention. That is why it is perfect. If they are not connected with motives that impel people to observe them, human conventions are useless. In themselves they are simple abstractions; they are unreal and have no effect. However, the convention by which religious things are pure is ratified by God himself. Thus it is an effective convention, a convention containing virtue and operating of itself. This purity is unconditioned and perfect, and at the same time real. There we have a truth that is a fact and in consequence cannot be demonstrated by argument. It can only be verified experimentally. It is a fact that the purity of religious things is almost everywhere to be seen in the form of beauty, when faith and love do not fail. Thus the words of the liturgy are marvelously beautiful; the words of the prayer issued for us from the very lips of Christ are perfect above all, In the same way Romanesque architecture and Gregorian plain chant are marvelously beautiful. Some people like to believe that the architecture, singing, language, and even the words are chosen by Christ himself. The moment we become convinced that universal life has a higher purpose than the mere reproduction of the species, that moment our own individual life takes on a higher meaning, a glorious significance. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
It is this that gives our less affluent personal lives their meaning and rescues them from their foamlike character. Here is a concept on which the mind can linger, braces by its reminder of our human possibilities. Those who move through life hopeless and dreamless, who see none of its beauty and hear none of its music, who have lost most of its battles and won none of its prizes, these can console themselves only by adopting a new set of values or by applying one if they merely theorized before. If they do this, the end can be a new beginning. The discovery that there are higher concepts of human existence, that these have a validity not less than the meaner ones which are all that so many people know, may prove a turning point at any age. For the young it gives some guidance, for the mature it offers some hope. So short a time, so small a gain, so high a quest. For what is best, serves better in the end. The importance of this work is ignored by most people and unknown to many people. They believe it to be the preoccupation of time-wasting dreamers or ill-adjusted neurotics. If they do not treat it with such indifference they treat it either with open abuse or with contemptuous indulgence. However, if they could understand that it penetrates to the foundations of human living and affects the settlement of human problems, they might be less arrogant in their attitudes towards it. It is not less important to the individual than to society at all times but immeasurably more so in those grave, critical times. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
It may be asked of what social use are those who make this quest their primary occupation, and therefore make their Worldly occupation and way of life conform to it? First of all, they embody, and therefore carry on and keep alive, the very idea of the quest. Secondly, their very presence, by telepathic and auric existence, does touch the inner beings of those who come into contact with them and does leaven the mental atmosphere of those who do not—however minute the effect on any particular day. Thirdly, although each has to live and express the quest in the way referable to one’s temperament and circumstances, one does offer a model—in general terms—for others to see, an example from which to draw stimulation. In choosing this path, the aspirant has taken the first step toward a Divine Power whose possession, or rather whose possession of one, will ultimately, enable one to become a real healer of suffering humankind. Jesus declares that we are forgiven. Our state of mind, our ecstasy of love, show that something has happened to us. And nothing greater can happen to a human being than that one is forgiven. Forgiveness means reconciliation in spite of estrangement; it means reunion in spite of hostility; it means acceptance of those who are unacceptable, and it means reception of those who are rejected. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Forgiveness is unconditional or it is not forgiveness at all. Forgivenness has the character of in spite of, but the righteous ones give it the character of because. The sinners, however, cannot do this. They cannot transform the divine in spire of into a human because. They cannot show facts, because of which they must be forgiven. God’s forgiveness is unconditional. There is no condition whatsoever in mortals which would make one worthy of forgiveness. If forgiveness were conditional, conditional by mortals, no one could be accepted and no one could accept one’s self. We know that this is our situation, but we loathe to face it. It is too great as a gift and too humiliating as a judgment. We want to contribute something, and if we have learned that we cannot contribute anything beneficial, then we try at least to contribute something negative: the pain of self-accusation and self-rejection. And then we read our story and the parable of the Prodigal Son as if they said: These sinners were forgiven because they humiliated themselves and confessed that they were unacceptable; because they suffered about their sinful predicament they were made worthy of forgiveness. However, this reading of the story is a misreading and a dangerous one. If that were the way to our reconciliation with God, we should have to produce within ourselves the feeling of unworthiness, the pain of self-rejection, the anxiety and despair of guilt. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
There are many Christians who try this in order to show God and themselves that they deserve acceptance. They perform an emotional work of self-punishment after they have realized that their other good works do not help them. However, emotional works do not help either. God’s forgiveness is independent of anything we do, even of self-accusation and self-humiliation. If this were not so, how could we every be certain that our self-rejection is serious enough to deserve forgiveness? Forgiveness creates repentance—this is declared in our story and this is the experience of those who have been forgiven. The view that such an existence is selfish and unproductive, is a shallow one. It takes no account of the value of higher forces. For whoever, by this quest and practice, realizes the divine presence, does so not only for oneself but for all others in that little part of the World confided to one’s care. Who are the most important human beings in the World? Those who try to bring sanity to an insane World or those who try to perpetuate its condition? Our artist can find new sources of inspiration in it. Our dying religious hopes can receive an influx of unexpected new life from it. If we turn our faces to that direction where the Sun rises in red dawn, the phoenix of Divine Truth can rise again out of the ashes of materialism strewn around us. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
