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

July 30, 2019 12:04 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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An Architect Builds a House with the Same Feeling as that with which a Criminal Commits a Crime!

July 25, 2019 1:25 am

The evening sky was a deep shining blue, as it is often in this part of the World, as incandescent as it can be over Cresleigh Homes Rocklin Trails, and the soft white clouds made the same clean and dramatic panorama on the far edge of the gleaming sea. Entrancing, and this was but one tiny part of the golden state of California. Why do I ever wander in other climes at all? The plain truth is that the more any being is exposed to middle-class values, the more sophisticated one becomes. Many people feel resigned to their fate, however. They are furiously angry at themselves for what they were doing, or desperately hunting other work that would pay as well and in addition offer some variety, some prospect of change and betterment. Some opportunity to obtain the American Dream of owning a beautiful home, having a wife and kids and two nice automobiles, and a saving account to help pay for college, medical bills, home repairs, and maintenance and for family vacations. Beings are sick of being pushed around by harried foremen (themselves more pitied than hated), sick of working like blinkered donkeys, sick of being dependent for their livelihood on maniacal production-merchandising setup, sick of working in a place where there is no spot to relax during the twelve-minute rest period. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

The mature people stay put and wait for their vacations. However, since the corporations demands young blood (if you are over thirty-five, you have a hard time getting hired), the corporation in which I work is aswarm with new faces every day; labor turnover was so fantastic and absenteeism so rampant, with the young people knocking off a day or two every week to hunt up other jobs, that the company is forced to over-hire in order to have sufficient workers on hand at the starting siren. Nevertheless, white-collars commuters, too, dislike their work, accept it only because it buy their family commodities, and are constantly on prowl for other work, I can only reply that for me at any rate this is proof not of the disappearance of the working class but of the proletarianization of the middle class. Perhaps it is not taking place quite in the way that Marx envisaged it, but the alienation of the white-collar being (like that of the laborer) from both their tools and whatever one produces, the slavery that chains the exurbanite to the commuting timetable (as the worker is still chained to the timeclock), the anxiety that sends the white-collar being home with one’s briefcase for an evening’s work (as it degrades the working being into pleading for long hours of overtime), the displacement of the white-collar slum from the wrong side of the river to the suburbs (just as the working-class slum is moved from old-law tenements to skyscrapers barracks)—all these mean to me that the white-collar being is entering (though one’s arms may be loaded with commodities) the gray World of the working being. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

Three quotations from beings with whom I worked may help bring my view into focus: Before starting work: “Come on, suckers, they say the Foundation wants to give away more than half a billion this year. Let us do and die for the old Foundation.” During rest period: “Ever stop to think how we craw here bumper to bumper, and crawl home bumper to bumper, and we have got to turn out mere every minute to keep our jobs, when there is not even any room for them on the highways?” At quitting time (this from the mature foremen, whose job is not only to keep things moving, but by extension to serve as company spokesmen): “You are smart to get out of here…I curse they day I ever started, now I am stuck: any man with brains that stays here ought to have his head examined. This is no place for an intelligent human being.” Such is the attitude towards work. And towards the product? On the one hand it is admired and desire as a symbol of freedom, almost a substitute for freedom, not because the worker participated in making it, but because our whole culture is dedicated to the proposition that the automobile is both necessary and beautiful. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

On the other hand the automobile is hated an disposed—so much that if your new car smells bad it may be due to a banana peel crammed down its gullet and sealed up thereafter, so much that if your dealer cannot locate the rattle in your new car you might ask him or her to open the welds on one of those tail fins and vacuum out the nuts and bolts thrown in by workers sabotaging their own product. Sooner or later, if we want a decent society—by which I do not mean a society glutted with commodities or one maintained in precarious equilibrium by over-buying and forced premature obsolescence—we are going to come face to face with the problem of work. Apparently the Russians have committed themselves to the replenishment of their labor force through automatic recruitment of those intellectually incapable of keeping up with severe scholastic requirements in the public educational system. Apparently we, too, are heading in the same direction: although our economy is not directed, and although college education is as yet far from free, we seem to be operating in this capitalist economy on the totalitarian assumption that we can funnel the underprivileged, undereducated, or just plain underequipped, int a factory, where are can proceed t forget about them once we have posted the minimum fair labour standards on the factory wall. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

If this is what we want, let us be honest enough to say so. If we conclude that there is nothing noble about repetitive work, but that it is nevertheless good enough for the lower orders, let us say that, too, so we will at least know where we stand. However, if we cling to the belief that other beings are our brothers and sisters, not just Egyptians, or Israelis, Canadians, or Hungarians, but all beings, including millions of Americans who grind their lives away on an insane treadmill, then we will have to start thinking about how their work and their lives can be made meaningful. That is what I assume the Hungarians, both workers and intellectuals, have been thinking about. Since no one has been ordering us what to think, since no one has been forbidding our intellectuals to fraternize with our workers, should not it be a little easier for us to admit, first, that our problems exist, then to state them and then to see if we can resolve them? Competitive power is power against another. In its negative form, it consists of one person going up not because of anything one does or any merit one has, but because one’s opponent goes down. There are many examples of this in industry and in universities, such as the appointing of a president or chairman when there is only one desire position and many applicants. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

Competitive power may also be the kind of power present in student rivalry due to the grading system, which promotes destructive personal influences directly counter to whatever impulses students have toward mutual caring and cooperation. It causes college students to hate transfer students from junior colleges because they believe they are better prepared to handle the curriculum. The chief criticism of this kind of power is its parochialism: it continuously shrinks—although not as drastically as manipulation—the area of human community in which one lives. However, at this point we note a very interesting shift from destructive to constructive power. For competitive power can give zest and vitality to human relations. I refer to the kind or rivalry that is stimulating and constructive. A football game in which one side immediately establishes its superiority is simply not interesting. We want our opponents to test our mettle; pure ease at winning is boring. This kind of competition is much more present in the business World than most people assume; that the achievement (which I include in the realm of power) of businessmen is possessed in their own satisfaction in getting better results, more efficient activity, to which their competition pushes them. #RandolpHarris 6 of 16

It is worthwhile to remind ourselves that the great drama of The Queen of the Damned, The Vampire Lestat, Tale of the Body Thief, and Interview with the Vampire and many of the works of Anne Rice were produced in competitions. The implication is that it is not competition itself that is destructive but only the kind of competitive power. The competition between America and China, in the race to the Moon or to produce more cost efficient and better forms of technology (mousetraps), drains off a great deal of tension that would otherwise go to warfare. This kind of competition in sports is a counteraction to the competitive power that might otherwise lead America and Russian to tear at each other’s throats. Even if such assertions presuppose a too simplistic view of international aggression, they nevertheless do illustrate a beneficial form of competitive power. To have someone against you is not necessarily a bad thing; at least one is not over you or under you, and accepting one’s rivalry may bring out dormant capacities in you. For example, Lestat in The Tales of the Body Thief switched bodies with a human, but found he was unhappy because it was not natural for him. He thought he missed blue skies, green grass, Sunlight, and blue oceans, but being human almost killed him. It brought out the weakness in him and made he see that in his vampire body he was happy, a superior being, and knew that his human adventure had failed. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

