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My First Act of Free Will Shall be to Believe in Free Will
My courtyard banana trees had not been touched by a heatwave this Summer, and grew thick and drowsing as ever against the stucco walls. The wild impatients and lantana were glowing in the overgrown beds, and the fountain, the fountain with its cherub, was making its crystalline music as the water splashed from the cherub’s horn into the basin. And the flowers introduced a profusion of colors which had never been before in nature, expect in the rainbow! Colors we had known in Heaven and thought to be purely celestial and now we saw they were in this beautiful community. Trees rose in their mature fullness; rain came in whispering gusts, full of fragrance. They sky warmed and colors everywhere expanded or deepened. These souls took the invisible fabric of Heaven, whatever it is—energy, essence, the light of God, the Creative Power of God—and in a twinkling surrounded us all with wonderous constructions representing their curiosity, their concepts of beauty and their desires! What was going on at the moment when this breakthrough occurred? Taking this experience of mine as a start, we noticed, first of all, that the insight broke into my conscious mind against what I had been really trying to think rationally. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
I had a good, sound thesis and I had been working very hard trying to prove it. The unconscious, so to speak, broke through in opposition to the conscious belief to which I was clinging. There is a polarity, a kind of opposition, between unconscious experience and consciousness. The relationship is compensatory: consciousness controls the wild, illogical vagaries of the unconscious, while the unconscious keeps consciousness from drying up in banal, empty, arid rationality. The compensation also works on specific problems: if I consciously bend too far one way on some issues, my unconscious will lean the other way. This is, of course, the reason why the more we are unconsciously smitten with doubt about an idea, the more strict and rigidly we fight for it in our conscious argument. This is also why persons as different as Saint Paul on the Damascus road and the alcoholic in the Bowery go through such radical conversions—the repressed unconscious side of the dialectic erupts and takes over the personality. The unconscious seems to take delight (if I may so express it) in breaking through—and breaking up—exactly what we cling to most rigidly in our conscious thinking. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
What occurs in this breakthrough is not simply growth; it is much more dynamic. It is not a mere expansion of awareness; it is rather a kind of battle. A dynamic struggle goes on within a person between what one consciously thinks on the one hand and, on the other, some insight, some perspective that is struggling to be born. The insight is then born with anxiety, guilt, and the joy and gratification that is inseparable from the actualizing of a new idea or vision. The guilt that is present when this breakthrough occurs has its source in the fact that the insight must destroy something. My insight destroyed my other hypothesis and would destroy what a number of my professors believed, a fact that caused me some concern. Whenever there is a breakthrough of a significant idea in science or a significant new form in art, the new idea will destroy what a lot of people believe is essential to the survival of their intellectual and spiritual World. This is the source of guilt in genuine creative work. As Picasso remarked, “Every act of creation is first of all an action of destruction.” The breakthrough carried with it also an element of anxiety. For it not only broke down my previous hypothesis, it shook my self-World relationship. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
At such a time I find myself having to seek a new foundation, the existence of which I as yet do not know. This is the source of the anxious feeling that comes at the moment of the breakthrough; it is not possible that there be a genuinely new idea without this shake up occurring to some degree. However, beyond guilt and anxiety, as I said above, the main feeling that comes with the breakthrough is one of gratification. We have seen something new. We have the joy of participating in what the physicists and other natural scientists call an experience of elegance. When the Universe itself runs down and disintegrates given enough time, how can this little and limited being of a person hope to preserve one’s personal consciousness, one’s personality, one’s character just as it is today? Any belief fostered by any kind of authority—religious or metaphysical or any other—which fosters this illusion is a false one. However, this said, let it be counted by that other truth which is needed to complete the thought. If the individualized being must one day part with its limited consciousness, this is only in order to return to its origin in the universal consciousness, for consciousness cannot come out of nothing. It came from and goes back to the universal mind. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
Therefore, if a being loses the little and temporary immortality of the ego, it will only be to gain the greater and true immortality of that mind. The higher individuality is preserved, but the lower personality, with its miserable limitations, is not. The difference between the individual and the universal self persists throughout the incarnations and no mystical emotionalism or metaphysical jugglery can end it. It will end indeed not by the individual transforming oneself into the greater being but by one’s merging oneself into it, that is, by the disappearance of one’s separate consciousness in the pure essence of all consciousness. However, it need not so end unless one wants it. Even if we should surrender it to God, there is no reason why we should not preserve own individuality. When the higher self encloses and absorbs the ego, the goal is achieved. Through one has been caught up into something immensely great than oneself, one still remains an individual—albeit a loosely held one. One’s further life will be a record of discovery rather than speculation, of insights rather than intellections. What will happen to one’s environment after illumination? Nothing. It will not be miraculously transformed so that one sees auras, ghost, and atoms mixed up with its ordinary appearance. It will still look as it did before. The grass will have the same shapes and colour. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
However, the question of inequality has not yet been answered. For now we must ask—why do some of us receive more than others in the very beginning, before using or wasting our talents is even possible? Why does the one servant receive five talents, and the second, two, and the third, one? Why is one person born to desperate less affluence, and another to affluence? To reply that much will be demanded of those to whom much is given, and little of those to whom little is given, is not adequate. For it is just this original inequality, internal and external, that gives rise to the question. Why is the power to gain so much more out of one’s being human given to one human being rather than to another? Why is so much given to one that much can be asked of one, while little can be asked of another, because little was given one? If we consider this problem in relation not only to individual beings, but also to classes, races, and nations, the question of political inequality also arises, and with it the many ways in which beings have tried to abolish inequality. In every revolution and way, the will to solve the riddle of inequality is a driving force. However, neither war nor revolution can answer it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
And even though we may imagine that most social inequalities will be conquered in the future, there remain three realities: the inequality of talents in body and mind, the inequality created by freedom and destiny, and the inequality of justice deriving from the fact that all generations before the time of such equality would by nature be excluded from its blessings. This last would be the greatest inequality possible! No! In the face of one of the deepest and most tormenting problems of life, we cannot permit ourselves to be so shallow or foolish as to try to escae into a social dreamland. We have to live now. We have to live this life. We must face the riddle of inequality today. Let us not confuse the riddle of inequality with the fact that each of us is a unique and incomparable self. Our being individual certainly belongs to our dignity as beings. This being was given to us, and must be made use of an intensified, not drowned in the gray waters of conformity that threaten us so much today. One should defend every individuality and the uniqueness of every human self. However, one should not be deluded into believing that this is a solution to the riddle of inequality. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Unfortunately, there are social and political reactionaries who exploit this confusion social and political reactionaries who exploit this confusion in order to justify social injustice. They are at least as foolish as those who dream of the future abolition of inequality. One who has witnessed hospitals for the ill and insane, prisons, sweat shops, battlefields, people starving, family tragedies, or moral aberrations should be cured of any confusion of the gift of individuality with the riddle of inequality. One should be cured of any sense of easy consolation. If any teacher or organization asks you to swear ceremoniously that you will not reveal to others what you are taught, be sure that you will receive inferior occultism, not philosophic truth. For the truth hides itself from the unready: it does not have to be hidden from them. Do not confuse the necessary secrecy of philosophic presentation with the portentous secrecy of charlatanic cults. It is not necessary to call meetings or to organize societies in order to propagate truth. There is no crowd salvation, no communal redemption. The monasteries and ashrams, the organizations and societies, the institutions and temples have their place and use. However, the one is very elementary and the other is very limited. Whatever is most worthwhile to, and in, a being must come forth from one’s own individual endeavour. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
Society improves only as, and when, its members improve. This is strikingly shown by the moral failure of some states with dictatorships, and by the half-failure of established religions. Most institutions and organizations have developed in time the fault of an egocentrism which cases them to lose sight of their original higher purpose, and so they join the list of additions to societies which have a mixed selfish and idealistic character. Too many spiritual organizations exist mainly to serve those who create or staff them. When those who direct the affairs of an institution become more concerned about the state of its revenue than about its state of spirituality, when they are more affected by its increasing financial returns than about its increasing materiality, it is time to pick up one’s hat and stick and bid it farewell. Starting from speculations on the beginning of life and from biological parallels I drew the conclusion that, besides the instinct to preserve living substances, there must exist another, contrary instinct seeking to dissolve those units and to bring them back to their primaeval, inorganic state. That is to say, as well as Eros there was an instinct of death. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
The death instinct is directed against the organism itself and this is a self-destructive drive, or it is directed outward, and in this case tends to destroy others rather than oneself. When blended with sexuality, the death instinct is transformed into more harmless impulses expressed in sadism or masochism. Even though Dr. Freud suggested at various times that the power of the death instinct can be reduced, the basic assumption remained: beings were under the sway of an impulse to destroy either oneself or others, and one could do little to escape this tragic alternative. It follows that, from the position of the death instinct, aggression was not essentially a reaction to stimuli but a constantly following impulse rooted in the constitution of the human organism. The death instinct is a biological force in all living organisms: this should mean that animals, too, express their death instinct either against themselves or against others. Hence one should find more illness or early death in less outwardly aggressive animals and vice versa; but, of course, there are no data supporting this idea. Yet, there is a dualistic concept in which two basic forces are opposed to each other. This dichotomy was at first that between self-preservation and libido, and later that between life and death instincts. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
There is a vastness and the precariousness of existing fully and the courage required to preserve in the face of ill health and depression. The organism has a great stake in blowing itself up in size, importance, and durability. Because only if we understand how natural this motive is can we understand how it is only in society tat beings can get the symbolic measures for the degrees of one’s importance, one’s qualification for extradurability. And it is only by contrasting and comparing oneself to like organism, to one’s fellow being, that one can judge if one has some extra claim to importance. Obviously it is not very convincing about one’s ultimate worth to be better than a lobster, or even a fox; but to outshine that fellow sitting over there, the one with the black eyes—now that is something that carries the conviction of ultimacy. The faces beings carry the highest meaning to other beings. Once we understand this, we can see further why the moiety organization is such a stroke of primitive genius: it sets up society as a continuing contest for the forcing of self-feeling, provides ready-made props for self-aggrandizement, a daily script that includes straight men for joking relationships and talented rivals with whom to contend for social honor in games, feats of strength, hunting and warfare. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
Sociologist have very nicely described the dynamics of status forcing and similar types of behavior, in which people try to come out of social encounters a little bigger than they went in, by playing intricate games of one-upmanship. However, you cannot force your status vis-à-vis someone else unless there is a someone else and there are rules for status and verbal conventions for playing around with status, for coming out of social groups with increases self-inflation. Society almost everywhere provides codes for such self-aggrandizement, for the ability to boast, to humiliate, or just simply to outshine in quiet ways—like displaying one’s superior achievements, even if it is only skill in hunting that feeds everyone’s stomach. A being cannot impart life to oneself but must get it via ritual from one’s fellow being, then we can say even further that beings cannot impart importance to oneself; and importance, we now see, is just as deep a problem in securing life: importance equals durability equals life. However, I do not want to seem to be making out that primitive society organized itself merely as a stage for competitive self-aggrandizement, or that beings can only expand their sense of self at the expense of others. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
This would not be true, even though it is a large and evidently natural part of human motivation. Primitive society also expressed its genius by giving to people much less invidious and competitive forms of self-expansion. People impart to one another the daily sense of importance that each needs, not with rivalry and boasting, but rather with elaborate rules for protecting their insides against social damage and deflation. People do this in their interpersonal encounters by using verbal formulas that express proper courtesies, permit gentle handling, save the other’s face with the proper subtleties when self-esteem is in danger, and so on. Social life is interwoven with salutations foe greeting and taking leave, for acknowledging others with short, standardized conversations which reinforce the sense of well-being of all the members. Beings in society manage to give each other what they need in terms of good organismic self-feeling in two major ways: on one hand, by codes that allow people to compare their achievements and virtues so as to outside rivals; on the other hand, by codes that support and protect tender human feelings that prevent the undermining and deflation that can result from the clash of organismic ambitions. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
However, now to see how the technique for the ritual renewal of nature worked—how well it served the actors who played the parts. We can really only get inside primitive societies by seeing them as religious priesthoods with each person having a role to pay in the generative rituals. We have so long been stripped of a ritual role to play in creation that we have to force ourselves to try to understand this, to get this into perspective. We do not know what it means to contribute a dance, a chant, or a spell in a community dramatization of the forces of nature—unless we belong to an active religious community. Nr can we feel the immense sense of achievement that follows from such a ritual contribution: the ritualist has done nothing less than enable life to continue; one has contributed to sustaining and renewing the Universe. If rituals generate and redistribute life power, then each person is a generator of life. That is how important a person could feel, within the ritualist view of nature, by occupying a ritual place in a community. Even the humblest person was a cosmic creator. We may not think that the ritual generation of brown kangaroos is a valid casual affair, but the primitive feels the effect of one’s ability to generate life, one is ennobled by it, even though it may be an illusion. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
We may console ourselves about our historical demotion from the status of cosmic heroism by saying that at least we know what true religion is, whereas these cosmic creators lived according to immature magic. I will admit that our historical disenchantment is a burden that gives us a certain sober Worldliness, but there is no valid difference between religion and magic, no matter how many books are written to support the distinction. Magic is religion we do not believe in, and religion is magic we believe in. Voila tout. A school should exist not only to teach but also to investigate, not to formulate prematurely a finalized system but to remain creative, to go on testing theories by applying them and validating ideas by experience. The formation of a society of seekers may have a social value but it has little instructional value, for it merely pools their common ignorance. The justification of a society educationally is its possession of a competent teacher—competent because one’s instruction possess intellectual clarity and one’s knowledge possesses justifiable certitude. “I will not show unto the wicked of my strength, to one more than the other, save it be unto those who repent of their sins, and hearken unto my words,” reports Helaman 7.23. The mind passes through a stage, when seeking after truth, it finds out that the World is other than it seems to be. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