Yet since the spiritual is the deepest part of our nature, the process of our absorption of spiritual truths is a slow and not obvious one. Another perennial attitude is summed up in the words Us-Them Here the World is divided in two: the children of light and the children of darkness, the sheep and the goats, the elect and the damned. Every social problem can be analyzed without much study: all one has to look for are the sheep and goats. There is room for anger and contempt and boundless hope; for the sheep are bound to triumph. Should a goat have the presumption to address a sheep, the sheep often do not hear it, and they never hear it as another I. For the goat is one of Them, not one of Us. Righteousness, intelligence, integrity, humanity, and victory are prerogatives of Us, while wickedness, stupidity, hypocrisy, brutality, and ultimate defeat belong to Them. Those who have managed to cut through the terrible complexities of life and offer such a scheme as this have been hailed as prophets in all ages. In these five attitudes there is no You: I-I, I-It, It-It, We-We, and Us-Them. There are many ways of living in a World without You. There are also many World with the two poles I-You. I-You sounds unfamiliar. What we are accustomed to is I-Thou. However, mortal’s attitudes are not manifold, and Thou and You are not the same. Nor is Thou very similar to the German Du. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
German lovers say Du to one another, and so do friends. Du is spontaneous and unpretentious, remote from formality, pomp, and dignity. What lovers or friends say Thou to one another? Thou is scarcely ever said spontaneously. Thou immediately brings to mind God; Du does not. And the God of whom it makes us think is not the God to whom one might cry out in gratitude, despair, or agony, not the God to whom one complains or prays spontaneously; it is the God of the pulpits, the God of the holy tone. When mortals pray spontaneously or speak directly to God, without any mediator, without any intervention of formulas, when they speak as their heart tells them to speak instead of repeating what is printed, do they say Thou? How many know the verb forms Thou commands? The World of Thou has many mansions. Thou is a preachers’ word but also a dear to anticlerical romantic poets. Thou is found in Shakespeare and at home in the English Bible, although recent versiouns of the Scriptures have tended to dispense with it. Thou can mean many things, but it has no place whatever in the language of direct, nonliterary, spontaneous human relationships. If one could liberate I-Thou from affectation, the price for that would still involve reducing it to a mere formula to jargon. However, supposed a mortal wrote a book about direct relationships and tried to get away from the formulas of theologians and philosophers: a theologian would translate it and turn Ich und Du into I and Thou. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
One may be told contemptuously that that kind of truth and reality have no practical value for us living in the World as it is, active in the World and dealing with the facts as they are, not getting lost in dreams. That in several ways this is not so can be demonstrated without too much difficulty. However, let it be said that such a supreme knowledge or experience may possibly serve higher purposes which our small minds cannot yet glimpse. All that really matters is how one lives one’s life. However, relative-plane activities do not constitute all there is to living. Consciousness rises from the plane behind the mind, and this region, like the outer World, needs to be explored with competent guides—its possibilities and benefits fully revealed by each individual one thou. Living will begin to achieve its own purpose when one’s outer life becomes motivated, guided, and balanced by the fruits of one’s inner findings. When you show u and censure the oddities and charlatanries, you do not demolish the cause for mystics, the unreasons and fanaticisms of a few mystical cults. As the influences of the World increasingly embrace the evil, we must strive with all diligence to stay firmly on the path that leads us safely to our Savior. We do not lower our standards to fit in or to make someone else feel comfortable. #Randolpharris 16 of 16
If they Do Not Even Know Why they are Standing Upon it at All, What is the Use of their Running from Point to Point on this Earth?
Your faith touches me as always, but do not be my acolyte just now. They were already legends—filled with love for all they saw around them, beings who understood the word joy. How can we learn to love ourselves? Perhaps we can start by admitting that it is impossible! It is not possible in the same sense that we will never become completely self-accepting (not in this life anyway!). Like others values worth wanting, loving one’s self is an ideal never fully realized. However, moving in that direction is a fascinating and worthwhile, lifelong adventure. If we can become more self-aware, it will help us to become more loving toward ourselves. It is not possible to love someone profoundly whom one does not know, and many of us are virtually strangers to ourselves, so deadened have we become to any awareness of our deeper feelings. And since we have spent many years cutting ourselves off from awareness of hated parts of ourselves, the recovery of awareness is usually not easily accomplished. We are frightened of what we may find and resist awareness in multitudes of ways. Frequently, the help of a professional therapist is needed to help us overcomes these resistances. Often in the early stages of recovering self-awareness it will seem as though we are learning to hate ourselves, not love ourselves. This happens because one of the first things we become aware of is our hidden self-hate, which has been building up over the years and of which we have likely had only vague intimations, and feelings that have been too unacceptable for us to allow ourselves to experience some to the surface. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
We may begin to feel more hate then we thought it was possible for us to feel. Self-loathing, deeply experienced hurt, disgust about pleasures of the flesh, and other frightening feelings may burst into awareness. This is a crisis in personal growth, but it is often a necessary crisis. Advocates of self-actuating thinking approach mental health frequently do a disservice at this point. Too often they short-circuit this process by encouraging individuals to think optimistically about themselves without taking into account their need to first experience their self-hatred. Under the influence of this advice individuals are likely to cover up something bad about apparent self-acceptance and self-affirmation over the tomb of their inner deadness to themselves and their self-hate. In this way they may talk themselves into being more successful insurance salesmen or less disagreeable husbands, while they have only cut themselves off even farther from contact with themselves and the ultimate possibility of genuine self-acceptance and self-affirmation. Gradually, when we allow ourselves to experience self-hate, this crisis will pass. We discover that it is not so bad after all to have very human feelings. A young woman who has been shocked and scandalized by accounts of promiscuity feels profound disgust as she becomes aware that she, too, has desires for pleasures of the flesh that are not limited to one man. However, she begins to enjoy and cherish her feelings for pleasures of the flesh. As is usually the case, he disgust masked an unaccepted appetite. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