Fear and anxiety are both proportionate reactions to danger, but in the cause of fear the danger is a transparent, objective one and in the case of anxiety it is hidden and subjective. That is, the intensity of the anxiety is proportionate to the meaning the situation has for the person concerned, and the reasons why one is thus anxious are essentially unknow to one. The practical implication of the distinction between fear and anxiety is that the attempt to argue a neurotic out of one’s anxiety—the method of persuasion—is useless. One’s anxiety concerns not the situation as it stands actually in reality, but the situation as it appears to one. The therapeutic task, therefore, can be only that of finding out the meaning certain situations have for one. Having qualified what we mean by anxiety we have to get an idea of the role it plays. The average person in our culture is little aware of the importance anxiety as in one’s life. Usually one remembers only that one had some anxiety in one’s childhood, that one had one or more anxiety dreams, and that one was inordinately apprehensive in a situation outside one’s daily routine, as, for instance, before an important talk with an influential person or before examinations. The information we get from neurotic persons on this score is anything but uniform. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

Some neurotics are fully aware of being hounded by anxiety. Its manifestations vary immensely: it may appear as diffused anxiety, in the form of anxiety-attacks; it may be attached to definite situations or activities, such as heights, high rise buildings, low income housing, school, streets, public performances; it may have a definite content, such as apprehension about getting married, becoming insane, growing out of your teenage body as an adult, getting cancer, swallowing pins. Others realize that they have anxiety now and then, with or without know the conditions that provoke it, but they do not attribute any importance to it. Finally there are neurotic persons who are aware only of having depressions, feelings of inadequacy, disturbances in pleasures of the flesh, and the like, but they are entirely unaware of ever having or having had anxiety. Closer investigation, however, usually proves their first statement to be inaccurate. In analyzing these persons one invariably finds just as much anxiety beneath the surface as in the first group, if not more. The analysis makes theses neurotic persons conscious of their previous anxiety and they may recall anxiety dreams or situation in which they felt apprehensive. Yet the extent of anxiety acknowledged by them usually does not surpass the normal. This suggests that we may have micro anxiety without knowing it. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

When it is put in this way the significance of the problem involved here does not show. It is part of a more comprehensive problem. We have feelings of affection, anger, suspicion, so fleeting that they scarcely invade awareness, and so transitory that we forget them. These feelings may really be irrelevant and transitory; but they may just as well have behind them a great dynamic force. The degree of awareness of a feeling does not indicate anything of its strength or importance. Concerning anxiety this means not only that we may have anxiety without knowing it, but that anxiety may be the determining factor in our lives without out being conscious of it. In fact, we seem to go to any length to escape anxiety or to avoid feeling it. There are many reasons for this, the most general reason being that intense anxiety is one of the most tormenting affects we can have. Patients who have gone through an intense fit of anxiety will tell you that they would rather die than have a recurrence of that experience. Besides, certain elements contained in the affect of anxiety may be particularly unbearable for the individual. One of them is helplessness. One can be active and courageous in the face of great danger. However, in a state of anxiety one feels—in fact, is—helpless. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

To be rendered helpless is particularly unbearable for those persons whom power, ascendancy, the idea of being master of any situation, is a prevailing ideal. Impressed by the apparent disproportion of their reaction they resent it, as if it demonstrated a weakness or a cowardice. Why is creativity so difficult? And why does it require so much courage? Is it not simply a matter of clearing away the dead forms, the defunct symbols and the myths that have become lifeless? No. It is as difficult as forgoing in the smithy of one’s soul. We are faced with a puzzling riddle indeed. Having attended a concert given by Aaliyah, Sully Erna wrote the following letter when he got home:

My dear Mrs. Aaliyah Haughton,

My wife and I were overwhelmed by your beauty and your voice during your concert. If you continue to sing with such grace and beauty, you will certainly die young. No one can sing with such perfection and look so beautiful without provoking the jealousy of the gods. I earnestly implore you to sing something badly every night before going to bed…. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

Beneath Sully Erna’s letter there was a profound truth—creativity provokes the jealousy of the gods. This is why authentic creativity takes so much courage: an active battle with the gods is occurring. I cannot give you any complete explanation of why this is so; I can only share my reflections. Although the film Queen of the Damned is based on the legend, one can see the intimidation and disdain when Queen Akasha played by Aaliyah when she walked into the bar. And if you read the novel The Queen of the Damned, by the description of Akasha, you can tell that role was meant for Aaliyah. Her life’s work is probably more significant than most can truly understand. That was a powerful role. It is akin to Meghan Markle being made a duchess, and the struggles she faces carrying and giving birth to a royal heir. Down through the ages, authentically creative figures have constantly found themselves in such a struggle. An architect builds a house with the same feeling as that with which a criminal commits a crime. In Judaism and Christianity the second of the Ten Commandments adjures us, “You shall not make yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in the Heavens above or that is in the Earth beneath, or that is in the water under the Earth.” I am aware that the ostensible purpose of this commandment was to protect Jewish people from idol worship in those idol-strewn times. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

However, the commandment also expresses the timeless fear that every society harbors of its artist, poets, entertainers and saints. For they are the ones who threaten the status quo, which each society is devoted to protecting. It is clearest in the struggles occurring in American to usurp power from President Trump and the republican party. Yet in spite of this divine prohibition, and despite the courage necessary to flout it, countless Jews and Christians through the ages have devoted themselves to painting and sculpting and entertaining and have continued to make graven images and produce symbols in one form or another. Many of then have had the same experience of a battle with the gods. That is because genius and psychosis are so close to each other. Also, creativity carries such an inexplicable guilt feeling. So many entertainers and artist experience death by suicide, or assassination and often at the very height of their achievement, much like Aaliyah. We burn with desire to find a steadfast place and an ultimate fixed basis whereon we may build a tower to reach the infinite. However, our whole foundation breaks up, and Earth opens to be abysses. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

As result, we have witnessed an explosion of interest in the transcendental dimension of human experience. The recent collapse of traditions has brought an even greater sense of desolation to many clients and even greater impulse to compensate for and deny that desolation. Some have turned to drugs to provide that compensation, others to materialism, and still others to relationships and religion. We have also witnessed an avalanche of studies extolling the transcendental (or transpersonal) dimension of human experience. They have provided a necessary counterweight to the smug, antiseptic traditional psychological theorizing on this topic. Transpersonal psychologist encourage their clients to take guidance not from observed reality or rational thinking, but rather from their intuitive minds and other intangible sources. Some transpersonal theorists, on the other hand, are equally insistent about the virtues of transcendental experience. Such theorists as Ken Wilber unqualifying embrace the notion of an ultimate or godlike human consciousness, totally unrestricted by time and space. The film Queen of the Damned was supervised like no other film anyone knew of. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