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Many People Remember a Time When the Desire to Solve the Riddles of the Universe and to Find Truth was the Driving Force in their Lives
I cannot live without this beauty. I cannot endure without it. Oh, God, you have shown me Hell and it lies behind me, surely in the land where I was born. If Christ is the Lord, if Christ is the Lord, then what a beautiful miracle it is, this Christian mystery—that the Lord himself should come to Earth and clothe himself in flesh the better to know us and to comprehend us. Oh, what God, ever made in the image of Man by His fancy, was ever better than one who would become flesh? However, absolute unity, in spire of brilliant dashes in its direction, still remains undiscovered, still remains a Grenzbegriff. “Ever not quite.” After all that reason can do has been done, there still remains the opacity of the finite fact as merely given, with most of their peculiarities mutually unmediated and unexplained. To the very last, there are the various points of view which the philosopher must distinguish in discussing the World; and what is inwardly clear from one point remains a bare externality and datum to the other. The negative, the alogical, is never wholly banished. Something—call it fate, chance, freedom, spontaneity, the devil, what you will—is still wrong and other and outside and unincluded, from your point of view, even though you be the greatest of philosophers. #RandolphHaris 1 of 14
Reason is but one item in the mystery of the Universe; and behind the proudest consciousness that ever reigned, reason and wonder blushed face to face. Real possibilities, real indeterminations, real beginnings, real ends, real evil, real crises, catastrophes, and escapes, a real God, and a real more life, just as common-sense conceives these things, may remain in empiricism as conceptions which that philosophy gives up the attempt either to overcome or to reinterpret in monistic form. The Last Days! Christianity is a religion based on the notion that we are living in the Last Days! It is a religion fueled by the ability of beings to forget all the blunders of the past, and get dressed once more for the Last Days. Here in this room, we all of us believe in molecules and the conservation of energy, in democracy and necessary progress, in Protestant Christianity and the duty of fighting for the immortal life. Our reason is quite satisfied, in nine hundred and ninety-nice cases out of every thousand f us, if it can find a few arguments that will do to recite in case or credulity is criticized by some one else. Our faith is faith in someone else’s faith, and in the greatest matters this is most the case. Our belief in truth itself, for instance, that there is a truth, and that our minds and it are made for each other,–what is it but a passionate affirmation of desire, in which our social system backs us up? #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
We want to have a truth; we want to believe that our experiments and studies and discussions must put us in a continually better and better position towards it; and on this line we agree to fight out our thinking lives. Why do few scientists even look at the evidence for telepathy, so called? Because they think, as a leading biologist, now dead, once said to me, that even if such a thing were true, scientists ought to band together to keep it suppressed and concealed. It would undo the uniformity of Nature and all sorts of other things without which scientists cannot carry on their pursuits. However, if this very being had been shown something which as a scientist one might do with telepathy, one might not only have examined the evidence, but even have found it good enough. This very law which the logicians would impose upon us—if I may give the name of the logicians to those who would rule out our willing nature here—is based on nothing but their own natural wish to exclude all elements for which they, in their professional quality of logicians, can find no use. Still, there is a truth, and it is the destiny of our minds to attain it, we are deliberately resolving to make, though the sceptic will not make it. The faith that truth exits, and that our minds can find it, may be held in two ways. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
We may talk of the empiricist way and of the absolutist way of believing in truth. The absolutions in this matter say that we not only can attain to knowing truth, but we can know when we have attained to knowing it; while the empiricists think that although we may attain it, we cannot infallibly know when. To know is one thing, and to know for certain that we know is another. One may hold on to the first being possible without the second; hence the empiricists and the absolutists, although neither of them is a sceptic in the usual philosophic sense of the term, show very different degrees of strict and rigid doctrines in their lives. What one ha to do in the World as a human being is henceforth to be done not really by one’s ordinary personal self but by the Presence which, shapeless and silent though it be, is the vital living essence of what connect one with God. If this seems to deprive one of the attributes which make a being a being, I can reply only that we are here back with the Sphinx. Yes, the enigma is great; but the realized understanding and experience is immeasurably greater in its blessedness. One’s life becomes a lengthened awareness of this Presence. One is never lovely because one is never encased in the belittling thought that this narrow personal self-consciousness is the totality of one’s “I.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
One lives every moment in the awareness of one’s higher self. Yet this does not oppose nor interfere with the awareness of one’s lower one. Everything one then does is done by the ordinary personal self alone, out of and in harmony with the Overself, or one’s higher individuality. In thus working together, the divine presence supports the ego’s presence, but the ego is put in its place and kept in harmony with the higher individuality. If this is what people mean by killing out the ego (which is really killing our its tyranny), there could be no objection to the statement. However, to asset that it is not functioning at all is silly. If the claim of complete merger is valid, if the individual self really disappears in the attainment of Divine Consciousness, of whom then was this same self away in the experience of attainment? No—it is only the lower personal self that is transcended; the higher spiritual individuality is not. One day a learned colleague called me up and cried angrily, “There is a saying in the New Testament which I consider to be one of the most immoral and unjust statements ever made!” And he began to quote our text—“To him who has will more be given,” his anger increasing as he continued, “and from him who has not, even what he has will be taken away.” I believe that most of us cannot but feel equally offended. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
And we cannot easily excuse the passage by suggesting what this colleague suggested—that the words may be due to a misunderstanding on the part of the disciples. No, they appear at least four times in the gospels with great emphasis. And furthermore, it is clear that the writers of the gospels feel exactly as we do. For them, the statement is a stumbling block, and they tried to interpret it in different ways. Probably none of the explanations satisfied them fully, for this particular saying of Jesus confronts us immediately with the greatest and perhaps most painful riddle of life—the inequality of all beings. We certainly cannot hope to solve it. Neither the Bible nor any of the great religions and philosophies was able to do so. However, this we can do: we can explore the breadth and dept of the riddle of inequality; and we can try to find a way to live with it, unsolved as it may remain. When we consider the words, “to him who has will more be given,” we ask ourselves—what do we have? And we may discover that much has been given us in terms of external goods, of friends, of intellectual gifts, and even of a comparatively high morality on which to base our actions. So we can expect that even more will accrue to us, while, at the same time, those who are lacking in all these attributes will lose the little they already have. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
Even further, according to Jesus’ parable, the one poor talent they possess shall be handed over to those who have five or ten talents. We shall be richer because they will be poorer. And cry out as we may against such an injustice, we cannot deny that life abounds in it. We cannot deny it, but we might well ask—do we really have what we believe we have, so that it cannot be taken from us? It is a question full of anxiety, intensified by Luke’s version of our text: “From one who has not, even what one thinks that one has will be taken away.” Perhaps our having of those many things is not the kind of having that can be increased. Perhaps the having of a few things on the part of the poor is the kind of having that makes them grow. Jesus confirms this thought it the parable of the talents. The talents that are used, at the risk of their being lost, are the talents that we really have. Those that we try to preserve, without risking their use for growth, are those that we do not really have, and that will therefore be taken from us. They begin to disappear, until suddenly we feel that we have lost them, perhaps forever. Of some things we feel that we are certain: we know, and we know that we do know. There is something that gives a click inside of us, a bell that strikes twelve, when the hands of our mental clock have swept the dial and meet over the meridian hour. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
The greatest empiricist among us are only empiricists on reflection: when left to their instincts, they dogmatize like infallible popes. When the Cliffords tell us how sinful it is to be Christian on such insufficient evidence, insufficiency is really the last thing they have in mind. For them the evidence is absolutely sufficient, only it makes the other way. They believe so completely in an anti-Christian order of the Universe that there is no living option: Christianity is a dead hypothesis from the start. However, as pragmatism explains, the criteria for the validity of knowledge are the consequences that are produced by the (given) knowledge. This approach provides useful implications for understanding human beings (for instance, thoughts or behaviors that give people pleasure or help them meet basic needs). The consequences, of course, as that our fields of experience have no more definite boundaries than have our fields of view. More that continuously develops, and that continuously supersedes them as a life process validates not only sense perception, but also affectional, intuitive, imaginal, and spiritual states of experience. It purports that usefulness need not be confined to discrete, overt, or measurable behaviors, but may encompass any experience that a person finds subjectively or objectively for help. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
For example, it has been found by experts such as William James that so-called mystical experiences are useful for people. A sense of the divine gives beings a powerful ally for their own ideals. Spiritual life is more richly satisfying tan that of the conventional (logical-positivist) perspective. In the memory of all of us, there are many things that we seemed to have, but that we really did not have, and that were therefore taken away from us. Some of them were lost because of the tragic limitations of life. They had to be sacrificed so that other things might grow. We are all given youthful innocence, but innocence cannot be used and increased. The growth of our lives is made possible only by the sacrifice of the original gift of innocence. Sometimes, nevertheless, a melancholy longing arises in us for a purity that has been taken from us. We were all given youthful enthusiasm for many things and goals. However, all this enthusiasm also cannot be used and increased. Most of the objects of our early enthusiasm must be sacrificed for a few, and those few approached soberly. No maturity is possible without this sacrifice. Yet often a deep yearning for the lost possibilities and that enthusiasm takes hold of us. Innocence and youthful enthusiasm: we had them, and we did not have them. Life itself demanded that they be taken from us. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
However, there are other things that we had and that were taken from us because we were guilty of taking them too much for granted. Some of us were deeply sensitive to the wonder of life as it is revealed in nature. Slowly, under the pressure of work and social life and the lure of cheap pleasures, we lost the wonder of our earlier years—the intense joy and sense of the mystery of life in the freshness of the young day or the glory of the dying afternoon, the splendor of the mountains and the infinite of the sea, or in the perfection of the movements of a young animal or of a flower breaking through the soil. We try perhaps to evoke such feelings again, but we find ourselves empty and do not succeed. We had that sensitivity and we did not have it, and it was taken from us. Others of us have has the same experiences with respect to music, poetry, great literature and the drama. We desired to devour all of these; we lived in them, and through them created for ourselves a life beyond our daily life. We had this experience and we did not have it. We did not allow it to grow. Our love for it was not strong enough, and so it was taken from us. Many people remember a time when the desire to solve the riddles of the Universe and to find truth was the driving force in their lives. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
These beings could not rest satisfied with the littleness that see nothing beyond its own greed and desire. One was haunted by higher ideals than the ordinary; one wanted to be finer, cleaner, better and nobler human material than the common one. They entered college and the university not in order to gain access to the upper middle classes or the preconditions for social and economic success, but because they felt driven by their thirst for knowledge. They had something to which, seemingly, more could be added. However, their desire was not strong enough. They failed to nurture it, and so it was taken from them. Expediency and indifference towards truth took the place of genuine academic interest. Because their love for the truth was let go, they sometimes feel sick at heart; they realize that what they have lost may never be returned to them. We all know that any deep relationship to another human being requires watchfulness and nourishment; otherwise, it is taken from us. And we cannot recapture it. This is a form having and not having that is the root of innumerable human tragedies. We are all familiar with them. An outward organization may be useful to those who are still on the religious and mystical levels but for the purpose of philosophic advancement it is unnecessary. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
Public societies are mere babels of strict and rigid opinions and lead in the end to confusion. The correct history of many spiritual organizations is not an edifying one. No formal association or institution is of any real worth here. Every student must work hard on and for oneself. Outside of that one may catch inspiration and receive help from an expert guide. The few who are able to walk together with one on this path will come along with time; the others would only be a drag. However, if one wants to join wit other really interested persons in studying the books together in an informal way, with no external bond, one may try it. And there is the most fundamental kind of having and not having—our having and losing God. Perhaps in our youth and innocence, and even beyond it, our experience of God was rich. We may remember the moments in which we felt God’s presence intensely. We may remember our praying with an overflowing heart, our encounter with the holy in words and music and holy places. We communicated with God; but this communication was taken from us, because we had it and did not have it. We failed to let it grow, and therefore, it slowly disappeared, leaving only an empty space. We became unconcerned, cynical and indifferent, not because we doubted our religious traditions—such doubt belongs to a life rich in God—but because we turned away from what once concerned us infinitely. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
Such thoughts mark the first step in approaching the riddle of inequality. Those who have, receive more if they really have what they have, if they use it and cause it to grow. And those who have not, lose what they seem to have, because they really do not have it. The seeker after Reality will be suspicious of professional spirituality, although the seeker after religion will be attracted by it. It is not necessary to advertise inner attainment. One who would be a true philosopher must turn to the only source of true philosophy—the front within oneself. That is, one must turn inward, not outward to a group. Institutions tend to deaden inspirations. Of all things Truth is the freest. So, if a being is to find it in all its genuineness, and not in its distortions, caricatures, or fragmentation, not in any substitute for it, then one must preserve one’s own freedom to search for it. However, this is just what one cannot do so easily if one joins a sect. As I see it, the history of humankind divides into two great periods: the first one existed from time immemorial until roughly the Renaissance or Enlightenment, and it was characterized by the ritualist view of nature. The second period began with the efflorescence of the modern machine age and the domination of the scientific method and World view. In both periods beings wanted to control life and death, but in the first period they had to rely on a nonmachine technology to do it. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
Primitive ritual manufacture of life may not have actually controlled the Universe, but at least it was never in any danger of destroying it. We control it up to a point—the point at which we seem to be destroying it. Besides, our belief in the efficacy of the machines control of nature has in itself elements of magic and ritual trust. Machines are supposed to work, and to work infallibly, since we have to put all our trust in them. And so when they fail to work our whole World view begins to crumble—just as the primitives’’ World view did when they found their rituals were not working in the face of New World culture and weaponry. I am thinking of how anxious we are to find the exact cause of an airplane crash, or how eager we are to attribute the crash to human error and not machine failure. Or even more, how certain authorities hush up their air crashes: how can machines fail in machine paradise? The fact is that beings in the New World did not know what was going on because they were faced with a technics so alien to their ways of thought probably explains our long puzzlement over the organization of primitive society. “Awake, and hear the words which I shall tell thee; for behold, I am come to declare unto you the glad tidings of great joy. For the Lord hath heard thy prayers, and hath judged of thy righteousness, and hath sent me to declare unto thee that thou mayest rejoice; and that thou mayest declare unto thy people, that they may also be filled with joy,” reports Mosiah 3.3-4. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
This is the Price that Must be Paid for the Passions of this Earth thus I Have Given the Recipe for the Absurd Victory!