Khayman was a young man addicted to working long and hard hours and he was considerably bugged by his father’s lack of ambition. He could not understand how his father could go off for a day of fishing when he was having business difficulties and financial pressures. When the young man examined his feelings more closely, it became evident that he did not allow himself to experience his own desire to take off and get away from it all occasionally. He was afraid he would like it too much and become a drifter. So he drove himself constantly, no allowing himself the pleasure of relaxation. And it is not surprising that once Khayman was able to experience this desire to loaf within himself, he not only moved in the direction of greater self-acceptance but was able to experience more love for his father. If we can keep our goals realistic, it will also help us in our efforts to learn to love ourselves. Many of us make severe demands on ourselves. We think we ought to be perfect, and we think we ought to achieve that perfection immediately. When we fail to do so, as we certainly must, we are burdened with unproductive feelings of guilt and worthlessness. With this kind of perfectionist cycle operating we might easily make even the search for self-acceptance a new vehicle for feelings of worthlessness! #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
Perhaps the secret is possessed in learning to relax and enjoy what we are right now—every feeling, every urge, every idiosyncrasy that is a part of us. Then if we really want to be what we have always told ourselves we ought to be, we may be freer to move in that direction. In other words, we dare not wait until we are perfect to start loving ourselves. We would wait forever. Let us learn to love ourselves in our imperfections. This attitude toward ourselves might be compared to the attitude of a warmly affectionate father toward his son. When the boy makes mistakes, he does not stop loving his son. He recognizes that failures and probably will express his concerns and perhaps may even become angry. However, somehow, there is communication from father to son of steadfast love and encouragement that is no destroyed or even threatened by these occasional crises. A similar attitude toward ourselves is very desirable. There will, of course, be times when we feel we have goofed. We may be angry and say to ourselves, “Oh, you meathead, you have done it again.” However, if there is a basic underlying sense of personal worth that is not shaken by the recognition that we have made a mistake, we can be much more effective about doing what we want to do in the future; for we will not be wasting the days of our lives in self-recrimination. Often this self-accepting attitude involves a sense of humor in which we can laugh at ourselves in our errors, give ourselves a good kick in the britches, and move on to the next moment of living. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
Ideally, religious faiths might play an important part in helping their believers to learn to love themselves. Perhaps they do, but frequently they tend to create self-hate. Often religion says, “You are unworthy and condemnable in God’s sight. However, if you confess your unworthiness, God is willing to forgive you. You will then be a new creature, and God will give you strength to feel and act in more acceptable ways.” It cannot be denied that individuals who accept such a belief in God often experience a profound relief as they feel released from the burden of self-hate. And often they live greatly changed lives. However, the question remains whether the basic problem of self-hate has been adequately dealt with or whether a veneer of self-acceptance has simply been laid over the self-condemnation. It would appear that a new and better repressive technique is often acquired whereby the individual can somewhat better avoid dealing with the desires and feelings that are still felt to be so condemnable in God’s eyes. On the other hand, religion sometimes says, “God knows how often you get into messes you regret. He also knows how ugly and brutal you can sometimes seem. However, he also knows how frightened you are and understands why you do the things you do. He loves and accepts you as you are. Because God loves you, he really wants you to enjoy life and the experience of love to the fullest. He enjoys being a partner in your quest.” It seems likely that faith in this kind of God would add to the experience of love for one’s self. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
Millions of humans come into the World and after a relatively short existence disappear. No of us are an exception, our turn to vanish will also come. Thought, confronted with this fact, must either despair, take refuge in the hopes of religion, or resolve to find out the truth behind the tremendous cosmic drama. It is better to accept the loneliness of the quester than the complacency of the Worldling who lives without any understanding of life’s inner purpose. Men and women try various ways to overcome their innate loneliness and with various results in the end. So long as the expedient used is something or someone outside themselves, their victories turn out to be illusions. There is no final way other than the Way which everyone has had to tread at last who ever succeeded in this objective, and which leads inwards to the Overself. In their search for satisfaction outside of and apart from the Overself, men and women are really fugitives from it. The response provoked in you by the entry of these ideas will determine your future. We suffering from stagnation and imagine that existence in the intellect and body is enough; it is not. The primary emphasis must be laid on the living principle of our being, the central self which creates both body and intellect. Here it is, the human creature put upon this round planet and left to make nothing from life, merely survive, or to make something out of it, and hold the great vision of the World-Idea, in company with the gods. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