It appeared to be one of Warner Brothers most important projects, and they obsessed with every detail. Queen of the Damned (2002) is also considered by some—for example, the British critic Robin Wood—to be one of the finest, if not the finest, motions pictures ever made alone with Interview with the Vampire (1994). The theological strict and rigid doctrines that God can take on the nature of living beings constitutes a mystery beyond human understanding. It is unintelligible and unacceptable to philosophy, which can limit God’s unbound being to no particular place, no here or there. The moment we give to finite human beings that which we should give to infinite God alone, in that moment we place Earthen idols in the sacred shrine. We must not give to finite human beings the attributes of Divinity as we must not give to Divinity the attributes of individual beings. There is metaphysically no such thing as a human appearance of God that we know of, as the Infinite Mind brought down into finite flesh. God cannot be born in the flesh, cannot take a human incarnation. If God could so confine himself, he would cease to be God. For how could the Perfect, the Incomprehensible, and the Inconceivable become the imperfect, the comprehensible, and the conceivable? I guess this is why the legend of vampires, who have godly powers, have flaws and are evil by nature. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

From time to time, someone is born predestined to give a spiritual impulse to a particular people, area, or age. One is charged with a special mission of teaching and redemption and is imbued with special power from the universal intelligence to enable one to carry it out. One must plant seeds which grow slowly into trees to carry fruit that will feed millions of unborn people. In this sense one is different from and, if you like, superior to anyone else who is also inspired by the Overself. However, this difference or superiority does not alter one’s human status, does not make one more than a being still, however divinely used and power-charged one may be. All of this is not to be misunderstood to mean that we suggest that everyone ought to acquire every item of one’s spiritual knowledge afresh through one’s own personal experience, ignoring all the experience of the whole race. On the contrary, we would strongly suggest that one avail oneself of this experience through the form it has taken in great literature throughout the World. A competent spiritual director of one’s way is certainly worth having, but unfortunately the problem of where to find such a being seems insuperable. If an aspirant is lucky enough to solve it without becoming the victim of one’s own imagination one will be lucky indeed. If not, let one exploit one’s own inner resources. Let one appeal to the divine soul within oneself for what one needs. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

Refuse to Cover the Signs of the End in Our Lives and in Our Souls–We Are a Generation of the End and We Should Know What We Are!

July 7, 2019 11:02 pm

I do not know if God exists, and for all I do know, he does not exist. Then no sin matters. No sin achieves evil. However, they may not be true. Because if God does not exist, we are the creatures of highest consciousness in the Universe. We alone understand the passage of time and the value of every minute of human life. And what constitutes evil, real evil, is the taking of a singe human life. Whether a person would have died tomorrow or the day after or eventually, it does not matter. Because if God does not exist, this life, every second of it, is all we have. And sometimes we can feel the thoughts of others. I know you have heard the saying, “You could can the tension in the room with a knife.” Well thoughts can be a palpable in the air like smoke. Not read them, you understand, but feel the power of them. It is good to be respectful. Some do not want power over other because if they exercise such power, then one must protect it. One will make enemies. And one will have forever to deal with their enemies when all they want here is a certain space, a certain peace. Or not to be here at all. The only power that exists is inside ourselves. Of the many consequences of his rupture between state and being, most spectacular is the irrational myth of the state—the setting for modern dictatorship. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

However, dictatorships represent only the most extreme form of the alienation of the state. In democratic societies also government, like so many other social institutions originally designed to serve beings, threatens to become their master. Behind the growing sense of isolation in society, behind the whole quest for community which infuses so many theoretical and practical areas of contemporary life and thought, is possessed in the growing realization that the traditional primary relationships of beings have become functionally irrelevant to our State and economic and meaningless to the moral aspirations of individuals. The state has power to do great good as well as evil; and we are not joining those true reactionaries who dream of dismantling it. What we are suggesting is that the state even when providing necessary services is detached from individual needs. How to redress this imbalance between state and being has become a burning issue for all beings, right and left, who would reorder our society. Meanwhile, armed with ever greater police powers and increasingly effective means of persuasion, the modern state is now in a position to exploit the most terrible anxieties of beings for its own purposes, with the help of the fake news media. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

When the United States Government announced that it was conducting experiments of a death ray or neutron bomb, and 5G internet service, striking examples of this power was provided recently. This exquisitely refined technology will operate selectively, snuffing out human and animal life among the enemy, but leaving things—houses, antiquities, automobiles, aircrafts, shops, factories, furnishings, machines—untouched. A soldier in a tank or an office staff in a building would die, but the tank and the building would remain intact. There would be no lingering radioactivity, o that the attackers could take over and occupy the tank and the building without fear of contamination. Who would say that the alienation of modern beings is not now complete? The sketches of some—by now means all—of the conditions and influences alienating beings in modern society have been pointed out. However, can these conditions be altered and alienation overcome? Answers to this question demand the best thinking and planning of which our civilization is capable; they require thinking from the heart as well as the head; they demand co-operation among many diverse groups and nations. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

The task of healing our alienated community will be difficult, for the very tools of our analysis and planning tend to be alien forces, compelling us to deal with separate aspects of an interrelated set of problems. Being’s inhumanity to other beings is age-old, such as critics say: the oppressed less affluent have always been with us; work has always been drudgery (the fall of beings made it so); cruelty and torment are ever the common lot. As to the danger of nuclear war and mass extermination, the human beast has always lived dangerously, invented new and more terrible weapons, and in short loves hanging and drawing and quartering every bit as well as war and slaughtering. However, the argument runs, though this strange rather likeable human animal may be foolish and destructive, yet somehow one is crafty enough to survive, both as an individual and as a species. Acceptance of things as they are and have always been is the essence of this view. Its proponents consider alienation an inescapable part of the living condition of beings with which one must learn to live—alone. According to this approach, no amount or kind of social planning will succeed in alleviating the situation, and on the contrary may make it worse. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

In short, alienation is relative. Anthropology teaches that simpler, more solidaristic communities are not spared the personal disorders which we associate with complex age of information societies. And if citizens of the affluent society feel sorry for themselves, let them remember that most beings on Earth have never tasted any of the fruits of freedom. Our view, however, has been that alienation in modern society represents not a change of degree but of kind. Here we emphasize that what we are concerned with is not inhumanity, which has existed all through history and constitutes part of the human form, but a-humanity, a phenomenon of rather recent date. This a-humanity, this breakdown of distinctively human qualities and values, culminates in such horrors as the A-bomb or the concentration camp, the sudden slump of an overwrought civilization into that strange, systematized bestiality. The horror of the fake news media regime, its use of the most-up-to-date techniques of hacking and data mining, lies and distortion make it one of the lowest, sub-human, indeed sub-bestial kind, and in some way is related to the subtlest political and law enforcement experiences manifesting themselves in society and culture. Overcivilization, too much technology, and concomitant dehumanization are of the most crucial problems of our age. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