Making sense of the senseless and finding the freedom in a capricious, perilous World is our primary philosophical concern. We must help each other live with and even benefit from the unfathomable conditions of life. When meaning or traditions dissolve, the legend of Christ becomes relevant. Mourners understand it; so do unemployed factory workers. Victims of war, crime, and brutality also know it, as do passionless couples. Why do they (or we) get up in the morning? How do they/we face the futility of our lives? We all have limits and destinies to play out, and we are all used for mysterious ends. The questions are, What are we going to make of out limits and destinies? How are we going to respond to them? Are we going to accept them passively—as many who are depressed and dependent do—or are we going to deny them—as do many who boast? Finally, are we going to engage them, try to fashion something of value from them, and surrender to them only when nothing is left? That is what therapy must inquire. We live facing he curve of the gulf, the sparking sea, and the smiles of the Earth. A decree of God is necessary. We must not let anyone snatch us from our joys, leading us forcibly back to the underworld, where our rock is ready for us. Many of us are abused heroes. We are as, as much through our passions and through our torture. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Our scorn of God, our hatred of death, and our passions for life wins us that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing noting. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this Earth. Legends are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for this one, one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the stone, which represents our would, to roll it and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one see the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two Earth-clotted hands. At the very end of this long effort measures by skyless space and times without depth, the purpose is achieved. We watch our soul rush down in a few moments toward that lower World whence we will have to push it up again toward the summit (Heaven). We go back down to the plain. We do not have a chip on our shoulder, but a mighty and serious tasks that could cost us our blessing of eternal life. Sometimes we go back down with a heavy measure stepping toward the torment of which we will never know the end. The lucidity that is to constitute our torture at the same time crowns our victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn. If the descent is thus sometime performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Ancient wisdom confirms modern heroism. Yes, you can, you have made images before for mortals. You know you can. You have wrapped them in spells. You are as strong as we are. You have achieved a very interesting stage in your development. I knew I was right about you all along. I am in awe of you. Human’s aggressive behavior has manifested in war, crime, personal quarrels, and all kinds of destructive and sadistic behavior and it is due to a phylogenetically programmed, innate instinct which seeks for discharge and waits for the proper occasion to be expressed. Nothing short of an analysis in depth of our social system can disclose the reasons for the increase in destructiveness, or suggest ways and means of reducing it. The instinctivistic theory offers to relieve us of the hard task of making such an analysis. It implies that, even if we all must perish, we can at least do so with the conviction that our nature forced this fate upon us, and that we understand why everything had to happen as it did. In contemporary industrial society, beings are cerebrally oriented, feel little, and consider emotions a useless ballast—those of the psychologists as well as those of their subjects. Defensive aggression is, indeed, part of human nature, even though not an innate instinct, as it used to be classified. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
All human aggression, including the passion to kill and to torture is an outcome of biologically given aggression, transformed from a beneficial to a destructive force because of a number of factors. However, human groups differ so fundamentally in the respective degree of destructiveness that the fact can hardly be explained by the assumption that destructiveness are cruelty are innate; various degrees of destructiveness can also be correlated to other psychical factors and to differences in respective social structures, and the degree of destructiveness increases with the increased development of civilization, rather than the opposite. Human beings are the only primates that kills and tortures members of their own species without any reason, either biological or economic, and who feels satisfaction in doing so. Humans can be driven by love or by the passion to destroy; in each case one satisfies one of one’s existential needs: the need to effect, or to move something, to make a dent. Whether human’s dominant passion is love or whether it is destructiveness depends largely on social circumstances; these circumstances, however, operate in references to human’s biologically given existential situation and the needs springing from it and not to an infinitely malleable, undifferentiated psyche, as environmentalist theory assumes. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
All instincts spring from this psychophysical constitution and noninstinctual character-rooted passions, too, are the outcome of one’s biological constitution. This theoretical basis opens up the possibility for a detailed discussion of the various forms of character-rooted, malignant aggression, especially of sadism—the passion for unrestricted power over another sentient being—and of necrophilia—the passion to destroy life and the attraction to all that is dead, decaying, and purely mechanical. These impulses can be conscious, but more often they are unconscious. They are, most of the time, integrated in a relatively stable character structure. The realm of human passions consists of love, hate, ambition, greed, jealousy, envy. By investigating these aspects of reality, we are able to research human’s soul in its most secret and subtle manifestations. Life instinct and death instinct give human destructiveness its dignity as one of two fundamental passions in humans. It frees such passions as the strivings to love, to be free, as well as the drive to destroy, to torture, to control, and to submit, from their forced married to instincts. Instincts are a purely natural category, while the character-rooted passions are a sociobiological, historical category. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Although not directly serving physical survival passions are as strong—and often even stronger—that instincts. They form the basis for being’s interest in life, one’s enthusiasm, one’s excitement; they are the stuff from which not only one’s dreams are made but art, religion, myth, drama—all that makes life worth living. Beings cannot live as nothing but an object, as dice thrown out of a cup one; suffers severely when one is reduced to the level of a feeding or propagating machine, even if one has all the security one wants. Beings seek for drama and excitement; when one cannot get satisfaction on a higher level, one created for oneself the drama of destruction. The contemporary climate of thought encourages the axiom that a motive can be intense only when it serves an organic need—for instance, that only instincts have intense motivating power. If one discards this mechanistic, reductionist viewpoint and starts from a holistic premise, one beings to realize that being’s drives must be seen in terms of their function for the life process of the whole organism. Their intensity is not due to specific physiological needs, but to the need of the whole organism to survive—to grow both physically and mentally. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
These passions do not become powerful only after the more elementary ones have been satisfied. They are at the very root of human existence, and not a kind of luxury which can afford after the normal, lower needs have been satisfied. People have experienced death by suicide because of their failure to realize their passions for love, power, fame, revenge. Causes of death by suicide because of a lack of satisfaction in pleasures of the flesh are virtually nonexistent. These noninstinctual passions excite beings, fire one on, make life worth living. Un homme sans passions et desires cesserait d’etre un homme (a being without passion or desires would cease to be a being). This statement is of course to be understood in the context of the philosophical thinking of the Old World. People from the Old World have an entirely different concept of passions. In order to appreciate the difference between Old World and New World passions, we have to understand the distinction between irrational passions, such as ambition and greed, and rational passions, such as love and care for all sentient beings. What is relevant, however, is not this difference, but the idea that life concerned mainly with its own maintenance is inhuman. When the images of Earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call for happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy rises in a being’s heart. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
When I speak of passions, I refer to all energy-charged impulses as distinct from those which have their origin in the need for the physiological maintenance of the body. Love and no-greed are, I believe, the highest form of manifestation of human energy. The human passions transform beings from a mere thing into a hero, into a being that in spite of tremendous limitations tries to make sense of life. One wants to be one’s own creator, to transform one’s state of being unfinished into one with some goal and some purpose, allowing one to achieve some degree of integration. Being’s passions are not banal psychological complexes that can be adequately explained as caused by childhood traumata. They can be understood only if one goes beyond the realm of reductionist psychology and recognizes them for what they are: being’s attempt to make sense out of life and to experience the optimum of intensity and strength one can (or believes one can) achieve under the given circumstances. They are one’s religion, one’s cult, one’s ritual, which one as to hide (even from oneself) in so far as they are disapproved by one’s group. To be sure, by bribery and extortion, for instance, by skillful conditioning, one can be persuaded to relinquish one’s religion and to be concerted to the general cult of the no-self, the automaton. Crushing truths perish from being acknowledged. Thus we obey faith without know it. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
However, this psychic cure deprives one of the best one has, of being a human and not as a thing. The truth is that all human passions, both the good and the evil, can be understood only as a person’s attempt to make sense of one’s life. Change is possible only if one is able to convert oneself to a new way of making sense of life by mobilizing one’s life-furthering passions and thus experiencing a superior sense of vitality and integration to the one one had before. Unless this happens one can be domesticated, but one cannot be cured. However, even though the life-furthering passions are conducive to a greater sense of strength, joy, integration, and vitality than destructiveness and cruelty, the latter are as much an answer to the problem of human existence as the former. Even the most sadistic and destructive being is human, as human as the saint. One can be called a warped and sick being who has failed to achieve a better answer to the challenge of having been born human, and this is true; one can also be called a human who took the wrong way in search of one’s salvation. Salvation comes from the Latin root sal, “salt” (in Spanish salud, “health”). The meaning stems from the fact that salt protects meat from decomposition; “salvations” is the protection of beings from decomposition (to protect one’s health and well-being). In this sense each being needs “salvation” (in a nonetheologial sense). #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
These considerations by no means imply, however, that destructiveness and cruelty are not vicious; they only imply that vice is human. They are indeed destructive of life, of body and spirit, destructive not only of the victim but of the destroyer oneself. They constitute a paradox: they express life turning against itself in the striving to make sense of it. They are the only true perversion. Understanding them does not mean condoning them. However, unless we understand the, we have no way to recognize how they may be reduced, and what factors tend to increase them. Such understanding is of particular importance today, when sensitivity toward destructiveness—cruelty is rapidly diminishing, and necrophilia, the attraction to what is dead, decaying, lifeless, and purely mechanical, is increasing throughout our cybernetic industrial society. The spirit of necrophilia was expressed in literary form by F.T. Marinetti in his Futurist Manifesto of 1909. The same tendency can be seen in much of the art and literature of the last decades that exhibits a particular fascination with all that is decayed, unalive, destructive, and mechanical. The Falangist motto, Long life death, threatens to become the secret principle of a society in which the conquest of nature by the machine constitutes the very meaning of progress, and where the living person becomes an appendix to the machine. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
According to Memnoch in Memnoch The Devil “First, to be worthy of Heaven—to have a ghost of a chance with God, I could say—the Soul had to understand life and death in the simplest sense. I found many souls who did. Next there had to be in this understanding an appreciation of the Beauty of God’s work, the harmony of Creation from God’s point of view, a vision of Nature wrapped in endless and overlapping cycles of survival and reproduction and evolution and growth. Many souls had come to understand this. Many had. But many who thought life was beautiful, felt that death was sad and endless and terrible and they would have chosen never to have been born, had they been given the choice!” And when God decides to come down to Earth as Jesus, he response by saying, “I am God Incarnate.” How could I have a human soul? What is important is that I will remain in this body as it is tortured and slain; and my death will be evidence of my Love for those whom I have created and allowed to suffer so much. I will share their pain and know the pain. My resurrection will confirm the eternal return of the spring after winter. It will confirm that Nature all things have evolved have their place.” This study tries to clarify the nature of this necrophilous passion and the social conditions that tend to foster it. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
The conclusion will be that help in any broad sense can come only through radical changes in our social and political structure that would reinstate beings to their supreme role in society. The call for “law and order” (rather than for life and structure) and for stricter punishment of criminals, as well as the obsession with violence and destruction among some “revolutionaries,” are only further instances of the powerful attraction of necrophilia in the contemporary World. We need to create the conditions that would make the growth of beings, this unfinished and uncompleted being—unique in nature—the supreme goal of all social arrangements. Genuine freedom and independence and the end of all forms of exploitative control are the conditions for mobilizing the love of life, which is the only force that can defeat the love for the dead. We have considered forgetting as a way in which life drives towards its own renewal. What and how do we forget? What did Saint Paul forget, when he strained forward to what lay ahead? Obviously, he longed to forget his past as a pharisee and a persecutor of Christianity. However, every word of his letters proves that he never forgot. There seem to be different kinds of forgetting. There is the natural forgetting of yesterday and most of the things that happened in it. If reminded, we might still remember some of them; but slowly, even they tend to disappear. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
The whole day disappears, and only what was really significant in it is remembered. So most of the days of our lives vanish in forgetfulness. This natural process of forgetting operates without our cooperation, like the circulation of our blood. However, there is another aspect of forgetting that is familiar to us all. Something in us prevents us from remembering, when remembering proves to be too difficult and painful. We forget benefits, because of the burden of gratitude is too heavy for us. We forget former loves, because the burden of obligations implied by them surpasses our strength. We forget former hates, because the task of nourishing them would disrupt our mind. We forget former pain, because it is still too painful. We forget former guilt, because we cannot endure its sting. Such forgetting is not the natural, daily form of forgetting. It demands our cooperation. We repress what we cannot stand. We forget it by entombing it within us. Ordinary forgetting liberates us from innumerable small things in a natural process. Forgetting by repression does not liberate us, but seems to cut us off from what makes us suffer. We are not entirely successful, however, because the memory is buried within us, and influences every moment of our growth. And sometimes it breaks through its prison and strikes at us directly and painfully. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Then there is a forgetting, to which Saint Paul witnesses, that liberates us not from the memory of past guilt but from the pain it brings. The grand old name for this kind of forgetting is repentance. Today, repentance is associated with a half-painful, half-voluptuous emotional concentration on one’s guilt, and not with a liberating forgetfulness. However, originally it meant a turning around, leaving behind the wrong way and turning towards the right. It means pushing the consciousness and pain of guilt into the past, not by repressing it, but by acknowledging it, and receiving the word of acceptance in spite of it. If we are able to repent, we are able to forget, not because the forgotten act was unimportant, and not because we repress what we cannot endure, but because we have acknowledged our guilt and can now live with it. For it is eternally forgotten. This was how Saint Paul forgot what lay behind him, although it always remained with him. This kind of forgetting is decisive for our personal relationships. None of them is possible without a silent act of forgiving, repeated again and again. Forgiving presupposes remembering. And it creates a forgetting not in the natural way we forget yesterday’s weather, but in the way of the great in spite of that says: I forget although I remember. Without this kind of forgetting no human relations could endure healthily. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
I do not refer to a solemn act of asking for and offering forgiveness. Such rituals as sometimes occur between parents and children, or friends, or man and wife, are often acts of moral arrogance on the one part and enforced humiliation on the other. However, I speak of the lasting willingness to accept one who has hurt us. Such forgiveness is the highest form of forgetting, although it is not forgetfulness. The stumbling block of having violated another is pushed into the past, and there is the possibility of something new in the relationship. Forgetting in spite of remembering is forgiveness. We can live only because our guilt is forgiven and thus eternally forgotten. And we can love only because we forgive and are forgiven. The techniques of ritual beings imagined that they took firm control of the material World, and at the same time transcended that World by fashioning their own invisible projects which made them supernatural, raised them over and over above material decay and death. In the World of ritual there are not even any accidents, and accidents, as we know, are the things that make life most precarious and meaningless. Our knees grow weak when we think of a young lady of awesome beauty who dies in a plane crash simply because she was working to make an honest living; if life can be so subject to chance, it must not have too much meaning. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
However, how can that be that life has no meaning, since we are alive and since creatures are so marvelous? Primitive beings take care of this problem by imagining that one’s control over nature is fairly complete, and that in any case nothing ever happens unless somebody wants it to happen. So a person dies in a plane crash because some powerful dead spirit is jealous of that living, or some witch is secretly working her ritual against that person. In psychoanalysis, working through all the different individual forms of anxiety, one gradually recognizes the fact that the basic anxiety underlies all relationships to people. While the individual anxieties may be stimulated by actual cause, the basic anxiety continues to exist even though there is no particular stimulus in the actual situation. If the whole neurotic picture were compared to a state of political unrest in a nation, the basic anxiety and basic hostility would be similar to the underlying dissatisfactions with and protests against the regime. Surface manifestations may be entirely missing in either case, or they may appear in diversified forms. In the state they may appear as riots, strikes, assemblies, demonstrations; in the psychological sphere, too, the forms of anxiety may manifest themselves in symptoms of all sorts. Regardless of the particular provocation, all manifestations of the anxiety emanate from one common background. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
All too soon an institution becomes a restricted, or even closed, system. Its ideas get frozen into strict and rigid doctrines, its members begin to suffer from intellectual paralysis, and its methods begin to savour of totalitarianism or tyranny. The being who is captured by a particular religion, sect, group, or organization frequently builds a wall around it, sets up a barrier between oneself and non-members, excludes every approach to God other than one’s own. The independent seeker, who affiliates oneself with no sectarian group, no fanatic organization, no narrowing cult, avoids the tensions and discards the prejudices which such affiliation usually brings with it. For those who are affiliated, contact with other denominations creates the need of defending the selfish interests and the given strict and rigid doctrines of their own, either directly or obliquely by attacking the others. In this way the tensions and prejudices arise and subsist. They cannot come to an end until this exclusiveness itself comes to an end. How many evils, hatreds, fights, and injustices come from it! How many unjust malignments of character does it lead to! How much blind bigotry does it cause, a bigotry which refuses to allow, and is unable to see, the good in cults other than its own! As soon as they begin to organize a movement, the other things begin also to emerge—the narrow fanaticism, the limiting sectarianism, the intolerant attitude. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Every organization which perpetuates strict and rigid doctrines dares not admit new ideas which correct the error of those strict and rigid doctrines, for such ideas would affront the beliefs of its followers! In all matters spiritual, mystical, and religious, humanity is bewitched both by spell of the past and the prestige of the institution. There are several systems, methods, groups, and organizations, but of acceptable ones there are only few. Too often the clinging to a particular teacher, the membership of a particular groups, leads at best to a naïve faith in the self-sufficiency of the tenets advocated, at worst to a new sectarianism. Sectarianism, zealotry, and bigotry develop by stages in the minds of followers. Typically, the bigger an organization becomes, the more likely are dissentions and quarrels to arise within it, despite all its professions of special sanctity or proclamations of fellowship and love. The essential things get gradually lost, the accidental are made more of and treasured up. The Spirit is squeezed out, the superfluities brought in. One may be said to have entered and settled in the fourth state of consciousness when one is aware of its purity egolessness and freedom at all times, and even during the torpor of sleep or the activity of work. When this awareness is so stabilized that it maintains itself at all times awake or asleep, one is at the end of the quest. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
The divine presence does not leave the enlightened being when one goes to sleep and return to one when one awakes, nor does it leave one when enters the state of dream and return to one when one leaves it; it is in truth something which is ever present. If one enters the sleeping state, one enters it while in the light of knowledge, and the same applies if one enters the dream state. The enlightened persons does not retire at night in the darkness, the ignorance of ordinary sleep, but in the light of the Consciousness, the ever-unbroken Transcendence. One’s sleep is a suspended state, with one’s awareness never fully lost but retracted into a pin-point. There are no breaks in the awareness of one’s higher nature. There is no loss of continuity in the consciousness of one’s immortal spirit. Therefore one is not illuminated at some hour of the day and unillumined at another hour, nor illumined while one is awake and unillumined while one is asleep. That alone is the final attainment which can remain with one through all the three states—waking, dream, and deep sleep—and though all the day’s activities. “And I know, O Lord, that thou hast all power, and can do whatsoever thou wilt for the benefit of beings; therefore touch these stones, O Lord, with thy finger, and prepare them that they may shine forth in darkness; and they shall shine forth unto us in the vessels which we have prepared, that we may have light while we shall cross the sea,” reports Ether 3.4. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
The distinction between one’s lower self and higher self will slowly become clear to one through inner experience and reflection thereon. As I listened, rapt, to all details both large and small, he told me the provenance of the pearls sewn into my tunic, of how they had come from the oysters of the sea. Boys had dived into the depths to bring these precious round white treasures up to the surface, carrying them in their very mouths. Emeralds came from mines within the Earth. Men killed for them. And diamonds, as, look at these diamonds. He took a ring from his finger and put it on mine, his fingertips stroking my finger gently as he made sure of the fit. Diamonds are the white light of God, he said. Diamonds are pure. What, in a general way, is missing in one’s development as a human being moving on from animality to higher Awareness must be supplied. By prayer and study the mind returns, like a circle, upon itself, with the result that when this movement is successfully completed, it knows itself in its deepest divinest phase. That which appears as the spiritual seeker engaged on a Quest is itself the spiritual self that being sought. We have not to become divine for we are divine. We have, however, to think and do what is divine. “Behold, O Lord, thou canst do this. We know that thou art able to show forth great power, which looks small unto the understanding of beings,” reports Ether 3.5. Despites many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
And How do We Relight the Flame When it is Cold, Why do We Dream When Our Thoughts Mean Nothing?