The making of money, the earning of a livelihood, and the attainment of professional or business success have their proper place in life and should be accorded it but—in comparison with the fulfilment of spiritual aspiration—out to be regarded as having quite a secondary place. Some people throw their clothes away after they wear them, they rent million-dollar apartments and forget where they are. No scientific technological advance, buy sports and luxury cars and cannot remember where they parked them. These individuals have an endless parade of sports coats, pants, robes, silk foulards. mink-lined raincoats, and dinner jackets for Monte Carlo, and jeweled cuff links. When they awake, their clothes are already laid out for them. Heaven help them if they were to change a single time, from the linen handkerchief to the black silk socks. Breakfast awaits them in the immense kitchen with its beautiful windows. The Greeks as always were a splendid people, gentle and trusting though they were darker of hair and skin now on account of their Turkish blood. The power to communicate varies. To listen to the thoughts of others is often to be heard oneself. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
They are sane, but they are so busy, and have so much money, and travel so much that it is like finding a tree in the forest without a map of which one you are looking for. Gold watch on his wrist, one of those high-tech numbers he so adored. Think of that thing flashing its digits inside his office. No scientific technological advance, no political gain, no economic improvement will ever be enough in and of itself to provide a proper goal for human endeavour. It is easy to forget this in certain favourable periods, and if we do we come close to disaster in the end. We use every possible moment to cultivate the uncertain fields of commerce or to grow the perishing flowers of pleasure, but we are unable to spare one moment to cultivate the certain fields of the spirit within ourselves or to grow the enduring asphodels of divine devotion. The goals of progress are but imagined ones. There is only one goal which is undeniably real, completely certain, and authentically true—and that is an unchanging one, an eternal one. Yet it is also the one that has escaped humankind! #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
Our self-hate is developed primarily from experiences of feelings of rejection by others. Learning to love ourselves also involves relationships with people. We need the experience of emotional intimacy with others so that we can learn that we can be accepted as we are and thus can grow in self-acceptance. A very real predicament faces us at this point. We are desperately afraid of intimacy because we assume that deep involvement with another person will lead only to further rejection and hurt, and further confirmation of our feelings of worthlessness and unlovableness. Yet the experience of intimacy is almost a prerequisite for moving in the direction of the greater self-acceptance that would free us to enter into intimate relationships. The only solution to this dilemma seems to be to move gradually into increasing intimacy in spite of our fear. We will probably act somewhat like a wild deer leading to trust a would-be human friend. Because of our fear, our seeking of intimacy will undoubtedly proceed slowly and cautiously and our forward progress will include many frightened strategic withdrawals. However, if we can overcome our fear sufficiently to begin to talk about our inner feelings with another human being we will begin to learn that we are not unique. And out of the mutual acceptance will begin to assert itself. When we feel hurt, angered, misunderstood, and above all else, frightened, of course such a relationship will have its difficult moments, both for ourselves, and the other person. This will happen because we are both so frightened of self-disclosure that we constantly seek to avoid it. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
If we can persist in spite of our fears, the rewards in satisfaction and growing self-acceptance will be great. If we are sufficiently motivated toward changing ourselves, if we have not been so emotionally damaged that we cannot make a start, the suggestions described above for breaking through the cycle of rejection and our self-hatred and learning to love ourselves will probably be helpful. Here in this country, mortals are more eager to better their manufactures than themselves. They will accept their own imperfections quite smugly and contentedly, but the imperfections of their automobiles—never! Yet, if they do not even know why they are standing upon it at all what is the use of their running from point to point on this Earth? Mortals as scientists have put under observation countless objects on Earth, in sea and sky. They have thoroughly examined them. However, mortal as mortal has put oneself under a shallower observation. One has limited one’s scrutiny first to the body, second to what thinking can find. Yet a deeper level exists, where a deeper hidden self can be found. One will discover that it is not enough to regard as good only that which is favourable to one’s physical life. One must complete the definition and sometimes even contradict it by adding that which is favourable to one’s spiritual life. There is nothing more important in life than the Quest, and the time will come when the student discovers that there is nothing more enjoyable as well. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
This is inevitable in a Quest whose essential nature is one of infinite harmony and unbroken peace. No Worldly object, person, or pleasure can ever bestow the satisfaction experienced in uniting with the Overself. It is not the primal needs and their gratification but the realization of our divine possibilities which is the hidden justification of our presence in this World. The ceaseless longing for person happiness which exists in every human being is a right one, but is generally mistake in the direction along which satisfaction is sought. For all outward objects and beings can yield only a transient and imperfect delight that can never be equivalent to the uninterrupted happiness of life in the Overself. An existence which has no higher aims than purely physical ones, no nobler activities than merely personal ones, no inner references to a spiritual purpose, has to depend only on its own small resources. It has failed to benefit by its connection with the power behind the Universe. That the truth of life must be deeper than what we see and hear and touch, is suspected by intuitive persons, believed or felt by pious persons, and directly known by wise persons. What the surface story tells us is not the whole of it, they say. The love of institutional religion, although the name of God necessarily comes into it, is not in itself an explicit, but an implicit love of God, for it does not involve direct, immediate contact with him. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