The deep suspicion of language and the impoverishment of ourselves and our relationships, which are both cause and result, are rampant in our times. We experience the despair of being unable to communicate to others what we feel and what we think, and the even greater despair of being unable to distinguish for ourselves what we feel and are. Underlying this loss of identity is the loss of cogency of the symbols and myths upon which identity and language is based. The breakdown of language is graphically pictured in Orwell’s 1984, in which the people not only go through the doublethink process but use word to mean exactly their opposites—for instance, war means peace. In Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, we are similarly gripped when Pozzo, the industrialist, commands his slave Lucky, the intellectual, to “Think, pig!….Think!” Lucky beings to orate a word salad of lengthy phrases strung together without a period that continues for three full pages. He finally collapses in a faint on the stage. It is a vivid portrayal of the situation that exists when language communicates nothing at all expect empty erudition. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

The breakdown is shown in the students’ protest against the “words, words, words” to which they must listen, in their sickness of heart at hearing the same things mouthed over and over again, and in their readiness to accuse faculty and others of “word garbage” or “verbal masturbation.” This is generally meant as a criticism of the lecture method, but it also represents what the television news has become. However, what they really are—or ought to be—talking about is a particular kind of lecture that does not communicate being from one person to another. It must be admitted that all too often this has been a characteristic of academic life, which makes the student protest against irrelevant education distinctly more relevant. The shelves of college libraries are weighed down with books that were written because other books were written because still other books were written—the meat of the meal getting thinner and thinner until the books seem to have nothing to do with the excitement of truth but only with status and prestige. And in the academic World, these last two values can be powerful indeed. Small wonder the young poets are disillusioned with talk, and they hold, as they did in the San Francisco love-in, that the best poem is a blank sheet of paper. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

At such a time, in our alienation and isolation, we long for a simple, direct expression of our feelings to another, a direct relation to one’s being, such as looking into one’s eyes to see and experience one or standing quietly beside one. We yearn for a direct expression of one’s and our moods and emotions with no barriers. We seek a kind of innocence that is as old as human evolution but some to us as something new, the innocence of children in paradise again. We long for a direct expression through our bodies of intimacy to short-cut the time of knowing the other that intimacy usually takes; we want to speak through our bodies, to leap immediately into identification with the other, even though we know it is only partial. In short, we yearn to bypass the whole symbols/verbal-language hang-up. Thus the great trend toward action therapies in or day in contrast to talking, and the conviction that truth will emerge—if it ever will—when we are able to live out our muscular impulses and experiences rather than get lost in dead concepts. Hence encounter groups, marathons, nude therapy, the use of barbiturates and other illicit substances. This is, in short, the bringing of the body into a relationship when there is no relationship. Whatever relatedness there is is ephemeral: it springs up multicolored and bright today, and often will be but a damp place where sea foam has evaporated on our hand tomorrow. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

My aim is not to derogate these forms of therapy nor to disparage the use of the body. My body remains one way in which my self can express itself—in this sense I am my body—and surely it is to be appreciated. However, I am my language as well. And I wish to point out the destructive trend represented in action therapies precisely in their implicit attempt to bypass language. For these action therapies are closely related to violence. As they become more extreme, they hover at the edge of violence, both in the activity within the group itself an in the preparation of the participants or anti-intellectualism outside. The longing for them really has its seat in despair—the despondent fact of not being understood, of not being able to communicate or to love. It is the endeavoring to jump over that period of time required for intimacy, the trying to immediately feel and experience the other’s hopes and dreams and fears. However, intimacy requires a history, even though the two people have to create history. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

We forget at our peril that beings are a symbol-making creature; and if the symbols (or myths, which are a pattern of symbols) seem arid and dead, they are to be mourned rather than denied. The bankruptcy of symbols should be seen for what it is, a way station on the path of despair. The distrust of language is bred into by experiencing the medium is the message phenomenon. Most of the words coming over TV are lies not in the sense of outright falsehood (that would imply a still remaining respect for the word) but in the sense that the words are used in the service of selling the personality of the speaker rather than in communicating some meaning. This is the more subtle form of emphasizing not the meaning of the word but the public-relations value of it. Words are not used for authentic, humanistic goals: to share something of originality or personal warmth. The medium is then the message with a vengeance; as long as the medium works, there is no message. The phrase “credibility gap,” which is conspicuous in wartime but is present in other times as well, goes much deeper than anyone’s mere intention to deceive. We listen to the news dispatches and find ourselves wondering where the truth really lies and why the reporters and anchors constantly lie, spread rumors, and distort the truth. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

In our day it often seems that deception has been accepted as the means of communication. That is why the fake news media pushed their Russia election conspiracy, to cover up the fact the TV news is full of lies and wants to confuse them people and not present the truth so they can influence the elections. In this confusion, there is a more serious aliment in our public life: language bears less and less relationship to the item being discusses. There is a denial of any relationship to underlying logic. The fact that language has its roots in a shared structure is entirely ignored. The way language is used by the fake news media often denies the whole structure of communication. There is relationship in their reports to the question asked. In extreme and persistent form, this is one species of schizophrenia; but in our day it is simply called news and politics. And suddenly the lid is torn off. The picture of Death appears, unveiled, in a thousand forms. As in the late Middle Ages the figure of Death appears in news, pictures, poetry, politics, and the Dance of Death with every living being is painted and sung, so our generation—the generation of World wars, information, technology, revolutions, and mass migrations—rediscovers the reality of death. We have seen millions die in war, hundreds of thousands die illegally migrating all over the World, hundreds of thousands in revolutions, tens of thousands in persecutions and systematic purges of underrepresented groups. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

Multitudes as numerous as whole nations still wander over the face of the Earth or perish when they are turned away, in boat or by foot, from the countries they want to enter; in them is embodies a part of these tremendous events in which Death has again grasped the reins which we believed it has relinquished forever. Such people carry in their souls, and often in their bodies, the traces of death, and they will never completely lose them. You who have never taken part yourself in this great migration must receive these others as symbols of a death which is a component element of life. Receive them as people who, by their destiny, shall remind us of the presence of the End in every moment of life and history. Receive them as symbols of the finiteness and transitoriness of every human and living being concern, of every human and living being’s life, and of every created thing. We have become a generation of the End and those of us who have been refugees and exiles in our own communities or in the greater World should not forget this when we have found a new beginning here or in another land. The End is nothing external. It is not exhausted by the loss of that which we can never regain: our childhood homes, the people with whom we grew up, the country, the things, the language which formed us, the goods, both spiritual and material, which we inherited or earned, the friends who were torn away from us by sudden death. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