God said: “Wait!” So I found myself stopped at the gates of Heaven, along with all my companions, the Angels who generally went and did what I did, and Michael and Gabriel and Uriel, though not among my companions, were there, too. “Memnoch, my accuser,” said God, and the words were spoken with the characteristic gentleness and a great effulgence of light. “Before you come into Heaven, and you begin your diatribe, go back down to the Earth and study all you have seen thoroughly and with respect—by this I mean humankind—so that when you come to me, you have given yourself every chance to understand and to behold all I have done. I tell you now that Humankind is part of Nature, and subject to the Laws of Nature which you have seen unfold all along. No one should understand batter than you, save I. But go, see again for yourself. Then, and only then, will I call together a convocation in Heaven, of all Angels, of all ranks and all endowment, and I will listen to what you have to say. Take with you those who seek the same answers you seek and leave me those Angels who never cared, nor taken notice, nor though of anything but to live in My Light.” Parts of the psychoanalysis of a young man will demonstrate what happens when an individual’s power cannot be admitted consciously and openly, much like Memnoch In Anne Rice’s Memnoch the Devil. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
The power is not erased but comes out in a myriad of other, separate ways. These ways may be camouflaged power or they may be pseudopower. Soren, a Ph.D. student, good-looking, tall, appeared younger than his twenty-six years. He was the third and last child of an affluent Italian family of which the oldest child, Soren’s brother, who was nine years his senior, had always been successful both socially and on the athletic field. Soren’s sister, who was seven years older, had been in some form of therapy most of her life, had been hospitalized after a schizophrenic breakdown, and had been mute for two years in the mental hospital where she now was. His father, the treasurer of a large chain of stores, was detached, successful at work, and hypochondriacal at home—kind at times, but completely unpredictable, wanting the children to be “sweet” to him and reacting to family disagreements by becoming sick and withdrawing. Soren’s mother, who had been and still was a beauty, dominated the family constellation. She was flighty, subtle, inconsistent, intelligent, and in arguments would change her viewpoint with every sentence in order to put the other person on the defense. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
She had “spoiled” Soren—preparing his favorite cuisine, driving him to school so that he would not have to take the subway like the other boys—and was more than glad when Soren, who disliked school consistently and strongly, would feign illness in order to stay home with her. Soren’s mother was delicate toward him, actively opposing his ineffectual efforts later to date girls. The mean table was a constant battlefield of bickering, with one member of the family not speaking to another for weeks on end. This technique of cutting the resented person dead (“I would walk by my father as though he was not there,” said Soren) was resorted to particularly by Soren and his sister, the weakest members of the family. Soren’s sister eventually enlarged the pattern to include the whole World by her muteness at the hospital. Our opening question is: How was Soren to achieve any power in such a family and such a World? Caught in a double bind, with a mother who would change her stance at the drop of a word, with a father who would withdraw with the threat of a heat attack whenever the smoldering undercover warfare of the family burst out into the open, a pawn between his sister who was mentally disturbed and a successful brother who did come to protect Soren at school but teased him mercilessly at home—what was Soren to do? #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
Should Soren try, now that he had grown to six feet and was good-looking, to assert himself on the social scale? However, the girls at high school had always called him the “baby” (which he had been), and this still bedogged him. The athletic field? He was a novice there; and besides his brother had completely usurped that mode of recognition. Intellectually? For his entire life, until he got into college, he had hated school, did not prepare his work. All of this in spite of the fact that he basically was highly imaginative and, as it later turned out, demonstrated a rich mind and active intelligence. In his boyhood Soren presents the picture of the “little fellow,” who had learned early to be “sweet” to others, never to blow up, and, like the little countries in Europe in the eighteenth century, to get some protection by making alliances with different important members of the family. This self-deprecation pattern went so far, he confessed, that he preferred to be disliked in high school (the other boys had for him a disparaging nickname, “Sappo”) because that at least brought him some attention. Where does his power go? When he was sixteen he had had two epileptic attacks and had been on a daily dose of Dilantin since. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
These epileptic attacks are interesting for our purpose as a symptom of the seething cauldron of emotions under the surface in Soren. Whatever these attacks show physically, the psychological dimension is generally a massive rage. This rage builds up and finally explodes in the periodic seizure. The explosion is blotted out of consciousness, so the individual never has to be aware of, or has to be responsible for, what he does. However, it turns out to be violence directed chiefly against himself—the person himself gets physically hurt, to a greater or lesser degree, as he falls at the time of the seizure. Furthermore he is, like Soren, chronically crippled by having this Damocles’ Sword hanging over his head, never knowing when it will fall. All the while Soren denied this, saying: “I never get emotional or upset—I saw what it does to my sister so I vowed I would never get that way.” Soren’s dreams early in the therapy were frequently of thieves breaking into the house, which was a kind of fortress for him. The only thing he could do was to play dead, the ultimate symbol of impotence and innocence: A group of thieves was in the house. Someone came downstairs—I curled up as though dead. He looked at me a long time. After a while I went outside. The thieves grabbed me. Then a crowd of people were outside, where a woman began to chase me with a meat cleaver in her hand, and then a man took the cleaver and began to chase me. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
“I remember moments of unhappiness,” said Soren, “never any joy in our family. I learned to roll with the punches in family fights, to go along, never to expect anything—you get hurt that way. Why struggle? It is painful, and I learned early never to believe in pain of any sort…Nobody paid any attention to my feelings. I was always belittled.” This is similar to the way Memnoch felt about God creating human beings and their suffering. “I went up to Heaven,” he said, “ablaze with thoughts and doubts and speculations. I knew wrath. The cries of suffering mammals had taught me wrath. The screams and roars of wars amongst beings had taught me wrath. Decay and death had taught me fear. Indeed all of God’s Creation had taught all I needed to speed before him (God) and say, ‘Is this what you wanted! Your own image divided into male and female! The spark of life now blazing huge when either dies, male or female! This grotesquerie; this impossible division; this monster! Was this the plan?’” Soren and Memnoch are both like Gulliver, all tied up with ropes by Lilliputians, this is a symbol which betrays their own image of hidden power. Memnoch’s only happy time was before the creation of humans. Soren’s only happy time was the year he went to Israel. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
The Israeli-Arab war was beginning, and Soren covered it for an American newspaper. He looked back upon this period with fond memories; he loved the excitement, the enforced relationship with death in his walking along the Gaza strip among the bodies of fallen soldiers. For a brief period he left himself to be of some significance. He was twenty-four at this time, and Soren fell in love with a girl—the first time he had ever been in love. The occasion, as distinguished from the cause, of his coming for psychoanalysis was his turmoil over whether to marry this girl or not. His family was aligned against her, but when I met her she seemed a sympathetic though somewhat optimistic person who was someone Soren could talk and who gave him some recognition. About three months after his psychotherapy started, he told me that he believed he could influence distant objects to change. He was shy and hesitant in telling me this, saying he knew it sounded irrational and adding that if I did not believe what he said he could not tell me. I replied that my task was not to argue the truth or falsehood of such ideas; but to find out what function they served for him; and obviously the ideas were significant for him. This apparently satisfied him, for Soren then began to reveal a whole system of belief in “retribution” at the hands of God and in harm being meted out to others and punishment for wrongs they had done. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
When we awakens in the morning, Soren must think of his family or else they would get hurt. He must lift the sheets up two feet, look at an exact spot on the wall, stand up exactly the right way on the floor, go to the bathroom and urinate, all before he exchanged a word with anyone. He must take his clothes out, put on his undershirt, sit down on the bed and put his left shoe on first, then his trousers. If he makes a mistake in this ritual, he must go back to bed and start the whole thing over. After that he must say “good morning” to Charlotte (the maid) or to his brother. At breakfast he had to eat in the same rigid order; he must drink his orange juice, then eat his egg, then drink his milk. And so on. When he does something wrong in this system, his father will have a heart attack or something will happen to his mother. Punishment and happiness, he believed, were portioned out by God. Several years earlier Soren had been relatively happy when enrolled in journalism school. As a “result” his grandmother died because he had placed the book Huckleberry Finn in a certain position on his desk or because of the way he had placed his pennies on his dresser. When I, testing the rigidity of the system, asked whether his grandmother might not have died anyway, he replied, not at the time or in some other way. If Soren does right, others will benefit; if he does wrong, others, especially those in his own family, will get sick or have accidents. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Soren cannot have pleasures of the flesh, nor must he enjoy it very much. When he did experience pleasures of the flesh, he waited in fear for several days for the retribution to fall. Surely enough, two days later his mother was mugged and robbed in the train station in a neighboring city. What strikes us immediately in this complex system is the tremendous power it gives him. Any chance deed of his could decide whether someone lived or died. He even had power over the weather: “When it rains, the rain is sent by God to punish me.” He actually controlled the Universe that way. “I have to control everything about my life. I could not live if I did not control the future.” It is worthy of note that “control” was one of Soren’s favorite words, and he used it often. I contended myself at first by remarking that he must feel as if he were in a strait jacket with all those rigid compulsions, and did not he find it a heavy weight upon him? He agreed that it was difficult, but he had no choice. Moreover, he had not been able to read Faust when in high school because of all the “demons” running around in it, and even Mary Poppins was prohibited when it became filled with devils. He could not say the word that goes before Yankees in the title of a contemporary play. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
Soren did see the vast power that his system gave him, after I pointed it out to him. However, Memnoch was also very powerful. God created him and his followers first—the archangels were Memnoch, Michael, Gabriel, Uriel, and many others whose names have never been discovered—either inadvertently or deliberately. There were actually fifty archangels, and they were the first made. Memnoch is actually Satan. The archangels are very powerful because they are the ones who communicated in the most direct way with God, and also with the Earth. That is why they were labeled Guardian Angels, as well as Archangels. Much like Soren, the Archangels were sometimes given a low rank in religious literature, but they do not have a low rank. What they have is the greatest personality and the greatest flexibility between God and humans. However, whenever the Angels have a problem with God, they would take their concerns to Memnoch, so much like Soren a lot of power rested on his shoulders. Also, like Soren, Memnoch became rejected as he was deemed God’s accuser. Satan means accuser. “And the early religious writers, knowing only bits and pieces of the truth, thought it was man whom I accused, not God; but there are reasons for this, as you will soon see. You might say I have become the Great Accuser of everybody,” says Memnoch. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
Much like Soren, some thought Memnoch seemed “exasperated.” Soren have lived as a child, he knew, in such emotional disorder that he had to have something solid. He was compensating for a boyhood that was completely powerless. “I would allow people to use me to build themselves up,” he said; and one can be sure Soren have to take revenge. The neurotic power (or magic) is in direct proportion to the early powerlessness. Such a person will not and cannot five up his system until he experiences some real power in the actual World. That Soren had plenty of threats against which to protect himself is shown in several dreams that occurred during the weeks he was telling me about his retribution system. One was: “I was left in the house alone. A masked man and woman disguised as my mother and father broke into our house to attack me.” He also often dreamed of the Mafia, and suddenly asked one day: “Is my mother this Mafia, the enemy? Sometime pain is the punishment or is an alleviating factor. I then can give up the compulsions. Generally the compulsions does not affect my life, but it leaves me very frightened. In some ways it is like voodoo. I keep thinking may I have dome something I should not have. I do not want to be responsible for all those things happening.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Memnoch feels the say way as Soren, he does not want to be held responsible for everyone’s mistakes. “At times when I am angry and making speeches to all of Heaven, I accuse them…if you will pardon the expression again—of being held to Go as if by a magnet and not having a free will or personality such as we possess. But they have these things, they do, even the Ophanim, who are in general the least articulate or eloquent—in fact, Ophanim are likely to say nothing for eons—and any of these First Triad can be sent by God to do this and that, and have appeared on Earth, and some of the Seraphim have made rather spectacular appearances to men and women as well. To their credit, they adore God utterly, the experience without reserve the ecstasy of his presence, and he fills them completely so that they do not ask questions of him and they are more docile, or more truly aware of God, depending on one’s point of view,” Memnoch. So, you can see that both Memnoch and Soren feel frustrated and like they are the only ones who can keep the order and peace. However, is it not that Soren and Memnoch want the controlling the system not to continue—it gives their lives a tremendous sense of significance—but neither wants to accept the responsibility for the power. It is to be kept secret, not admitted openly; they both are a controller of life and death for countless people related to them, and no one but the both of them know it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
By acting as controller, Memnoch and Soren can preserve their façade of innocence. When people have to ask for help, and feel a need to be in control, it can be humiliating. Therefore, they have to work out a covert system of secret control over others while doing so. Much like Memnoch, Soren was a puppeteer, pulling wires, in reality or in fantasy, to direct his therapist, his girl friend, his professors, and everyone around him. Memnoch had to direct God, the Angels, and humans. They both are weak, greatly needing an authority figure and tried to maneuver people into taking the responsibility they felt they had. One must, at all costs, not let one’s power come out into the open or let oneself be seen as powerful; one must forever remain the innocent little boy or Angel. To make someone else responsible but powerless—this is the bind the Soren and Memnoch tried to put their authority figure in. It is the bind both of them had been in all of their lives. The pattern of God and retributions, I proposed, must have the effect of reversing the above pattern: it must be a way that one can be powerful with no responsibility. Memnoch and Soren had no confidence in the possibility of their changing; change must come from the outside. This conviction was necessary to keep the whole retribution system intact. Memnoch and Soren get their power by being secretly allied with God. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