When they are pure, God is present in religious practices, just as he is present in our neighbor and in the beauty of the World; in the same way and not any more. The form that the love of religion takes in the soul differs a great deal according to the circumstances of our lives. Some circumstances prevent the very birth of this love; others kill it before it has been able to grow very strong. In affliction some mortals, in spite of themselves, develop a hatred and contempt for religion because the cruelty, pride, or corruption of certain of its ministers have made them suffer. There are others who have been reared from their earliest youth in surrounding impregnated with a spirit of this sort. If they are sufficiently strong and pure, we must conclude that in such cases, by God’s mercy, the love of our neighbor and the love of the beauty of the World will be enough to raise the soul to any height. The love of institutional religion normally has as its object the prevailing religion of the country or circle in which a mortal is brought up. As a result of an inborn habit, everyone thinks first of that each time one thinks of a religious service. The whole virtue of religious practices can be conceived of from the Christian tradition concerning the recitation of the name of the Lord. Our goal is to raise ourselves in a land of purity, and the Bible reminds of that the Lord really has the power of transforming the soul. Religion is supposed to truly be nothing else but this promise of God. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
Every religious practice, every rite, all liturgy is a form of the recitation of the name of the Lord and in principle should have a real virtue, the virtue of saving whoever devotes oneself to performing it with desire. All religions pronounce the name of God in their particular language. As a rule it is better for a mortal to name God in one’s native language rather than one that is foreign to the culture. When it has to make the slight effort of seeking for the words in a foreign language, even when this language is well known, except in special cases, the soul is not able to abandon itself utterly. A writer whose native language is poor, difficult to manipulate, and not widely known throughout the World is very strongly tempted to adopt another. There are a few like Joseph Conrad who have done so with startling success. However, they are very rare. Except in special cases such a change does harm, both thought and style suffer, the writer is always ill at ease in the adopted language and cannot rise above mediocrity. A change of religion is for the soul like a change of language for a writer. All religion, it is true, are not equally suitable for the recitation of the name of the Lord. Some, without any doubt, are very imperfect mediums. However, religion is known only from inside. Catholics say this of Catholicism, but it is true of all religions. Religion is a form of nourishment. It is difficult to appreciate the flavor and food value of something one has never eaten. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
The comparison of religions is only possible, in some measures, through the miraculous virtue of sympathy. If at the same time as we observe them from outside, we can know mortals to a certain extent, as we manage by sympathy to transport our own soul into theirs for a time. In the same way the study of different religions does not lead to a real knowledge of them unless we transport ourselves for a time by faith to the very center of whichever one we are studying. Here, moreover, this word faith is used in its strongest sense. This scarcely ever happens, for some have no faith, and the others have faith exclusively in one religion and only bestow upon the others the sort of attention we give to strangely shaped shells. There are others again who think they are capable of impartiality because they have only a vague religiosity which they can turn indifferently in any direction, all our faith, all our love to a particular religion in order to think of any other religion with the high degree of attention, faith, and love that is proper to it. In the same way, only those who are capable of friendship can take a real heartfelt interest in the fate of an utter stranger. If we do not love our fellow travelers on this mortal journey, we cannot truly love God. We are all spirit children of our Heavenly Father and, as such, are brothers and sisters. As we keep this truth in mind, loving all of God’s children will become easier. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
Focus on the Imaginative Part of the Soul and Awaken What is Real and Eternal to See the True Light and Hear the True Silence
Very well. I am going to lay down the law to you. If I am to remain with you, I am the Master here. And I refuse to prove myself to you. I will not spend my tenure with you being constantly questioned as to the virtue of my authority! For most people giving affection and receiving affection are very difficult matters. Many people feel that they are unlovable and that any gestures of affection or admiration are extremely hard for them to accept. If a person knows one is unlovable, how can one believe it when someone professes love? Well, many people have deep within themselves a special significant sense of deprivation of affection and the consequent feelings make them feel unlovable. When they are able to go inside of themselves and reflect on this strong need for affection, it will help the individual readjust. One will begin to turn away from the inability to feel affection—there will actually be a massive escape from one’s longing—and one will gradually look toward the problem itself. Most of the times, the issue is an unresolved problem with one’s parental situation and once that is identified, an individual can work toward a resolution of those feelings with a possible increase in self-esteem. Sometimes it is important to figure out what each person wants and what you want to give. This will allow one to understand better some difficulties one has to on one’s life where people tend not to treat one as a sufficiently significant individual. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
Other people are here to teach us lessons, and sometimes people have pseudo personalities, which become unmasked later in life, especially after changes in the family dynamics. However, as you are maturing, you can see where people are coming from, so it is no big surprise when they show you who they really are. Some people are so busy trying to gratify others regardless of one’s own wishes. The important thing to remember is no matter how good you are or how much you try to please and impress others, in many cases it is a failed effort because they do not care. The central issues of affection is trusting the feelings of others. The other side of this trust is the ability to gratify and give pleasure to someone who trusts. As the brain matures, the feelings of trust of distrust are usually felt very clearly in any situation. Successful experiences can greatly restructure a person’s self-concept in the direction of helping one feel more loving and loveable. Even in your family or people you grew up with, you may find later in life that you have different values than them and that is why they do not totally accept you, and that is find. Unfortunately, cultural and organizational forces are often powerful deterrents to joyful feelings. It is always good to see where people are coming from and you do not have to express any feelings of hurt or anger toward them, just be civil, but understand they may not have your best interests at heart. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