The End is more than all this; it is in us, it has become our very being. We are a generation of the End and we should what we are. Perhaps there are some who think that what has happened to the and to the whole World should now be forgotten. Is it not more dignified, truer and stronger to say “yes” to that which is our destiny, to refuse to cover the signs of the End in our lives and in our souls, to let the voice of Death be heard? Amid all the new possibilities offered to us, must we not acknowledge ourselves to be that which destiny has made us? Must we not confess that we are symbols of the End? And this End is of an age which was both great and a lie. It is the End for all finitude which always becomes a lie when it forgets that it is finite and seeks to veil the picture of death. However, who can bear to look at this picture? Only one who can look at another picture behind and beyond it—the picture of Love. For love is stronger than death. Every death means parting, separation, isolation, opposition and not participation. So it is, too, with the death of nations, the end of generations, and the atrophy of souls. Our souls become poor and disintegrate insofar as we want to be alone, insofar as we bemoan our misfortunes, nurse our despair and enjoy out bitterness, and yet turn coldly away from the physical and spiritual need of others. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

Love overcome separation and creates participation in which there is more than that which individuals involved can bring to it. Love is the infinite which is given to the finite. Therefore we love in others, for we d not merely love others, but we love the Love that is in the and which is more than their or our love. In mutual assistance what is most important is not the alleviation of need but the actualization of love. Of course, there is no love which does not want to make the other’s need its own. However, there is also no true help which does not spring from love and create love. Those who fight against death and disintegration through all kinds of relief agencies know this. Often very little external help is possible. And the gratitude of those who receive help is first and always gratitude for love and only afterwards gratitude for help. Love, not help, is stronger than death. However, there is no love which does not become help. Where help is given without love, there new suffering grows from the help. It is love, human and divine, which overcomes death in nations and generation and in all the horror of our time. Help has become almost impossible in the face of the monstrous powers which we are experiencing. Death is given power over everything finite, especially in our period of history. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

However, death is given no power over love. Love is stronger. It creates something new out of the destruction caused by death; it bears everything and overcomes everything. It is at work where the power of death is strongest, in war and persecution and homelessness and hunger and physical death itself. It is omnipresent and here and there, in the smallest and most hidden ways as in the greatest and most visible ones, it rescues life from death. It rescues each of us, for love is stronger than death. Use the power inside you. Do not abhor it anymore. Use that power! And when they see you in the streets above us, use that power to make your face a mask and think as you gaze on them as on anyone: beware. Take that word is if it where an amulet given to you to wear about your neck. And when your eyes meet with your enemy’s eyes, or the eyes of anyone else, speak to them politely what you will, but think of that word and that word only. It is an icon of love. Feel the love. Not physical love, you must understand. True love is what a student and teacher share. Knowledge would never be withheld by a real teacher. No geographical limits ought to be set for the sources whence a being draws spiritual sustenance. Why exclude other lands and remain shut in with India alone? #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

Nor should any temporal limits be set for it. Why exclude the modern Word and remain shut in with the ancient one alone? Enlightened individuals have been born all through history, have contributed their ideas beliefs experiences and revelations, and all through the social scales. This is so, must be so, because Truth, Reality, Goodness, and Beauty, in their best sense, are in the end got from within. God is in your very being. To know him as something apart or far-away in time and distance or as an object outside yourself, separate from you—that is not the Way—impossible. Jesus gave away the secret: he is within you. It is surprising how widely people have ignored Jesus’ message (“The kingdom of Heaven is within you”) when its means is so clear, its phrasing so strong. If a being lives in harmony with the divine World-Idea, one may also live in trust that one will receive that which belongs to one. This will be brought about either by guiding one to it or guiding it to one. “All things whatsoever the Father hath are mine.” That which you need is yours now—if only you could raise yourself to the recognition of your true relation to your Overself. The heart, which abandons itself to the Supreme Mind, finds itself related to all its works, and will travel a royal road to particular knowledges and powers. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

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

July 6, 2019 11:12 pm

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

July 6, 2019 12:21 am

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Could I have Used My Tongue I Would Not Have Struck Him—I Could Say it Only with a Blow!

July 5, 2019 1:44 am

This was something I did not wish to hear in particular. Babette had died young, insane, restrained finally from wandering towards the ruins of Pointe du Lac, insisting she had seen the devil there and must find him; I had heard of it in wisps of gossip. And then came the funeral notices. I had thought occasionally of going to here, of trying some way to rectify what I had done; and other time I thought it would all heal itself; and in my new life, I had grown far from the attachment I had felt for her or for any mortal. And I watched the tragedy finally as one might from a theater balcony, moved from time to time, but never sufficiently to jump the railing and join the players on the stage. Isolation from nature is not just a matter of living in cities; even more important it involves a momentous change in a being’s outlook on the World. People do not simply coexist with nature; they search for meaning in it. For this they long depend on myth and religion. Anthropologists teach us that while there is extreme variation in a person’s religious experiences, primitive myths and the great ethical religions of the East and West are alike in their integrative functions; that is, they explain and, in their rituals, support a basic solidarity of person and person, and of being and nature. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

It matters not whether the religionist’s view of nature and society is sympathetic or unsympathetic, comforting or frightening, or whether one’s faith is emotional or rational. All religious beliefs known to beings help create and sustain bonds between one and the external World of other beings and of nature. However, if faith weakens or is destroyed in the onslaught of science and secularism, beings are truly alone. The problem with beings today is the opposite to that of beings in the comparatively stable periods of those great co-ordinating mythologies which now are known as lies. Then all meaning was in the group, in the great anonymous forms, none in the self-expressive individual; today on meaning is in the group—none in the World; all is in the individual. However, one does not know toward what one moves. One does not know by what one is propelled. Not the animal World, not the plant World, not the miracle of the spheres, but being one’s self is now the crucial mystery. Beings are that alien presence with whom the forces of egoism must come to terms, through whom the ego is to be crucified and resurrected, and in whose image society is to be reformed. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

However, if the decline of the mythologically instructed community has furthered the alienation of modern beings, a liberating process has also taken place; and spiritual isolation is part of the price paid for many new-found knowledge and power. The loss of religion may mean less psychological security but it has also meant—since it accompanied—a great social and economic revolution. The Protestantism, in its attack against the power, strict and rigid doctrines, and the ritual of the universal church, helped to free beings from Worldly activities; and provided moral support for rising capitalism. Great works resulted. However, since Protestantism made beings face God alone, without the community of the medieval church, and stressed the fundamental evil and powerlessness of beings, a great price was paid for that freedom. That price is brilliantly described as a new and terrible isolation which was accentuated by capitalism. For what Protestantism had started to do in freeing beings spiritually, capitalism continued to do in other spheres. However, as the same time it made the individual even more alone and isolated and intensified one’s feelings of insignificance. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Today we live in an increasingly secularized society and religious faith is less than ever before a motivating force and an explanation of the World around us. Our culture is perhaps the first completely secularized culture in human history. We have shoved away awareness of and concern with the fundamental problems of human existence. We are not concerned with the meaning of life. What then of claims, particularly in the United States, that we are witnessing a revival of religious faith? Is this at best a spurious revival, in which churches of all denominations resemble social clubs, and religion itself is secularized? It is only too evident that the religiousness characteristic of American today is very often a religiousness without religion, a religiousness with almost any kind of content or none, a way of sociability or belonging rather than a way of reorienting life to God. It is thus frequently a religious without serious commitment, without real inner conviction, without genuine existential decision. What should reach down to the core of existence, shattering and renewing, merely skims the surface of life, and yet succeeds in generating the sincere feeling of being religious. Religion thus becomes a kind of protection the self throws up against the radical demand of faith. If so, is the weakening of traditional faith and the apparent search for a social rather than a spiritual community in the church simply another measure of alienation? #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