All power remains with God; God requires that Soren and Memnoch have no autonomous power to assert themselves. If one once decided that one could make a fateful decision on one’s own, God himself would be challenged and the whole system would fall away like mist under the morning Sun. Taking responsibility upon one’s self, asserting one’s own autonomy, was challenging God and committing the sin of hubris. “Angels are not perfect. You can see that already. They are Created Beings. They do not know everything God knows, that is obvious to you and everyone else. However, they know a great deal; they know that all can be known in Time if they wish to know it; and that is where Angels differ, you see. Some wish to know everything in Time, and some care only for God and god’s reflection in those of his most devoted souls,” Anne Rice. One who has attained the consciousness of Overself puts in no claim to the attainment. One accepts it in so utterly natural and completely humble a manner than most people are deceived into regarding one as ordinary. One has not attained who is conscious that one has attained, for this very consciousness cunningly hides the ego and delivers one into its power. That alone is attainment which is natural, spontaneous, unforced, unaware, and unadvertised, whether to the being or to others. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
At this stage there is no struggle for further growth; it comes as softly and as naturally as a flower’s. There is no sacrifice of things the ego desires or clutches to itself, for there is such insight as to their worth or worthlessness that they stay or fall away of themselves. It is better to attain such high status without knowing it. For this absence of pride and presence of humility keeps the ego from threatening it. The actions of a being who has attained this degree are inspired directly by one’s Overself, and consequently are not dictated by personal wishes, purposes, passions, or desires. They are not initiated by one’s ego’s will higher than one’s own. Since there is no consciously deliberating thinking, no broken trends. There is only spontaneous thought, feeling, and action, all being directed by intuition. For one not to be aware that one is acting virtuously, courageously, wisely, or practicing contemplation beautifully, free from interfering mental images and thought, this is the ideal disposition. For then, if one does not know that one—the person—is doing so, no egoism will taint one’s consciousness. It will be pure being. One will do whatever has to be done by one as a human creature—whether it be a physical act or a mental one, one will respond to all situations that call for a human response, but neither the act nor the response will be accompanied by the personal ego. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
This does not mean that one’s Worldly life or one will suffer loss of identity—only that one will be isolated from the Worldly self-centered thought, desire, and motive which prompts the existence of the mass of people. One feels no need—so conspicuous in neurotics with a message—to call attention to oneself. Rather does one seek to keep it away. The strength of the enlightenment will determine the extent of its effects. An illumination maybe permanent but at the same time it may be only partial. Not until it is complete and lasting is it really philosophic. It is not only true that there is variety in the types of illumination but also true that there is a scale of degrees in the illumination itself. Until one has established permanently, although not necessarily at the very highest level, the consciousness can become corrupted, the being can fall back. “As I sit here and slowly close my eyes, I take another deep breath and feel the wind pass through my body. I am the one in your soul, reflecting inner light. Protect the ones who hold you, cradling in your inner child. I need serenity in a place where I can hide. I need serenity, nothing changes, days go by. Where do we go when we just do not know and how do we relight the flame when it is cold. Why do we dream when our thoughts mean nothing and when will we learn to control? Tragic visions slowly stole my life. Tore away everything, cheating me out of my time,” Serenity by Godsmack. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Good Health Generally Means the Ability to Resolve Contradictions—It is a Synthesis Like Breathing!
God created the Universe and Time. Well, we were astonished, and we were also enthralled! Absolutely enthralled. God said to us, “Watch this, because this will be beautiful and will exceed your conceptions and expectations, as it will Mine.” It is all garbled, in countless texts throughout the World. There are texts which are irretrievable now which contained amazingly accurate information about cosmology; and there are texts that mortals know; and there are texts that have been forgotten but which can be rediscovered in time. “And when he had sent the multitudes away, he went up into a mountain apart to pray: and when the evening was come, he was there alone,” reports Matthew 14.23. He was there alone. So are we. Beings are alone because they are mortal! In some way every creature is alone. In majestic isolation every star travels through the darkness of endless space. Each tree grows according to its own law, fulfilling its unique possibilities. Animals live, fight, and die for themselves alone, confined to the limitations of their bodies. Certainly, they also appear as male and female, in families and in flocks. Some of them are gregarious. However, all of them are alone! Being alive means being in a body—a body separated from all other bodies. And being separated means being alone. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
This is true of every creature, and it is more true of humans than any other creature. One is not only alone; one also knows that one is alone. Aware of what one is, one asks the question of one’s aloneness. One asks why one is alone, and how one can triumph over one’s being alone. For this aloneness one cannot endure. Neither can one escape it. It is one’s destiny to be alone and to be aware of it. Not even God can take this destiny away from one. In the story of paradise we read—“Then the Lord God said, It is not good that man should be alone.” And as we pondered, as we opened our arms and sang and tried to comfort them, while stepping invisibly and artfully through the material of Earth, something momentous made itself known to us, shocking us out of our explorations. Before our very eyes, the Twelfth Revelation of Physical Evolution was upon us! It struck us like the light from Heaven; it distracted us from the cries of the covert invisible! It shattered our reason. It caused our songs to become laughter and wails. The Twelfth Revelation of Evolution was that of the female of the human species had begun to look more distinctly different from the male of the human species by margin so great that no other anthropoid could compare! #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
The female grew pretty in our eyes, and seductive; the hair left her face, and her limbs grew graceful; her manner transcended the necessities of survival; and she became beautiful as flowers are beautiful, as the wings of birds are beautiful! What had risen, a female tender-skinned and radiant of face. And God created the woman from the body of Adam. Here an old myth is used to show that originally there was no bodily separation between man and woman; in the beginning they were one. Now they long to be one again. However, although they recognize each other as flesh of their own flesh, each remains alone. They look at each other, and despite their longing for each other, they see their strangeness. In the story, God himself makes them aware of this fact when he speaks to each of them separately, when he makes each one responsible for one’s own guilt, when he listens to their excuses and mutual accusations, when he pronounces a separate curse over each, and leave them to experience shame in the face of their nakedness. They are each alone. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
The creation of the woman has not overcome the situation which God describes as not good for man. He remains alone. And the creation of the woman, although it provides a helper for Adam, has only presented to the one human being who is alone another human being who is equally alone, and from their flesh all other beings, each of whom will stand alone. We ask, however—is this really so? Did not God accomplish something better? Is not our aloneness largely removed in the encounter of the genders? Certainly it is during hours of communion and in moments of love. The ecstasy of love can absorb one’s own self in its union with the other self, and separation seems to be overcome. However, after these moments, the isolation of self from self is felt even more deeply than before, sometimes ever to the point of mutual repulsion. We have given too much of ourselves, and now we long to take back what was given. Our desire to protect our aloneness is expressed in the feeling of shame. When our intimate self, mental or bodily is opened, we feel ashamed. We try to cover our vulnerability, as did Adam and Eve when they became conscious of themselves. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
Thus, man and woman remain alone even in the most intimate union. They cannot penetrate each other’s innermost center. And if this were not so, they could not be helpers to each other’ they could not have human community. This is why God himself cannot liberate mortals from their aloneness: it is human’s greatness that one is centered within one’s own being. Separated from one’s World, one is thus able to look at it. Only because one can look at it can one know and love and transform it. God, in creating one the ruler of the Earth, had to separate one and thrust one into aloneness. Humans are also therefore able to be spoken to by God and by other beings. One can ask questions and give answers and make decisions. One has the freedom for good or evil. Only one who has an impenetrable center in oneself is free. Only one who is alone can claim to be a human. This is the greatness and this is he burden of being. “In the sweat of thy face shalt thou eat bread.” From this primal decree millions of human beings are now liberated. More and more beings have more and more leisure. The working day grows shorter, the week end longer. More and more women are released at an earlier age from the heavier tasks of the rearing of children, in the small family of today, when kindergarten and school and clinic and restaurant come to their assistance. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
More and more people are freed for other things, released from the exhaustion of their energies in the mere satisfaction of elementary wants. No longer is the pattern so simple as that of Longfellow’s blacksmith, who something attempted, something done, had earned a night’s repose. Released from what? When necessity no longer drives, when people own long hors in which to do what they want, what do they want to do? Where necessity is heavy upon beings, they yearn for the joys of leisure. Now many have enough leisure. What are the joy they find? The shorter working day is also a different working day. Nearly all people work for others, not for themselves—not the way a person works who has one’s own little plot of Earth and must give oneself up to its cultivation. For many, work has become a routine—not too onerous, not too rewarding, and by no means engrossing—a daily routine until the bell rings and sets them free again. For what? It is a marvelous liberation for those who learn to use it; and there are many ways. It is the great emptiness for those who do not. People of a placid disposition do not know the great emptiness. When the day’s work done, they betake themselves to their quiet interests, their hobbies, their gardens or their amateur workbenches or their stamp collecting or their games or their affairs or their church activities or whatever it be. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
When they need more sting in life, they have a mild “fling,” taking a little “moral holiday.” Some find indulgence enough in the vicarious pleasure of snidely malicious gossip. Their habits are early formed and they keep a modicum of contentment. However, the number of the placid is growing less. The conditions of our civilization do not encourage that mood. For one thing, the old-time acceptance of authority, as God-given or nature-based, is much less common. Religion is for very many an ancient tale, a tale of little meaning, though the words are strong, reduced to ritual or the moral precepts of the Sunday pulpit. There is little allegiance to the doctrine that every being has allotted place. How could there be when competition has become a law of life? There is incessant movement and disturbance and upheaval. And with the new leisure there come new excitations, new stimuli to unrest. So the new leisure has brought its seeming opposite, restlessness. And because these cannot be reconciled the great emptiness comes. Faced with the great emptiness, unprepared to meet it, most people resort to one or another way of escape, according to their kind. Those who are less conscious of their need succeed in concealing it from themselves. They find their satisfaction in the great new World of means without ends. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Those who are more conscious of their need cannot conceal it; they only distract themselves from the thought of it. Their common recourse is excitation, and they seek it in diverse ways. The first kind are the go-getters. When they are efficient or unscrupulous or both, they rise in the World. They amass things. They make some money. They win some place and power. Not for anything, not to do anything with it. Their values are relative, which means they are no values at all. They make money to make more money. They win some power that enables them to seek more power. They are practical beings. They keep right on being practical, until their unlived lives are at an end. If they stopped being practical, the great emptiness would engulf them. They are like planes that must keep on flying because they have no landing gear. The engines go fast and faster, but they are going nowhere. They make good progress to nothingness. They take pride in their progress. They are outdistancing other beings. They are always calculating the distance they have gained. It shows what can be done when you have the know-how. They feel superior and that sustains them. They stay assured in the World of means. What matters is winning. “But what good cam of it at last?” Ouoth little Peterkin. “Why that I cannot tell,” said he, “But ’twas a famous victory.” Victory for the sake of the winning, means for the sake of the acquiring, that is success. So the circle spins forever means without end, World without end. Amen. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
One will find that the onset of insight will not be at all like the picture of it which one had previously and erroneously formed. When one awakens to truth as it really is, one will have no occult vision, one will have no astral experience, no ravishing ecstasy. One will awaken to it in a state of utter stillness, and one will realize that truth was always there within one and that reality was always there around one. Truth is not something which has grown and developed through your efforts. It is not something which has been achieved or attained by laboriously adding up those efforts. It is not something which has to be made more and more perfect each year. And once your mental eyes are opened to truth they can never be closed again. The discovery of one’s true being is not outwardly dramatic, and for a long time no one may know of it, except oneself. The World may not honour one for it: one may die as obscure as one lived. However, the purpose of one’s life has been fulfilled; and God’s will has been done. There is nothing melodramatic about realization of Truth. Those who look for marvels look in vain, unless indeed its bestowal of singular serenity is a marvel. No one really knows ho this enlightenment first dawns on one. One moment it was not there, the next moment one was somehow in it. No announcements tell the World that one has come into enlightenment. No heralds blow the trumpets proclaiming being’s greatest victory—over oneself. This is in fact the quietest moment of one’s whole life. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
To find out that one’s way does lie through cults, in the hope of finding one to suit one, ventures into a danger-beset field, where lunacy is often mistaken for illumination and where exaggerated claims substitute for solid facts. The desire for power over others, for authority, is a form of personal ambition which has, in the past, mixed easily with a spiritual glimpse. A new sect, a new movement, has then come to birth. The seeker after truth who comes in contact with it would be far safer to take some of the teaching without sacrificing one’s freedom, without joining the group. If any work, institution, or organization is centered in the Overself it cannot fall into the base, negative, or selfish currents which, in the historic past, have polluted, poisoned, and sometimes destroyed so many tasks and enterprises. The fears which repression serves to overcome may also be overcome by keeping the hostility under conscious control. However, whether one controls or represses hostility is not a matter of choice, because repression is a reflex-like process. It occurs if in a particular situation it is unbearable to be aware that one is hostile. In such a case, of course, there is no possibility of conscious control. The main reasons why awareness of hostility may be unbearable are that one may love or need a person at the same time that one is hostile toward one, that one may not want to see the reasons, such as envy or possessiveness, which have promoted the hostility or, that it may be frightening to recognize within one’s self hostility toward anyone. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