We have already seen how the tendencies to condemn, so prevalent in the church, are frequently incorporated into the life of religious families. To the child of such a family, religion often becomes a strong additional force in one’s feeling of rejection and one’s increasing hatred of oneself. One is taught that one is inherently evil and that it is only through God’s gracious mercy that one can be saved from oneself. And although it made clear to one that god behavior will not be of sufficient merit to win God’s acceptance of a naturally sinful person like oneself, one is nevertheless subjected to strong emphasis on various rules of conduct. It is no surprise that one feels that one is under constant surveillance by one’s family, one’s religious group, and God, and that they are all judging one’s worth by one’s actions. Feeling condemned on all sides, one attempts some form of escape from one’s growing self-hate. However, as we have seen, such efforts lead only to further feelings of rejection. Many people whose lives are deeply intertwined with a religious group find it difficult to experience and express love because they have a tendency to suppress or repress many of their feelings. It is within many of these groups that people are most forcefully confronted with the idea that they are committing a sin if they feel angry, covetous, jealous, or are involved in pleasures of the flesh with others. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
Many churches are so condemning toward these feelings that their members are likely to avoid expressing them and may deny even to themselves that they exist. And as we have seen in the discussions of anger and pleasures of the flesh, when we are full of unexpressed and unrecognized feelings that create barriers between ourselves and others, it is difficult to experience our love. In this context of life, as in others where we are so adept at creating barriers to love, it begins to look as though we are so frightened of love that we need the hindrances we create. No doubt it would be an oversimplification to see fear of love as the only factor in churches’ apparent need to codify behavior and judge people accordingly, but it is at least one very important underlying factor. Religious groups, like people in general, have not understood their fear of intimacy. Without realizing it, they have encouraged emotional distance between people rather than the experience of love they professed to promote. For example, churches often substitute apparent expressions of love for the experience of intimacy. A good illustration of this exists in those thousands of congregations (not al by any means) in our society who willingly give money to missionary enterprises throughout the World, including Africa, proclaiming their love of all humankind but who would be very upset and uncomfortable if someone from a culture different from theirs braved the evident fear, suspicion, and hostility and attempted to worship wit them and become active in their congregation. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
In an effort to promote fellowship many congregations have coffee hours after church services. The typical remoteness and lack of self-revelation that usually marks these functions makes them even less productive of the experience of love than the average cocktail party, where people sometimes feel relatively free to be themselves and express some of their genuine feelings. Churches from study groups, women’s groups, men’s clubs, and couples’ organizations. Although these groups talk about love and fellowship, they usually speak in very rational and impersonal ways. If anyone begins to express deeply personal feelings about the subject of discussion, such groups tend to become very uncomfortable and quickly change subject. If intimate relationships between members of these groups, as they undoubtedly sometimes do, it is accomplished outside of the group and almost in spite of it, for there is little or nothing within it to encourage the experience of love. During church services the minister often talks about the feeling of love and communion, which he presumes the worshipers feel with God and with each other as they worship. If he were sufficiently self-aware, it might be more helpful if the minister could tell his people that he, like the, is aware of an awful loneliness and longing for love that is almost too frightening to act upon. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
Another way in which the church often promotes emotional distance is that it discourages honesty within its community. This happens because if they are themselves, the church’s preoccupation with behavior fosters the impression among its adherents that they will be condemned rather than accepted and loved. So the church becomes a place where people do not say things many of them often say in other life situations. It becomes a place where people pretend they do not do things which they sometimes do: drink, smoke, act primarily in terms of the profit motive in their business, fornicate, get angry with their children—whatever their particular congregation would disapprove of. And it becomes a place where people pretend they do not feel things that they really do feel: anger, lust, prejudice, fear of love. We all wear masks, of course, to protect us from the self-revelation that would make us feel exposed and vulnerable to those around us, and we will never discard them entirely, but the atmosphere that most churches create, in which members feel they will be condemned if they say or do the wrong thing, makes the possibility of genuineness and the experience of love within the religious community even more difficult. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
We live in a World of unreality and dreams. Perhaps the most powerful demonstration of my thesis is that our age is witnessing the diminishing of the teaching of humanities in our high schools and our colleges. After an intensive study of the humanities over the last six years, the National Endowment for the Humanities in Washington reported that these subjects are progressively being erased from college curricula. The humanities were originally the soul of educational institutions of human life through the great work of history, literate, philosophy and art. However now, students can graduate from seventy-two percent of the colleges in the country without even taking modern or ancient history, that is, without any understanding of Greece and Rome, where our civilization came from, or our struggles since the Renaissance, or the wars that have put us in the present predicament of having our very existence threatened by nuclear war. When we entered college, it used to be pointed out that to learn a foreign language was to go into the heart of another people’s culture, and understand its art and psyche. Now a student in the majority of colleges can go through without understanding any other people’s culture, or any profession except one’s own. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