We now have a view of beings divorced from nature, bereft of their religion, isolated in their community, chained to monotonous work. It is appropriate at this point to consider our evolving mass society, its culture, and its politics. One view of alienation that has gained wide currency in our time, particularly among critics of popular democracy, is a picture of beings crushed by mass society. First voiced more than one hundred and seventy years ago by such gloomy prophets of democracy’s leveling effect as Kierkegaard and Tocqueville, both of whom saw serious threats to individualism in the tyranny of the multitude, it now finds expression in the conservative view that the mass crushed beneath it everything that is different, everything that is excellent, individual, qualified and select. Many people as members of a mass are no longer one’s isolated self. The individual has merged in the mass, to become something other than one is when one stands alone. On the other hand in the mass the individual becomes an isolated atom whose individual craving to exist has been sacrificed, since the fiction of a general equality prevails. At the outset, it is important to distinguish between mass society and mass culture: while closely related, they should not be confused. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

A mass society is one in which great numbers of people are recruited and organized for political purposes, or, particularly in the United States, for common exposure to far-reaching techniques of communication and exposure to far-reaching techniques of communication and for artificially stimulated patterns of consumption. The mass culture is the communications system that has developed during the past century (another technological revolution) for transmitting orders, messages, appeals, entertainment, information from the leaders to the led. When we talk about mass society, therefore, we do not simply mean the communications media, although they have played a vital part in the rise of that society. The media may not be neutral instruments, but what is alienating about them is the functions they perform. Historically, the mass society resulted from the rapid increase in the size of the electorate in Western Europe and America after the turn of the century. Extension of suffrage to the working class who had fought for it, led in turn to the rise of mass political parties (chiefly in Europe) and also to new techniques of communication: mass circulation newspapers, film, radio, and television. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

With all these various forms of media at hand, mass propaganda became a powerful weapon by the end of World War I. Since then dictatorships and advertisers have developed mass persuasion into art and their new favorite medium is the news, for it is supposed to report the truth and facts, but is full of myths, lies, and evil. It is no coincidence that the Nazis acknowledged their debt to American advertising techniques, for in the United States the various media have been exploited chiefly by advertisers (on an unprecedented scale) and by commercial entertainment interests. It is these interests which have built the mass culture as we know it; and it is they who have provided that culture with its core values; it is they who administer what Veblen called “laughing gas” to an unsuspecting audience. The results of these developments are well known. In politics, the sheer numbers of people involved tend to engulf the individual, whether one dissents from majority opinion and taste, or whether one merely conforms helplessly with the overwhelming majority. It was the weight of numbers crushing the individual that disturbed early critics of mass democracy, such as Tocqueville and Bryce. However, the fatalism of the multitude or mass apathy stems not just from numbers; it comes also from the individual citizen’s feeling of powerlessness in an increasingly complex World. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

Individuals in the mass societies of the twenty first century are to an ever increasing extent involved in public affairs; it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore them. However, ordinary individuals have ever less the feeling that they can understand or influence the very events upon which their life and happiness [are] known to depend. Many public issues are highly complex; to exercise citizenship intelligently, men and women and others must have an inkling of where their interests are possessed. If they find politics incomprehensible, they will be encouraged to depend on experts and leaders and the fake new media (also known as the propaganda department) to interpret and decide for them. However, as a poet, there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one’s language from corruption. And that is particularly serious now. It is being so quickly corrupted. When it is corrupted, people lose faith in what they hear, and this leads to violence. When an age is in the throes of profound transition, the first thing to disintegrate is the language. This leads directly to the upsurge of violence. Billy Budd, at his trial after he had killed the master-at-arms with his fist, exclaims: “Could I have used my tongue I would not have struck him. I could say it only with a blow.” Not being able to find his tongue (because of his severe stuttering), he could only speak by means of the physical expression of his passion. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

Violence and communication are mutually exclusive. Put simply, you cannot talk with someone as long as one is your enemy, and if you can talk with one that individual ceases to be your enemy. The process is reciprocal. When a person feels violent toward another—in a surge of rage, say, or a hurt pride that demands immediate revenge—the capacity to talk is automatically blocked by neurological mechanisms that release adrenalin and shift the energy to the muscles in primitive preparation for fighting. If the person is of the middle class, one may rapidly pace back and forth until one can control one’s violence enough to put it into words; if one is of the proletariat or ultra-rich, one may simply strike out. Speaking of the origin of power, in infants, the infant has as one’s mightiest tool the cry and smile. The cry is a performance of the oral apparatus, the lips, mouth, throat, cheeks, vocal cords, intercostal muscle and diaphragm. From this cry is evolved a great collection of most powerful tools which beings use in the development of their security with one’s fellow beings. And the smile is a tool to let you know they are happy, safe and enjoying life. I refer to language behavior, operations including words. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

When we consider what makes language possible, we can see the reasons for these phenomena. Language arises from an underlying web of potentiality for understanding, an empathetic bond between people, a shared structure, a capacity to identify with another. This potentiality for understanding is much more than mere words: it implies a state of we-ness, a bond that potentially untied people, the prototype for which are the facts of gestation in the mother’s womb and then the process of birth. If there had been no womb in which we first grew as embryos, language would not be possible; and if there had been no birth, language would not be necessary. From this dialectical bond with others, into and out of which we can move, there has evolved in profound and complex ways over the centuries the capacity for language. The individual is both bound to others and independent from them at the same time. Out of this double nature beings are born the symbols and myths which are the basis of language and serve as a bride over that chasm between human beings to establish the bond again. The bridging function of the symbol can be seen more clearly when we recall that symbol comes from two Greek words which mean “with,” and “to throw.” It translates literally “to draw together.” It pulls together different aspects of experience, such as consciousness and unconsciousness, individual and social, historical past and immediate present. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