In such circumstances repression is the shortest and quickest way toward an immediate reassurance. By repression the frightening hostility disappears from awareness, or is kept from entering awareness. I should like to repeat this sentence in other words, because for all its simplicity it is one of those psychoanalytic statements which is but rarely understood: if hostility is repressed the person has not the remotest idea that one is hostile. The quickest way toward a reassurance, however, is not necessarily the safest way in the long run. By the process of repression the hostility—or to indicate its dynamic character we had better use here the term rage—is removed from conscious awareness but is not abolished. Split off from the context of the individual’s personality, and hence beyond control, it revolves within one as an affect which is highly explosive and eruptive, and therefore tends to be discharged. The explosiveness of the repressed affect is all the greater because by its very isolation it assumes larger and often fantastic dimensions. As long as one is aware of animosity its expansion is restricted in a few different ways. First, consideration of the circumstances as they are in a given situation shows one what one can and what one cannot do toward an enemy or alleged enemy. Second, if the anger concerns one whom one otherwise admires or likes or needs, the anger will sooner or later become integrated into the totality of one’s feelings. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
Finally, inasmuch as a being has developed a certain sense of what is appropriate to do or not to do, personality being as it is, this too will restrict one’s hostile impulses. If the anger is repressed, then access to these restricting possibilities is cut off, with the result that the hostile impulses trespass the restrictions from inside and outside, though only in fantasy. If the chemist I mentioned yesterday had followed his impulses he would have wanted to tell others how Kirk had abused his friendship, or to intimate to his superior that Kirk had stolen his idea or kept him from pursuing it. Since his anger was repressed it became dissociated and expanded, as would probably have shown in his dreams; it is likely that in his dream he committed murder in some symbolic form, or became an admired genius, while others went disgracefully to pieces. By its very dissociation the repressed hostility will in the course of time usually because intensified from outside sources. For instance, if a high employee has developed an anger toward his chief, because the chief had made arrangements without discussing them with him, and if the employee represses his anger, never remonstrating against the procedure, the superior will certainly keep on acting over his head. Thereby new anger is constantly generated. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
The neurotic attitude calls forth a reaction of the environment, by which the attitude itself is reinforced, with the result that the person is more and more caught, and greater and greater difficulty escaping. This phenomenon is called Teufelskreia. Another consequence of repressing hostility arises from the fact that a person registers within oneself the existence of a highly explosive affect which is beyond control. Before discussing the consequences of this we have to consider a question which it suggests. By definition the result of repressing an affect or an impulse is that the individual is no longer aware of its existence, so that in one’s conscious mind ones does not know that one has any hostile feelings toward another. How then can I say that one registers the existence of the repressed affect within oneself? The answer is possessed in the fact that there is no strict alternative between consciousness and unconscious, but that there are several levels of consciousness. Not only is the repressed impulse still effective—one of the basic discoveries of Dr. Freud—but also in a deeper level of consciousness the individual knows about its presence. Reduced to the most simple terms possible this means that fundamentally we cannot fool ourselves, that actually we observe ourselves better than we are aware of doing, just as we usually observe others better than we are aware of doing—as shown, for example, in the correctness of the first impression we ger from a person—but we may have stringent reasons for not taking cognizance of our observations. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
For the sake of saving repetitive explanations I shall use the term register when I mean that we know what is going on within us without our being aware of it. These consequences of repressing hostility may themselves be sufficient to create anxiety, provided always that the hostility and its potential danger to other interests are sufficiently great. States of vague anxiety may be built in this way. More often, however, the process does not come to a standstill at this point, because there is an imperative need to get rid of the dangerous affect which from within menaces one’s interest and security. A second reflex-like process sets in: the individual projects one’s hostile impulses to the outside World. The first pretense, the repression, requires a second one: one pretends that the destructive impulses come not from one but from someone or something outside. Logically the person on whom one’s own hostile impulses will be projected is the person against whom they are directed. The result is that this person now assumes formidable proportions in one’s mind, partly because in any danger the degree of potency depends not only on the factual conditions but also on the attitude taken toward them. The more defenseless one is the greater the danger appears. The anxiety with which we react to a danger does not depend mechanically on the realistic greatness of the danger. An individual who has developed mechanically an attitude of helplessness and passivity will react with anxiety to a comparatively small danger. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
As by-function the projection also serves the need for self-justification. It is not the individual oneself who wants to cheat, to steal, to exploit, to humiliate, but the others want to do such things to one. A wife who is unaware of her own impulses to ruin her husband and subjectively convince ed that she is most devoted may, because of this mechanism, consider her husband to be a brute wanting to harm her. The process of projection may or may not be supported by another process working to the same end: a retaliation fear may get hold of the repressed impulse. In this case a person who wants to injure, cheat, deceive others has also a fear that they will do the dame to him. How far the retaliation fear is a general characteristic ingrained in human nature, how far it arises from primitive experiences of sin and punishment, how far it presupposes a drive for personal revenge, I leave as an open question. Beyond doubt it plays a great role in the minds of neurotic person. These processes brought about by repressed hostility result in the affect of anxiety. In fact, the repression generates exactly the state which is characteristic of anxiety: a feeling of defenselessness toward what is felt an overpowering danger menacing from outside. “Tell them to fear not, for God will deliver them, yea, and also all those who stand fast in that liberty wherewith God hath made them free,” Alma 6.21. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
Get thee Behind Me, Satan! God Moves the World Only by Love—For Thine is the Power and the Glory Forever!
We have souls, you and I. We want to know things; we share the same Earth, rich and verdant and fraught with perils. We do not—either of us—know what it means to die, no matter what we might say to the contrary. It is a cinch that if we did, we would not study history and religion. In the early nineties of the twentieth century, Italian fashion had flooded the market with so much shapeless, hangy, bulky, formless attire that one of the most erotic and flattering garments a man could choose was the well-tailored navy-blue Brooks Brothers suit. Remember we talked about the fabric of life ripping for a moment so you glimpsed thing you should not have seen? I had the same experience. And I thought, not many mortals would like to go prowling about this dark building, and the place is not entirely spiritually clean. Little spirits, elementals. Well, there are some gathered about this building, but they are no threat. God and the Devil are arguing about me. And now I have a sleepless mind in my heart because my teacher has a dangerous emotional grip to her lectures. The bureaucrat’s official life is planned for one in terms of a graded career, through the organizational devices of promotion by seniority, pension, incremental salaries, and so forth, all of which are designed to provide incentives for disciplined action and conformity to the official regulations. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
The official is tacitly expected to and largely does adapt one’s thoughts, feelings and action to the prospect of this career and the benefits that come with it. However, these very devices which increase the probability of conformance also lead to an over-concern with strict adherence to regulations which induces timidity, conservatism, and technicism. Displacement of sentiments from goals onto means is fostered by the tremendous symbolic significance of the means (rules). Another feature of the bureaucratic structure tends to produce much the same result. Functionaries have the sense of a common destiny for all those who work together. They share the same interests, especially since there is relatively little competition insofar as promotion is in terms of seniority. In-group aggression is thus minimized and this arrangement is therefore conceived to be absolutely functional for the bureaucracy. However, the esprit de corps and informal social organization which typically develops in such situations often leads the personnel to defend their entrenched interests rather than to assist their clientele and elected higher officials. If the bureaucrats believe that their status is not adequately recognized by an incoming elected official, detailed information will be withheld from one, leading one to errors for which one is held responsible. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Or, if one seeks to dominate fully, and this violates the sentiment of self-integrity of the bureaucrats, one may have documents brought to one in such numbers that one cannot manage to sign them all, let alone read them. This illustrates the defensive informal organization which tends to arise whenever there is an apparent threat to the integrity of the group. It would be much too facile and partly erroneous to attribute such resistance by bureaucrats simply to vested interests. Vested interest opposes any new order which either eliminates or at least makes uncertain their differential advantage deriving from the current arrangements. This is undoubtedly involved in part in bureaucratic resistance to change but another process is perhaps more significant. As we have seen, bureaucratic officials affectively identify themselves with their way of life. They have a pride of craft which leads them to resist change in established routines; at least, those changes which are felt to be imposed by others. This nonlogical pride of craft is a familiar pattern found even—to judge from Sutherland’s Professional Thief—among pickpockets who, despite the risk, delight in mastering the prestige-bearing feat of “beating a left breech” (picking the left front trousers pocket). #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
In a stimulating paper, Everett Hughes has applied the concepts of secular and sacred to various types of division of labor; the sacredness of caste and Stande prerogatives contrast sharply with the increasing secularism of occupational differentiation in our society. However, as our discussion suggests, there may ensue, in particular vocations and in particular types of organizations, the process of sanctification (viewed as the counterpart of the process of secularization). This is to say that through sentiment-formation, emotional dependence upon bureaucratic symbols and status, and affective involvement in sphere of competence and authority, there develop prerogatives involving attitudes of moral legitimacy which are established as values in their own right, and are no longer viewed as merely technical means for expediting administration. One may note a tendency for certain bureaucratic norms, originally introduced for technical reasons, to become rigidified and sacred, although they are laique en apparence. In this general process conveyed ate the attitudes and values which persist in the organic solidarity of a highly differentiated society. Another feature of the bureaucratic structure, the stress on depersonalization of relationships, also plays its part in the bureaucrat’s trained incapacity. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
The personality pattern of the bureaucrat is nucleated about this norm of impersonality. Both this and the categorizing tendency, which develops from the dominant role of general, abstract rules, tend to produce conflict in the bureaucrat’s contacts with the public or clientele. Since functionaries minimize personal relations and resort to categorization, the peculiarities of the individual cases are often ignored. However, the client who, quite understandably, is convinced of the special features of one’s own problem often objects to such categorical treatment. Stereotyped behavior is not adapted to the exigencies of individual problems. The impersonal treatment of affairs which are at times of great personal significance to the client give rise to the charge of arrogance and haughtiness of the bureaucrat. Thus, at the Greenwich Employment Exchange, the unemployed worker who is securing one’s insurance payment resents what he deems to be the impersonality and, at times, the apparent abruptness and harshness of one’s treatment by the clerks. Some beings complain of the superior attitude which the clerks have. Still another source of conflict with the public derives from the bureaucratic structure. The bureaucrat, in part irrespective of one’s position within the hierarchy, acts as a representative of power and prestige of the entire structure. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
In one’s official role one is vested with definite authority. This often leads to an actually or apparently domineering attitude, which may only be exaggerated by a discrepancy between one’s position within the hierarchy and one’s position with reference to the public. Protest and recourse to other officials on the part of the client are often ineffective or largely precluded by the previously mentioned espirt de corps which joins the officials into a more or less solidary in-group. This source of conflict may be minimized in private enterprise since the client can register an effective protest by transferring one’s trade to another organization within the competitive system. However, with the monopolistic nature of the public organization, no such alternative is possible. Moreover, in this case, tension is increased because of a discrepancy between ideology and fact: the governmental personnel are held to be servants of the people, but in fact they are often superordinate, and release of tension can seldom be afforded by turning to other agencies for the necessary service. This tension is in part attributable to the confusion of the status of bureaucrat and client; the client may consider oneself socially superior to the official who is at the moment dominant. “Know ye not that ye are in the hands of God? Know ye not that he hath all power, and at his great command that Earth shall be rolled together as a scroll?” (Reports Mormon 5.20). #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Thus, with respect to the relations between officials and clientele, one structural source of conflict is the pressure for formal and impersonal treatment when individual, personalized consideration is desired by the client. The conflict may be viewed, then, as deriving from the introduction of inappropriate attitudes and relationships. Conflict within the bureaucratic structure arises from the converse situation, namely, when personalized relationships are substituted for the structurally required impersonal relationships. This type of conflict may be characterized as follows. The bureaucracy, as we have seen, is organizes as a secondary, formal group. The normal responses involved in this organized network of social expectations are supported by affective attitudes of members of the group. Since the group is orientated toward secondary norms of impersonality, any failure to conform to these norms will arouse antagonism from those who have identified themselves with the legitimacy of these rules. Hence, the substitution of personal for impersonal treatment within the structure is met with widespread disapproval and is characterized by such epithets as graft, favoritism, nepotism, apple-polishing, buttering the bread, and so forth. These epithets are clearly manifestations of injured sentiments. The function of such virtually automatic resentment can be clearly seen in terms of the requirements of bureaucratic structure. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Bureaucracy is a secondary group structure designed to carry on certain activities which cannot be satisfactorily performed on the basis of primary group criteria. Hence behavior which runs counter to these formalized norms becomes the object of emotionalized disapproval. This constitutes a functionally significant defense set up against tendencies which jeopardize the performance of socially necessary activities. To be sure, these reactions are not rationally determined practices explicitly designed for the fulfillment of this function. Rather, viewed in terms of the individual’s interpretation of the situation, such as resentment is simply an immediate response opposing the dishonesty of those who violate the rules of the game. However, this subjective frame of reference notwithstanding these reactions serve the latent function of maintaining the essential structural elements of bureaucracy by reaffirming the necessity for formalized, secondary relations and by helping to prevent the disintegreation of the bureaucratic structure which would occur should these be supplanted by personalized relations. This type of conflict may be generically described as the intrusion of primary group attitudes when secondary group attitudes are institutionally demanded, just as the bureaucrat-conflict often derives from interaction on impersonal terms when personal treatment is individually demanded. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