To give up our imaginary position as the center, to renounce it, not only intellectually but in the imaginative part of our soul, that means to awaken to what is real and eternal, to see the true light and hear the true silence. A transformation then takes place at the very roots of our sensibility, in our immediate reception of sense impressions and psychological impressions. It is a transformation analogous to that which takes place in the dusk of evening on a road, where we suddenly discern as a tree what we thought at first was whispering voices. We see the same colors; we hear the same sounds, but not in the same way: To empty ourselves of our false divinity, to deny ourselves, to give up being the center of the World in imagination, to discern that all points in the World are equally centers and that the true center if outside the World, this is to consent to the rule of mechanical necessity in matter and of free choice at the center of each soul. Such consent is love. The face of this love, which is turned toward thinking persons is the love of our neighbor; the face turned toward matter is love of the order of the World, or love of the beauty of the World which is the same thing. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
I recall that I stumbled into a class in the ancient Greek language in Oberlin College and, in spite of being a country boy who scarcely knew Greece had ever existed, I remained in class. It turned out to be the richest, most valuable class I ever took. Nowadays there are very few such classes that one can eve stumble into. Literature, which is the language which crosses all borders—the Russians Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, the French Proust, the German Goethe, the English Shakespeare, the Americans Emerson and Whitman—all these are now scantily studied, or not at all in the hurry to get on to the study of computers, economics and business. And as far as the classic go—these great ancient Greek dramas and myths which are buried in our souls, along with Dante’s Divine Comedy and Marlowe’s Dr. Faustus—these classics are not read at all by the majority of the graduates. The understanding of the psyche of modern Americans requires knowing the self-interpretation of human beings in symbols and myths down through the ages; yet I rarely meet in my teaching graduate students who are planning to become psychotherapists, any who has even read the great classics. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
The purpose of the humanities is to make us more human, to enrich our lives, to develop our imaginations, and to make life worth living. And it is a saddening thing that these subjects are being dismissed. We need have no prejudice against engineering, business studies, accounting, techniques of all sorts including the use of computers, when we point out that these are studies of the how of life, to the neglect of what life is about. This is reflected in the fact that a professor of literature, so I am told by a professor-friend at one of our most distinguished universities, receives about $70,643.60 and a professor of business receives about $188,382.93. Philosophy, which used to be concerned with understanding the meaning of life, is now defunct on most campuses or, where it still exists, it has capitulated to the technical trends by becoming analytical philosophy. These studies of techniques are concerned with quantities, with exchange of goods, money, and even auctioning off of great pictures. However, the humanities are concerned with the quality, the what of life, the painting of the pictures or the composing and playing of music. The humanities are concerned, as I have said, with the questions of meaning. When, during the last century, they put on a great celebration in Boston at the completion of the stringing of telephone wires from Maine to Texas, Thoreau said, “Nobody asks the real question, Do the people of Maine have anything to say to the people in Texas?” #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
Our age is replete with techniques for mass communication, but what is the content of what we communicate beyond business and money matters? Barbara Tuchman wrote a penetrating article in the New York Times two years ago entitled, “The Decline of Quality.” When I had it xeroxed and passed around, a number of people were offended: how dare she criticize our great age of mass communication, our new techniques for everything from TV to dish-washing? This, of course, was exactly what she meant: the quality of life diminishes as the concern with quantity burgeons. This of course has a great deal to do with modern art and the future. Art—in which we include along with painting and sculpture, the dance, architecture, literate, poetry, music—is devoted to the quality of human life. Hence the great confusion in art in our time: it is as though art is lost, it has no central soul or direction in which to go. However, we note at the same time the poignant hunger of people for great art as shown in the crowds that line up to see the exhibitions of the artifacts of King Tut, or the works of Picasso or Van Gogh. Of course one can argue that this is conformism; people crowd in because that is the thing to do. However, I do not believe such arguments exhaust the motives. Even if cake with a hundred flavors is added, Men and women do not live by bread alone. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
It is a genuine hunger, a starvation for what people’s own intuition tell them is great. It is the artists, the musicians, the poets, the dramatists that remind us that life is worth living. Especially is we are talking about life abundant, some of us can say with truth that beauty has saved our lives. In ancient times the love of the beauty of the World had a very important place in mortal’s thoughts and surrounded the whole of life with marvelous poetry. This was the case in every nation—in China, in India and in Greece. The Stoicism of the Greeks, which was very wonderful and to which primitive Christianity was infinitely close, especially in the writings of Saint John, was almost exclusively the love of the beauty of the World. As for Israel, certain parts of the Old Testament, the Psalms, the Book of Job, Isaiah, and the Book of Wisdom, contain an incomparable expression of the beauty of the World. The example of Saint Francis shows how great a place the beauty of the World can have in Christian thought. Not only is his actual poem perfect poetry, but all his life was perfect poetry in action. His very choice of places for solitary retreats or the foundations of his convents was in itself the most beautiful poetry in action. Vagabondage and poverty were poetry within him; he stripped himself to his birthday suit in order to have immediate contact with the beauty of the World. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