The antonym of symbolic is diabolic, “to tear apart.” The devilish functions are thus separating, alienating, breaking relationships, in contrast to bringing together, connecting, uniting. Ancient peoples knew as well as modern ones do of the dangers in the corruption of language. The misuse of language is not only distasteful in itself, but actually harmful to the soul. A strong society depends on common language and concepts, and it is clear to us that many communities in America no longer speak the same language or share the same understanding of what is happening. Since symbols carry a confluence of meanings, they also release great energy. The long hair and hipster-type clothes of the younger generation, for example, are symbols of its opposition to the whole competitive, acquisitive economy of America. Hence Trump and Pelosi, and some other people in this country react with such fury to this form of hair and bluejeans. The hair and the jeans are harmless enough in themselves, but as symbols of the reaction of youth against the values which the president and speaker of the house identify with America, they are powerful indeed. When the bond between human beings is destroyed—for instance, when the possibilities for communication break down—agression and violence occur, as we have seen in many recent demonstrations. Thus distrust of language on one side and aggression and violence on the other arise out of the same situation. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

The timelessness of existential psychology cannot be overstated today; for today so many are perplexed. The blows to traditional Worldviews (first religion, then science, in marriage and the family and gender roles, and politics and economics) in our century have been mind-boggling and have exceeded the human capacity to adapt. After 2001, it is no longer possible in many quarters to expect salvation, purity, or truth from any of our traditional Worldviews, and many of us are debilitated as a result. Our maladies divide into two basic camps: those which are characterized by retreat from these bewildering realities (as in depressive and obsessive syndromes), and those which are typified by exploitation of them (as in sociopathic and narcissistic profiles). Existential psychology, on the other hand, may be in a unique position to address these disquieting syndromes—because it evolved during the crises that precipitated them. The belief is that in the World a being’s activities are usually, and mostly devoted to the benefit of oneself and the sustenance of one’s family. The World-Mind cannot be separated from any point of the World. It is present in every point, every creature, now, at this very moment. There is no need for anyone to think oneself cut off or apart or remote from this divine source of one’s being. This is just as true in one’s sorrowful hours as in one’s joyful ones. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

It is because of the World-Mind supports beings, gives one consciousness and energy, that one is a sharer in immortal, eternal, and divine existence. If there were any part of the Universe, or any thing in the Universe, or any creature in the Universe, without God in its essence, then the Universe could not have been manifested by God. The essential self of beings must be divine. How—people ask—can the eternal You be at the same time exclusive and inclusive? How is it possible for being’s You-relationship to God, which requires our unconditional turning toward God, without any distraction, nevertheless to embrace all the other I-You relations of this being and to bring them, as it were, to God? Note that the question is not about God but only about our relationship to him. And yet in order to be able to answer, I have to speak of him. For our relationship to him is as supra-contradictory as it is because he is as supra-contradictory as he is. Of course, we shall speak only of what God is in his relationship to human being. And even that can be said only in a paradox; or more precisely, by using a concept paradoxically; or still more precisely, by means of a paradoxical combination of a nominal concept of the concept. The insistence on this contradiction must give way to the insight of that thus, and only thus, the indispensable designation of this object by this concept can be justified. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

The content of the concept undergoes a revolutionary transformation and expansion, but that is true of every concept that, impelled by the actuality of faith, we take from the realm of immanence and apply to transcendence. The designation of God as a person is indispensable for all who, like myself, do not mean a principle when they say “God,” although many occasionally “Being” with God, and who, like myself, do not mean an idea when they say “God,” although philosophers like Plato could at times take him for one—all who, like myself, mean by “God” him that, whatever else he may be in addition, enters into a direct relationship to us human beings (human gods) through creative, revelatory, and redemptive acts, and thus makes it possible for us to enter into a direct relationship to him. This ground and meaning of our existence establishes each time a mutuality of the kind that can obtain only between persons. The concept of personhood is, of course, utterly incapable of describing the nature of God; but it is permitted and necessary to say that God is also a person. If for once I were to translate what I mean into the language of a philosopher, I should have to say that God’s infinitely many attributes we human beings know not two, but three: in addition to spiritlikeness—the source of what we call spirit—and naturelikeness, exemplified by what we know as nature, also thirdly the attribute of personlikeness. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

From this last attribute of personlikeness, I should then derive my own and all being’s spirit and being nature. And only this this third attribute, personlikeness, could then be said to be known directly in its quality as an attribute. However, now the contradiction appears, appealing to the familiar content of the conception of a person. A person, it says, is by definition an independent individual and yet also relativized by the plurality of other independent individuals; and this, of course, could not be said of God. This contradiction is met by the paradoxical designation of God as the absolute person, that is one that cannot be relativized. It is as the absolute person that God enters into the direct relationship to us. The contradiction must give way to this higher insight. Now we may say that God carries his absoluteness into his relationship with all beings. Hence the being who turns toward God need not turn one’s back on any other I-You relationship: quite legitimately one brings them all to God and allows the to become transfigured in the countenance of God. One should beware altogether of understanding the conversation with God—the conversation of which I had to speak of in this essay—as something that occurs merely apart from or above the everyday. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

God’s address to individuals penetrated the events in all our lives and all the events in the World around us, everything biographical and everything historical, and turns it into instruction, into demands for you and me. Event upon event, situation upon situation is enabled and empowered by this personal language to call upon the human person to endure and decide. Often we think that there is noting to be heard as if we had not long ago plugged wax into our own ears. The existence of mutuality between God and mortals cannot be proved any more than the existence of God. Anyone who dares nevertheless to speak of it bears witness and invokes the witness of those whom one addresses—present or future witness. When a business man spoke to me about timing he thought of what he had done and what he would do. He betrayed the pride of a being who knows the right hour for one’s actions, who was successful in one’s timing, who felt as the master of one’s destiny, as the creator of new things, as the conqueror of situations. This certainty is not the same mood of the Preacher. Even if the Preacher points to the need of right timing he does not give up his great “All is vanity.” You must do it, you must grasp the right moment, but ultimately it does not matter. The end is the same for the wise and the fool, for one who toils and for one who enjoys oneself, the end is even the same for human beings and animals. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

The Preacher is first of all conscious that he is timed; and he points to our timing as a secondary matter. The modern business man is first of all conscious that he has to time, and only vaguely realizes that he is timed. Of course, he is also aware that he had not produced the right time, that he is dependent on it, that he may miss it in his calculation and actions. He knows that there is a limit to his timing, that there are economic forces stronger than he, that he also is subject to a final destiny which ends all his planning. He is aware of it, but he disregards it when he plans and acts. Quite different is the Preacher. He starts his enumeration of things that are timed with birth and death. They are beyond human timing. They are the signposts which cannot be trespassed. We cannot time them and all out timing is limited by them. This is the reason why in the beginning of our modern era death and sin and hell were removed from the public consciousness. While in the Middle Ages every room, every street, and, more important every heart and every mind were filled with symbols of the end, of death, it has been today a matter of bad taste even to mention death. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