An interesting variation on the theme of power and love is seen in television show Big Little Lies, starring Oscar winning actress Reese Witherspoon. In this portrayal of a small town, the women have no overt power at all—no economic power, no political power. The only power they have is covert, connected with the pleasures of the flesh. They are condemned to innocence. They accept the pretense of their innocence, which takes the form of coyness and pretended modesty, and they trade on it. It is their moral position, and it turns out to be quite immoral. One young lady who wants to lose her virginity to make herself more desirable takes her boyfriend to a hot sheets motel, orders him to perform pleasures of the flesh. When he, understandably for the situation, is important, she heaps scorn upon him. However, she tells the others young ladies waiting outside: “It was so wonderful, I cannot describe it in words.” It turns out that the woman have power over the men at every turn; the men can only do their best to live up to the women’s demands and expectations. All of the drive for these gyrations comes from the women who have been kept powerless and have only their pretense of innocence as their shield. “And after Christ truly has showed himself unto his people he commanded that they should be made manifest,” reports Ether 4. 2. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
Another interesting aspect of the problem of power and love is the phenomenon of jealously. I shall not go into the question of whether some element of jealousy, as a function of caring and valuing the other person, is normally and healthy beyond saying that I believe it probably is. However, what is generally called jealousy surely goes far beyond that normal care. It is a possessiveness which arises in direct proportion to the impotence of the individual. That is, the degree to which one feels jealous. One can do nothing; one has not power in oneself to win the loved one back; and one has not power in oneself as left out completely in the cold. In such situations jealousy can become a form of violence. One young man, near the beginning of his analysis, could not reach his sweetheart in Rocklin by phone and was seized with a fit of jealousy. He immediately took a plane to Rocklin which is a city in California USA, half hoping to find her in bed with another man. This young man was threatened greatly because his sense of powerlessness was so great. I put the word hoping in to indicate that jealousy often arises from a special ambivalence in the relationship: the person loves but he also hates—that is, he would almost prefer it if she did force him, by having pleasures of the flesh with another, to break off the relationship. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Jealousy characterizes the relationship in which one seeks more power than love. It occurs when the person has not been able to build up enough self-esteem, enough sense of one’s own power, one’s own right to live, as Mercedes’s declared. Neurotic jealousy, strangely enough, may occur most strongly wen the love is not very solid or well founded. It is a reflection of the person’s feeling of inability to win the other back. This power gone awry and can be very time-consuming and destructive. The jealous person seems to have a need to put all, in this case, of his energy into the jealous fit, partly to prove a love that underneath he feels to be very problematic anyway. “Darling you see now that it was never, we are never what we see. Set you up to let you down, I am afraid. Darling do you see how our lies become the truth. We never said what we meant. Darling it feels good when they let you in. Do not play the fool. They will only let you down if you stay. We cannot all be broken down, I am afraid. Holy Hell, we have hit the bottom running to the ones we love, to the ones we hurt,” reports Broken Down by Tritonal. The boundaries of power and love overlap each other. Love makes the person who loves want to be influenced and want to do what the loved one wishes. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
The intertwining of love and power is shown in relationships between lovers and between husbands and wife in the concern for the dignity of the other, the preservation of his or her independent self. It is shown in child-rearing in the firm structure that the understanding adult gives to the child. Assertion, affirmation of the self, and even aggression at times are not only unavoidable but healthy in the developing love relationship. Some readers may wish to call nutrient power and integrative power actually forms of love. I agree with their meaning, but I think it best to guard against power and love being swallowed up in each other. Hence I prefer to keep their separate meanings clear. However, we can say that the lower forms of power—exploitative, manipulative—have a very minimum of love in them, while the higher forms—nutrient, integrative—have more. In other words, the higher up the scale we go, the more love we find. Even in the religious realm, the belief that God moves the World only by love is sentimentality. Persons who are of the opinion forget that the first of the General Confession is Almighty, and the Lord’s prayer ends with for Thine is the power and the glory forever. Often the Beatitudes are similarly misinterpreted—“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth”—as well as the story of Jesus saying, when he is offered all power over the Earth: “Get thee behind me, Satan.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
However, we need to take into consideration that Christianity was born in a World in which the Roman army occupied the whole known as the globe; and any kind of political power or lack of meekness would have meant that one would get oneself quickly executed. Our problem is now different: we stand in a World dominated by giant technology. If they are to survive at all, men and women must be able to asset the power of their conciseness. Social action—work for radical justice, international peace, helping of the poor, and so on—would not be possible without a combination of power and love. Joy does not come from submission and abnegation, but from assertion. Joy is only a symptom of the feeling of attained power. The essence of joy is an absolute feeling of power. However, if they coincide with culturally approved forms of inhibitions or with existing ideologies, it may be impossible ever to become aware of personal inhibitions. A patient who had serious inhibitions against approaching women was not aware of being inhibited because he saw his conduct in the light of the accepted idea of the sacredness of women. When the glimpse experience has been repeated many times, it will come to be looked upon as a natural experience. The state it induced will seem to be a normal one. The miracle which the beginner makes of it will seem an unnecessary exaggeration to the matured proficient being. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
An inhibition against making demands is easily put on the basis of the strict and rigid doctrines that modesty is a virtue; and inhibition against critical thinking about strict and rigid doctrines dominant in politics or religion or any specific field of interest may escape attention, and we may be entirely unaware of the existence of an anxiety concerning the exposure to punishment, criticism or isolation. In order to judge the situation, however, we must of course know the individual factors in great detail. The absence of critical thought does not necessarily imply the existence of inhibitions, but may be due to a general laziness of mind, to stupidity or to conviction that really coincides with the dominant doctrines of the strict and rigid type. A number of factors may account for the inability to recognize existing inhibitions and for the fact that even experienced psychoanalysts may find it difficult to detect them. However, even assuming that we could recognize all of them, our estimate of the frequency of inhibitions would still be too low. We would have to take into account all those reactions which, although not fully grown inhibitions, are on the way toward that culmination. In the attitudes I have in mind we are still able to do certain things, but the anxiety connected with them exerts certain influences on the activities themselves. When we define creativity, we must make the distinction between its pseudo forms, on the one hand—that is, creativity as a superficial aestheticism. And, on the other, its authentic form—that is, the process of bringing something new into being. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
The crucial distinction is between art as artificiality (as in artifice or artful) and genuine art. This is distinction that artists and philosophers have struggled all through the centuries to make clear. Plato, for example, demoted his poets and his artist down to the sixth circle of reality because, he said, they deal only with appearances and not with reality itself. He was referring to art as a decoration, a way of making life prettier, a dealing with semblances. However, in his later, beautiful dialogue, the Symposim, he described what he called the true artists—namely, those who give birth to some new reality. These poets and other creative persons are the ones who express being itself, he held. As I would put it, these are the ones who enlarge human consciousness. Their creativity is the most basic manifestation of a man or woman fulfilling his or her own being in the World. Now, if our inquiries into creativity are to get below the surface, we must make the above distinction clear. We are thus not dealing with hobbies, do-it-yourself movements, Sunday painting, or other forms of filling up leisure time. Nowhere has the meaning of creativity been more disastrously lost than in the idea that it is something you do only on week ends! The creative process must be explored not as the product of sickness, but as representing the highest degree of emotional health, as the expression of the normal people in the act of actualizing themselves. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Creativity must be seen in the work of the scientist as well as in that of the artist, in the thinker as well as in the aesthetician; and one must not rule out the extent to which it is present in captains of modern technology as well as in a mother’s normal relationship with her child. Creativity rightly indicates a process of making, of bringing into being. So much so that some people believe that science is becoming the new God, and the metaphysical speculations are the cold and calculating path to that goal. Rather than formulaic truths, therefore, or reductionist explanations of how and why we do what we do, and this is why some still advocate inwardness and passion. In reality, neither objectivism, with its emphasis on the publicly measurable and verifiable, nor subjectivism, with its accent on the private and emotional, can, in isolation, provide us with a complete picture of human functioning. Only taken together can they help us to understand our condition. The problem is that (particularly) objectivism has grown so monstrous in recent years and has become so top-heavy that it threatened to crush subjectivism—leaving us to pull levers and push bottoms for many of our needs. We do need rules, regulations, and formulas, but these things do not always help us to comprehend the richer aspects of living, such as the capacity to love, create, and marvel at the stars. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
We need to redress the imbalance that has emerged and forge a broader, more inclusive position. For truth exists only as the individual produces it in action. Away from speculation, away from the system, and back to reality, the more consciousness, the more self. Personhood is a synthesis of possibility and necessity. Beings exist on many levels, some of which are contradictory and some of which are fathomless. Our task is to affirm these various facets of our existence and not to reduce or deny them. The difference between the intermediate and the final state is the difference between feeling the Overself to be a distinct and separate entity and feeling it to be the very essence of oneself, between temporary experience of it and enduring union with it. Whereas when it first occurs, the glimpse may be a dramatic experience, being established is natural, simple, pleasant but not rapturous, and continuously aware. We must learn to differentiate between the partial attainment of the mystic who stops short at passive enjoyment of ecstatic states and the perfect attainment of the sage who does not depend on any particular states but dwells in the unbroken calm of the unconditioned Overself. From one’s high point of view all such states are necessarily illusory, however personally satisfying at the time, inasmuch as they are transient conditions and do not pertain to the final result. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
If the illumination itself is to be total pure, and reliable, all aspects of being’s nature needs to be illuminated and equably balanced. The self is a synthesis of infinitude and finitude, that relates itself to itself, whose task is to become itself. The self is a synthesis of which the finite is the limiting and the infinite the extending factor. When the overemphasize either polarity, when they become too finitized or infinitized, some beings become dysfunctional. The cold, pedantic objectivist, to further illustrate this description, may be understood as excessively finitized; while the fiery, indulgent subjectivist may be viewed as over infinitized. Infiniude’s despair is to lack or avoid finitude. Infinitude’s despair is the fantastic, the unlimited. As a rule, imagination is the medium for the process of infinitizing. The self then leads a fantasized existence moving further and further away from itself. It flounders in possibility until exhausted. Finitude’s despair is to lack or avoid infinitude, to lack infinitude is despairing reductionism, narrowness. Whereas one kind of despair plunges wildly into the infinite and loses itself, this kind permits itself to be tricked out of itself by other beings. A person in such a state forgets oneself, forgets one’s name, does not dare to believe in oneself, and find it far easier and safer to be like other, to become a copy, a number, a mass being. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Good health generally means the ability to resolve contradictions. It is a synthesis like breathing which is an inhaling and exhaling. A passionate-realistic hero, a knight of faith has precisely these qualities. However, ignorance of it is widespread among would-be heroes and mystics and even among real mystics. If there is contradiction between their results, it is because they too often experience the illumination fully through their feelings, to a limited extent through their wills, and hardly at all through their intellects. Many people, however, feel in their youth and inexperience and weakness that at their age there is a need for some kind of support from outside, some group to give then not merely fellowship but also a feeling of solidity and stability, something to learn upon, in short. This can teach others a lesson and make them understand sympathetically that the love of independence to ensure a free search, and the desire for self-reliance do not belong to everybody, and others, certainly most people, have other needs, prefer other ways, for which there is also room in human life. Organizational life can be helpful to our early efforts and guide our early steps. “I am under your spell. Bound and blind and only you can save me. I am tangled up inside, caught in your web. I am hypnotized and only you can wake me. Only you can bring this heart to life,” reports Under Your Spell by Cosmic Gate. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
There is a place for a society of friends, but this place is a preliminary one. If the final work of a seeker is to be done for and upon oneself, that does not displace the necessity of an institution in assisting one to do the preparatory work. Therefore, even the advance mystic, who has no need of its services, cannot in principle be hostile to an institution. One readily admits its necessity and denies only its all-sufficiency. These groups led by a guru (hopefully with all their wires in their brains properly connected) may be quite useful to a beginner who is stumbling in the dark. However, to join one without knowing the limitations and dangers would be foolish. When unled, religious followers begin to organize themselves either quite spontaneously, or when a leader appears, they organize themselves quite obediently for several good understandable reasons. The coming together in a compact group affords some protection, offers them a mode of expression and the teaching a mode of preservation. The strength of such a group must be possessed in its quality and not in its members. It must be the result not of propaganda activities but of the spontaneous association of like-thinking people. It is true that there are many eccentrics among these believers and they are still serious and sensible and well-behaved. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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It is a State Which Has Been Attained in its Fullness by Only a Few Persons During Each Century but Glimpsed at Least Once in a Lifetime by Many More!