Saint John of the Cross also has some beautiful lines about the beauty of the World. However, in general, making suitable reservations for the treasures that are unknown, little known, or perhaps buried among the forgotten remains of the Middles Ages, we might say that the beauty of the World is almost absent from the Christian tradition. This is strange. It is difficult to understand. It leaves a terrible gap. If the Universe itself is left out, how can Christianity call itself Catholic? In transitional ages there is bound to be some kind of cultural breakdown. The whole society becomes disoriented and negates itself. When we fail to see this from a historical viewpoint, then we do get hopeless, pessimistic, and lose our sense of balance—for we know only the present that will be destroyed in the cultural change. This illustrates again the dangers we face in dropping history—along with the other humanities—from college curricula. We can, however, experience ourselves as part of a culture that is dying in order that a new society may be born. This dying period is certainly no picnic for any sensitive person. Psychological breakdowns are almost the normal thing in our day; we have psychotherapists of all kinds trying to meet this need. However, for the most part therapists are equipped only to patch people up. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
The breakdowns of morals and family life—all these are part of the radical change. If we can see it that way, then we can move ahead with courage. We can realize that we are building a future, trying to produce some context, some art, some drama, some music that will communicate something to future ages. That I would like to be a part of. And I am sure all of us would. Therefore, find the ground form. Get below the surface, below all your superficial whims and find the reality, the foundation. Find the structure on which your life is built. One Summer on the coast of Maine, John Marin made several of his watercolors. These paintings were done with Marin’s character style—a dash across the sky for clouds, a jagged blue and brown expressing the ocean, strong vertical lines of green for spruce tress and the curves of brownish-red showing the unpredictable might of this rugged, rock-bound coast. Each stroke of Marin’s brush is made with profound emotion. When he had completed these particular paintings, he took them to the drug store in the little town and stood them against the wall. He then asked the pharmacist, whom we all knew as a typical “Down Easterner,” how he liked them. The druggist answered, “They will be fine when they are finished.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
What the druggist called unfinished was really the genius of Marin; he looked on beauty bare. In ever transitional age one must let go the finishing, and look on beauty care. The incompleteness, the groping, fits our age. Our beauty is not at all pretty or charming—it may be the bare rock, the skeleton watercolors of Marin, the silence of John Cage sitting at his piano without a note, the discord and sounds of cultures grinding together. If you are not prepared, it is dangerous to look. Hence Plato, as Greece began its deterioration, write of the terror of beauty, and Rilke wrote these enigmatic lines: “For beauty is nothing but the beginning of terror which we still are just able to endure and we are so awed because it serenely disdains to annihilate us.” We have in music, especially in the giants like Beethoven and Schonberg, Aaliyah Haughton and The Beatles, the same sense of terror. And even Dostoyevsky, who certainly knew what beauty was, has Dmitri, one of his characters in the Brothers Karamazov, cry out, “The awful thing that beauty is mysterious as well as terrible. God and the Devil are fighting there and the battlefield is the heart of mortals.” Yes, this is what modern art is all about. It has little or nothing to do with prettiness or niceness or sweetness. It its beauty there is the terror of the ground forms, and the contemporary artists are our distant early warning. They tell us of the fundamentals of love and the terror of life and death. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
In the Middle Ages we have art for God’s sake, in the Renaissance we have art for mortal’s sake, in the nineteenth century we have art for art’s sake, in the twentieth century we have no art for God’s sake, and in the twenty-first century we have art to remind us we have a soul. The good way must be clearly good but not wholly clear. If it is clear, it is too easy to reject. What is wanted is an oversimplification, a reduction of a multitude of possibilities to only two. However, if the recommended path were utterly devoid of mystery, it would cease to fascinate mortals. Since it clearly should be chosen, nothing would remain but to proceed on it. There would be nothing left to discuss and interpret, to lecture and write about, to admire and merely think about. The World extracts a price of calling teachers wise: it keeps discussing the paths they recommend, but few mortals follow them. The wise give mortals endless opportunities to discuss what is good. Mortal’s attitude are manifold. Some live in a strange World bounded by a path from which countless ways lead inside. If there were roads signs, all of them might bear the same inscription: I-I. Those who dwell inside have no consuming interest. They are not devoted to possession, even if they prize some; not to people, even if they like some; not to any project, even if they have some. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Things are something that they speak of; persons have the great advantage that one cannot only talk of them but also to, or rather at them; but the Lord of every sentence is no man but I. Projects can be entertained without complete devotion, spoken of, and put on like a suit or a dress before a mirror. When you speak to mortals of this type, they quite often do not heart you, and they never hear you as another I. You are not an object for mortals like this, not a thing to be used or experienced, nor an object of interest or fascination. The point is not at all that you are found interesting or fascinating instead of being seen as a fellow I. The shock is rather that you are not found interesting or fascinating at all: you are not recognized as an object any more than as a subject. You are accepted, if at all, as one to be spoken at and spoken of; but when you are spoken of, the Lord of every story will be I. Some come to the truth in a roundabout way. The Quest is direct. The quest is governed by its own inherent laws, some easily ascertainable but others darkly obscure. It is a search for meaning in the meaningless flow of events. It is response to the impulsion to look beyond the ever-passing show of Earthly life for some sign, value, or state of mind that shall confer hope, supply justification, gain insight. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
Randolph Harris II International Institute 