What have the many towers of great Rocklin to do with this endless sprawling World that comes so close to it. Wence came this metropolis of America with its clear blue skies and its vast teeming hillside McMansions? Beauty is beauty where you find it. At night, even these Spanish colonial cottages as they call them—the thousands upon thousands of houses that cover the streets on either side with their beautiful green lawns—are darling, for they have water, landscaping, sewerage, electricity, and they are peaceful and beyond all modern questions healthy and comfortable, and are strung with bright, shining electric lights. Sometimes it seems that light can transform anything! That is an undeniable and irreducible blessing of God’s grace. However, do the people of the suburbs know this? Is it for beauty that they do it? Or do they merely want a comfortable illumination in their beauty Cresleigh Homes? It does not matter. We cannot stop ourselves from making beauty. We cannot stop the World. Of course there is a way to stop the rampant spread of beauty. It has to do with regimentation, conformity, assembly-line aesthetics, and the triumph of the functional over the grandeur and marvelous. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
One of the by-produces of the development of mechanical devices and mechanical standards has been the nullification of skill. What has taken place here within the factory has also taken place in the final utilization of its products. The safety razor, for example, has changed the operation of shaving from a hazardous one, best left to a trained barber, to a rapid commonplace of the day which even the most inept males can perform. The automobile has transformed engine-driving from the specialized take of the locomotive engineer to the occupation of millions of amateurs. The camera has in part transformed the artful reproduction of the wood engraver to a relatively simple photo-chemical process in which anyone can acquire at least the rudiments. As in manufacture the human function first becomes specialized, then mechanized, and finally automatic or at least semi-automatic. When the last stage is reached, the function again takes on some of its original non-specialized character: photography helps recultivate the eye, the telephone the voice, the radio the ear, just as the BMW motor car has restored some of the manual and operative skills that the machine was banishing from other departments of existence at the same time that it has given to the driver a sense of power and autonomous direction—a feeling of firm command in the midst of potentially constant danger—that had been taken away from one in other departments of life by the machine. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
So, too, mechanization, by lessening the need for domestic service, has increased the amount of personal autonomy and personal participation in the household. In short, mechanization creates occasions for human effort; and on the whole the effects are more educative than were the semi-automatic services of slaves and menials in the older civilizations. For the mechanical nullification of skill can take place only up to a certain point. It is only when one has completely lost power of discrimination that a standardized Campbells canned soup can, without further preparation, take the place of a home-cooked one, or when one has lost prudence completely that a four-wheel brake or a BMW with XDrive can serve instead of a good driver. Inventions like these increase the province and multiple the interests of the amateur. When automatism becomes general and the benefits of mechanization are socialized, beings will be back once more in the Edenlike state which they have existed in regions of natural increment, like the South Seas: the ritual of leisure will replace the ritual of work, and work itself will become a kind of game. That is, in fact, the ideal goal of a completely mechanized and automatized system of power production: the elimination of work: the universal achievement of leisure. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
In pondering slavery, when the shuttle wove by itself and the plectrum played by itself chief working people would not need helpers nor masters slaves. It is believed that beings were in the process of establishing the eternal validity of slavery; but for us today, this is just a way of justifying the existence of the machine. Work, it is true, is the constant form of being’s interaction with one’s environment, if by work one means the sum total of exertions necessary to maintain life; and lack of work usually means an impairment of function and a breakdown in organic relationship that leads to substitute forms of work, such as invalidism and neurosis. However, the work in the form of unwilling drudgery or of that sedentary routine which the Athenians so properly despised—work in these degrading forms if the true province of machines. Instead of reducing human beings to work-mechanisms, we can now transfer the main part of burden to automatic machines. This potentiality, still so far from effective achievement for beings at large, is perhaps the largest justification of the mechanical development of the last thousand years. From the social standpoint, one final characterization of the machine, perhaps the most important of all, must be noted: the machine imposes the necessity for collective effort and widens its range. To the extent that beings have escaped the control of nature they must submit to the control of society. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
As in a serial operation every part must function smoothly and be geared to the right speed in order to ensure the effective working of the process as a whole, so in society at large there must be a close articulation between all its elements. Individual self-sufficiency is another way of saying technological crudeness: as our technics becomes more refined it becomes impossible to work the machine without large-scale collective cooperation, and in the long run a high technics is possible only on a basis of Worldwide trade and intellect intercourse. The machine has broken down the relative isolation—never complete even in the most primitive societies—of the handicraft period: it has intensified the need for collective effort and collective order. The efforts to achieve collective participation have been fumbling and empirical: so for the most part, people are conscious of the necessity in the form of limitations upon personal freedom and initiative—limitations like the automatic traffic signals of a congested center, or like the red-tape in a large commercial organization. The collective nature of the machine process demands a special enlargement of the imagination and special education in order to keep the collective demand itself from becoming an act of external regimentation. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
To the extent that the collective discipline becomes effective and the various groups in society are worked into a nicely interlocking organization, special provisions must be made for isolated and anarchic elements that are not included in such a wide-reaching collectivism—elements that cannot without danger be ignored or repressed. However, to abandon the social collectivism imposed by modern technics means to return to nature and be at the mercy of natural forces. The regularization of time, the increase in mechanical power, the multiplication of goods, the contraction of time and space, the standardization of performance and product, the transfer of skill to automata, and the increase of collective interdependence—these, then, are the chief characteristics of our machine civilization. They are the basis of the particular forms of life and modes of expression that distinguish the World, at least in degree, from the various earlier civilization that preceded it. Least anyone think the myth of Prometheus can be brushed aside as merely an idiosyncratic tale concocted by playful Greeks, let me remind you that in the Judeo-Christian tradition almost exactly the same truth is presented. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
I refer to the myth of Adam and Eve. This is the drama of the emerging of moral consciousness. In relation to this myth (and to all myths), the truth that happens internally is presented as though it were external. They myth of Adam is re-enacted in every infant, beginning a few months after birth and developing into recognizable form at the age of two or three, though ideally it should continue enlarging all the rest of one’s life. The eating of the apple of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil symbolize the dawn of human consciousness, moral consciousness and consciousness being at this point synonymous. The innocence of the Garden of Eden—the womb and the dreaming consciousness of gestation and the first month of life—are destroyed forever. The function of psychoanalysis is to increase this consciousness, indeed to help people eat of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil. If this experience is as terrifying for many people as it was for Oedipus, it should not surprise us. Any theory of resistance that omits the terror of human consciousness is incomplete and probably wrong. In place of innocent bliss, the infant now experiences anxiety and guilt feelings. Also, as part of the child’s legacy is the sense of individual responsibility, and, most important of all, developing only later, the capacity to love. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
The shadow side of this process of individuality is the emergence of repression and, concomitantly, neurosis. A fateful event indeed! If you call this the fall of man, you should join Hegel and other analysts of history who have proclaimed that it was a fall upward; for without this experience there would be neither creativity nor consciousness as we know them. However, again, God was angry. Adam and Eve were driven out of the garden by an Angel with a flaming sword. The troublesome paradox confronts us in that both the Greek and the Judeo-Christian myths present creativity and consciousness as being born in rebellion against an omnipotent force. Are we to conclude that these chief gods, Zeus and Yahweh, did not wish humankind to have moral consciousness and the arts of civilization? It is a mystery indeed. The most obvious explanation is that the creative artist and poet and saint must fight the actual (as contrasted to the ideal) gods of our society—the god of conformism as well as the gods of apathy, material success, and exploitative power. These the idols of our society that are worshiped by multitudes of people. However, this point does not go deeply enough to give us an answer to the riddle. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
In my search for some illumination, I read the legends of Anne Rice and discovered that perhaps Lestat gave up his vampire body, to switch places with Raglan James and become a human because he knew that David Talbot was old and could die and was his only true friend, but David refused to take the dark gift. So, Lestat figured if he gave up his body, even with a $20 million reward for the return of it, that Raglan would not want to give it up and David would be the only one willing to help him, and that perhaps that when they performed the body switching the Raglan, instead of going back into the beautiful tall, tan, body with blonde hair that he had stolen, that he would jump into David’s body, forcing David into the beautiful body because Raglan wanted nothing more than to become a vampire. And posing as David, Ragland could then get this dark gift, and have the power and immortality that he wanted. Raglan was really an old man and had stole the body from a young man and once that man was in his body, he hit in the dead to kill him. So the legend is all about Raglan ending his own torture by trading bodies until he could become immortal. This conclusion to the myth, if you can follow, tells us that the riddle of Prometheus is also connected with the problem of death. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
The same with Adam and Eve. Enraged at their eating of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, God cries out that he is afraid that they will eat of the tree of eternal life and become like one of us. So! Again the riddle has to do with the problem of death, of which eternal life is one aspect. The battle with the gods thus hinges on our own mortality! Creativity is a yearning for immortality. We human beings know that we must die. We have, strangely enough, a word for death. We know that each of us must develop the courage to confront death. Yet we also must rebel and struggle against it. Creativity comes from this struggle—out of rebellion the creative act is born. Creativity is not merely the innocent spontaneity of our youth and childhood; it must also be married to the passion of the adult human being, which is a passion to live beyond one’s death. Michelangelo’s withering, unfinished statues of slaves, struggling in their prisons of marble, are the most fitting symbols for our human condition. Although the higher consciousness may vary in vividness, before settling down to a fixed evenness of quality, it remains permanent at this stage. All problems vanish from one’s mind as though they have never been. One is under no necessity to concern oneself about anything or anyone. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
God in his Heaven and all is well with the World. There is no tormenting situation to be cleared up, no difficult decision to be made, no quest to be followed through drawn-out struggles and personal self-disciplines, and inevitable disappointments. One has now the secret of it all, the blissful state of enlightenment. Hitherto one has been only partially oneself. Now, with this radiant entry into the eternal, one is completely oneself. Now one can speak to others, move in the World, and work out relationships, solely from one’s centre, straight from one’s core: no distortions, no hypocrisies, no insincerities. Here at last is true normality, existence as it was meant to be but is never found to be. One has attained the delight and freedom of spontaneous living. The savage may have it, to, but on a lower level. When the knowledge of the soul is not merely intellectual, however convincing, not only a matter of belief, however firm, but an unchangeable awareness of its ever-present existence, it is true knowledge authentic revelation, and blissful salvation. We move up from being to Being. It is a state which has been attained in its fullness by only a few persons during each century but which has been glimpsed at least once in a lifetime by many more. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
There is another kind of power called integrative and this power is with the other person. My power then abets my neighbor’s power. A European friend of mine, when he was in this country working on his influential ideas and forming them into a book, would offer them for criticism; but the rest of us, rightly understanding how tender ideas can be when they are being born, would politely hold back any negative reaction. However, our friend would regularly react with impatience, protesting: “I want you to criticize me.” By this he meant that if we proposed an antithesis against his thesis, he would be forced to reform his thinking into a new and better synthesis. If opponents of all important truths do not exist, it is indispensable to imagine them and supply them with the strongest arguments which the most skillful devil’s advocate can conjure up. An audience rarely realizes how valuable its questions are to a speaker after a lecture, for they stimulate and compel one to alter or defend one’s position with renewed insight. I was tempted to call this kind of power cooperative, but I realized it too often beings with the victim having to be coerced into the cooperation. Our narcissism is forever crying out against the wounds of those who would criticize us or point out our weak spots. We forget that the critic can be doing us a considerable favor. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
Certainly criticisms are often painful, and one has to brace one’s self in the face of them. We can slide back into manipulative power (by forcefully silencing the critic) or competitive power (by making the critic look silly). Or we can even protect our thin skins by means of nutrient power (patronizing the critic by implying one is confused and needs our care). However, if we do regress in these ways, we are losing an opportunity for new truth that the questioner, hostile or friendly as the case may be, may well be giving us. I recall my own experience in psychoanalysis. When my analyst would point out something about my character structure which I found painful, I would at first deny it out of hand. However, later on, as realized the truth of the insight, I would have to suffer the pain of changing my character structure according to this new truth. This confession is not as dramatic as it sounds, for everyone I have ever met also react in exactly this way in similar situation. Integrative power, I have said, can lead to growth by Hegel’s dialectic process of thesis, antithesis, and synthesis. All growth, even that of molecular structures, proceed in this way: there is one body, then there is its anti-body, and growth proceeds by the repulsion or attraction of these two into a new body. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
Integrative power can be used with nonviolent methods on one’s opponents. One way of disarming the opponent is to expose their moral defenses. It weakens their morale and at the same time it works on their conscience. One just does not know how to handle it. No one can deny that this is describing a kind of power. It depends for its success not only on the courage of the nonviolent one, but also upon the moral development and awareness of the persons who are the recipients of the nonviolent power. One must be disciplined and adhere rigidly to nonviolence, it is incontestable that these same methods brought great psychological and spiritual power to bear upon the British rulers. Even if pitted against an entire empire, one can move it with eminent success by one fasting and prayer in a way that never could have been done by military power. It works on the conscience. Nonviolent power depends n memory, which in turn depends on the moral development of the persons against whom this kind of power is directed. The opponent has to live with one’ self, and this puts one in the position of having to remember that he, or she, or they have injured you. There was a judge, who shall remain nameless, who used his power to sentence two men to death. This judge spends his senile years going from person to person trying to explain and justify his act. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
The judge cannot forget, and he cannot integrate his action with his self-image; and the conflict this sets up preys upon him and contributes, if not causes, his senile psychosis. Beings are curious creatures who are afflicted with memory. If one cannot integrate one’s memories into one’s self-image, one must pay for one’s failure by neurosis or psychosis; and one tries, generally in vain, to shake oneself loose from the tormenting memories. Truth exists only as the individual produces it n action. The aim of existential philosophy is so comprehend the human being’s immediate, unfolding situation in the World or, being-in-the-World. Our goal is to clarify the life-designs or experiential perimeters within which we live. What are their shapes, how much freedom, meaning, value and so on do they permit us? How can we optimize them in order to lead fuller, more productive lives? The impetus for existential speculation is almost always a profound crisis. Why else would people ask such poignant questions about who or what they are or where they are head? Such questions are almost invariably a response to individual or collective breakdown—a point at which the old patterns no longer work or lead toward catastrophe. It is precisely this speculation that makes the emergence in the context of crises—points of disruption and alarm—that give existential philosophy its depth. It is precisely complacency against which existential philosophers take their stand. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
Existence is beyond the power of words to define: terms may be used but none of them is absolute. Existence by nothing bred, breeds everything, parent of the Universe. A way of escaping anxiety is to deny its existence. In fact, nothing is done about anxiety in such cases except denying it, that is, excluding it from consciousness. All that appears are the physical concomitants of fear or anxiety, such as shivering, sweating, accelerated heart-beat, choking, vomiting, and in the mental sphere, a feeling of restlessness, of being rushed or paralyzed. We may have all these feelings and physical sensations when we are afraid and are aware of being so; they may also be the exclusive expression of an existing anxiety which is suppressed. In the latter cases al that the individual knows about one’s condition is such outward evidence as the fact that one has to urinate frequently in certain conditions, that one becomes nauseated on trains, that at times one has night-sweats, and always without physical cause. It is also possible, however, to make a conscious denial of anxiety, a conscious attempt to overcome it. This is akin to what happens on the normal level, when it is attempted to get rid of fear by recklessly disregarding it. The most familiar example on the normal level is the soldier who, driven by the impulse to overcome a fear, performs heroic deeds. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
The fact may be noted without reproach and without antagonism, without surprise and without arrogance, that beings are the victims of the very institutions they have themselves created and maintained. The individual who refuses to be lost in their mesmerized surrender to the false prestige of these institutions must go forth alone into an arid and empty wilderness, must set oneself apart from the World around one. One has entered a World of being where few beings will be able to follow one. Their lack of understanding will be the bar. One will find that few of one’s kind are settled in this World, a discovery which one may meet either with disappointment or with resignation. The being who is travelling this inner way soon finds and feels its loneliness. One may try to get rid of the feeling by joining a group, but this can give only a partial liberation and, in the end, only a temporary one. However, this loneliness need not be a cause of suffering. Rather one may come to enjoy it. The feeling of being isolated, the sense of walking a lonely path, is true outwardly but untrue inwardly. For there one is companioned by the Overself’s gentle ever-drawing love. One has only to grope within sufficiently to know this for oneself, and to know it with absolute certitude. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
Cans. Beer cans. Glinting on the verges of a million miles of roadways, lying in scrub, grass, dirt, leaves, sand, mud, but never hidden. Piel’s, Rheingold, Ballantine, Schaefer, Schlitz, shinning in the Sun, or picked by Moon or the beam of headlights at night; washed by rain or flattened by wheels, but never dulled, never buried, never destroyed. Here is the mark of savages, the testament of wasters, the stain of prosperity. These wise souls contemplated their past lives in a long wrathless reverie, and sought to answer prayers from below as I have said. They watched over their kindred, their clansmen, their own nations; they watched over those who attracted their attention with accomplished and spectacular displays of religiosity; they watched with sadness the suffering of humans and wished they could help and tried to help by thought when they could. However, who are these beings who defile the grassy borders of our roads and lanes, who pollute our ponds, who spoil the purity of our ocean beaches with the empty vessels of their thirst? Who are the beings who make these vessels in millions and then say, “Drink—and discard”? What society is this that can afford to cast away a million tons of metal and to make of wild and fruitful land a garbage heap? #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
And as we Angels peered into Sheol, as we passed into it, invisible, our essence causing no disturbance in a realm that was purely souls at that point…souls and nothing but souls…we realized these souls were strengthened in their survival by the attentions of those living on Earth, by the love being sent to them by humans, by the thoughts of them in human minds. It was a process. And just as with Angels, these souls were individuals with varying degrees of intellect, interest, or curiosity. They were hosts as well to Hudegrees of spiritual illumination, which accounts both for the varying outlooks to be found among the mystics and for the different kinds of Glimpse among aspirants. All illumination and all Glimpses free the soul from its negative qualities and base nature, but in the latter case only temporarily. One is able, as a result, to see into one’s higher nature. In the first degree, it is as if a window covered with dirt were cleaned enough to reveal a beautiful garden. One can symbolically look down and see flowers of the World enjoy the petal and the center colors. The colors themselves were so distinct and so finely delineated one may be unsure that our spectrum is even involved. I mean, it is as if out spectrum of color is not the limit! #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
It is a lust again of time and for the future, for the mysteries of the natural World. For being the watcher that I became that long-ago night in Paris, when I was forced into it. I lost my illusions. I lost my favorite lies. You might say I revisited that moment and was reborn to darkness of my own free will. The transition to a study of the negative aspects of bureaucracy is afforded by the application of Veblen’s concept of trained incapacity, Dewey’s notion of occupational psychosis, or Warnotte’s view of professional deformation. Trained incapacity refers to that state of affairs in which one’s abilities function as inadequacies or blind spots. Actions based upon training and skills which have been successfully applied in the past may result in inappropriate responses under changed conditions. An inadequate flexibility in the application of skills, will, inchanging milieu, result in more or less serious maladjustments. Thus, to adopt a barnyard illustration used in this connection by Kenneth Burke, chickens may be readily conditioned to interpret the sound of a bell as a signal for trained chickens to their doom as they are assembled to suffer decapitation. In general, one adopts measures in keeping with one’s past training and, under new conditions which are not recognized as significantly different, the very soundness of this training may lead to the adoption of the wrong procedures. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18