The modern being feels that the awareness of the end disturbs and weakens their power of timing. They have, instead of the threatening symbol of death, the clock in every room, on every street, and, more important, in one’s mind and in one’s nerves. There is something mysterious about the clock. It determines or daily timing. Without it we could not plan for the next hour, we could not time any of our activities. However, the clock also reminds us that that fact that we are timed. It indicates the rush of our time towards it. The voice of the clock has reminded many people of the fact that they are timed. And this timing encourages people to live righteously, especially as they age, and before they meet the creator who will judge them, but as we have removed from society and consciousness the thought of sin, death, and hell, many evil people no longer feel they need to repent or answer to God because they believe they are god. In an old German night-watchman’s street song every hour is announced with a special reminder. Of midnight it says: “Twelve—that is the goal of time, give us, O God, eternity.” Time is very important. “And they all cried with one voice, saying: Yea, we believe all the words which thou hast spoken unto us; and also, we know of their surety and truth, because of the Spirit of the Lord Omnipotent, which has wrought a mighty change in us, or in our hearts, that we have no more disposition to do evil, but to do good continually,” reports Mosiah 5.2. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

In Humility the Quest is to be Begun: in Even Greater Humility it is to be Fulfilled

June 29, 2019 1:14 am

I held fast against him. Instinctively. I felt my eyes becoming opaque as if a wall had gone up to seal off the windows of my thoughts. And yet I felt such a longing for him, such a longing to fall into him and follow him and be led by him, that all my longings of the past seemed noting at all. He was all mystery to me as Magnus had been. Only he was beautiful, indescribably beautiful, and there seemed in him an infinite complexity and depth which Magnus had not possessed. While people like Hegal saw alienation as a metaphysical problem, Marx gave it a sociological frame of reference. In his essay of 1844 he wrote that under the system of private property the worker was alienated from the product of his labor and also from the means of production—both of which had become things “not belonging to one.” The worker thus separated from his product is alienated from oneself, since one’s labors are no longer one’s own but the property of another. Finally, one is alienated from other mortals, since one’s chief link with them now is the commodities they exchange or produce. Marx was the first to describe this process of reification (or converting an abstraction into something real) by which capitalist society transforms all personal relations between mortals into objective relations between things or money for the substitute for commodities. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

Later, in Captial, Marx referred to this process as the fetishism of commodities and wrote: “The labor of the individual asserts itself as part of the labor of society, only by means of the relations which the act of exchange establishes directly between the products, and indirectly through them, between the producers. To the latter, therefore, the relations connecting the labor of one individual with that of the rest appear, not as direct social relationships between individuals at work, but as what they really are, material relations between persons and social relations between things.” According to Marx, the disintegrative or negative character of capitalist society ay chiefly in its alienation of human labor and in its denial of opportunities for mortals to fulfill themselves in meaningful work. The industrial revolution and its subsequent transformation of human labor into a commodity are among the manor alienating forces in the capitalist World. However, our picture of that World is not complete. To administer their complex technology and labor markets mortals developed elaborate social structures or bureaucracies which are no less impersonal in their effects than machines. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

Indeed, that is their aim; and the attempt further to rationalize the conduct of human affairs by subjecting it to rules, regularity and a hierarchy of command—the distinguishing characteristics of bureaucracy as described by Max Weber—has enormously increased the power of alien forces over mortals. Marx’s analysis of the new conditions of labor under capitalism was complemented half a century late by Weber’s studies of bureaucracy. As Weber wrote, bureaucracy became particularly appropriate for capitalism because “the more bureaucracy depersonalizes itself, the more completely it succeeds in achieving the exclusion of love, hatred, and every purely personal, especially irrational and incalculable, feeling from the execution of official tasks. In the place of the old-type ruler who is moved by sympathy, favor, grace and gratitude, modern culture requires for its sustaining external apparatus the emotionally detached, and hence rigorously professional expert.” Bureaucracies typify not only government—as many believe—but also industry, armies and navies, education, philanthropy, banking, communications media, and all other activities that require organized effort. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

For the increasing numbers who work in bureaucratic settings, the consequences are much the same as for persons directly involved in the machine process. Thus Weber extended the concept of alienated labor to all organized or institutionalize work situations and one described a universal bureaucratic trend in which soldiers, scientists, civil servants—all “were separated or alienated from their respective means of production or administration in the same way as capitalist enterprise has separated the workers from theirs.” However, bureaucracy is not just significant because of its impersonal character or because it transforms a means—efficiency—into an end. Precisely because it represents a concentration of power, its effect, as C. Wright Mills observes, is to coerce, to manipulate. “Organized irresponsibility, in this impersonal sense, is a leading characteristic of modern industrial societies everywhere. On every hand the individual is confronted with seemingly remote organizations; he feels dwarfed and helpless before the managerial cadres and their manipulated and manipulating minions.” How industrial and bureaucratic machines alienate mortals can be seen most clearly in modern conditions of work. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

Although there has been considerable amelioration of the harsh conditions of early capitalism, thanks to the drive for a shorter working day and the abolition of child labor, the alienation of mortals from the means and ends of work as described by Marx and Weber characterizes most modern industrial societies. Increasing division of labor, greater mechanization, the growth of giant industrial and financial enterprises—these are the agents of our economic power and also of individual powerlessness. For evidence we need only look at mortals on the job. They must work, but how and for what? Few of them have known the pursuit of individual crafts. However, millions of men and women labor in large scale enterprises where work is monotonous and repetitious and where the decreasing need for skilled workers and an increasing division of labor place both in process and the products of work far beyond their control. To illustrate, in a recent survey workers’ attitudes it has been shown that work is not a central life interest. Nor do many of them value the informal associations with fellow workers that jobs offer. Not only is the workplace relatively unimportant as a place of preferred primary human relationships, but it cannot even evoke significant sentiments and emotions in its occupants. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

Other observers of work life have made it abundantly clear that most workers are not happy in their jobs, that they feel trapped and degraded by their working conditions, that they have a powerful desire to escape from their careers, and that what drives them on is the incessant demands of our consumption economy. However, far from escaping, growing numbers of workers and their families are forced to take on additional jobs in order to keep up with the rising costs of living. The result has been a serious fall in morale. It is a measure of the boring conditions of work in modern industry that management now gives so much attention to human relations. For many years it was believed that if mortals could not obtain satisfaction in their job, then their informal associations with follow workers would make up for the loss. The famous Hawthorne experiments at Western Electric seemed to show that increases or decreases in output were related not to physical conditions but rather to the strength of informal associations or cliques among workers. To raise morale and increase efficiency (the real goal) desperate and sometime ludicrous measure were taken by management. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

Thus in one American factor a picture of the finished product was installed on the assembly line so that worker performing their restricted tasks might better identify themselves with it! However, despite the great stress placed by management on human relations, evidence of workers’ continued dissatisfaction multiplies. It is reflected in restriction of output, wildcat strikes, outright sabotage and, perhaps most common, in feelings of detachment from the entire work process. There is a growing number of workers who find themselves alienate from work. There is an army of salaried or white-collar workers facing conditions which is more pleasant physically are no less disruptive psychologically. The powerlessness of blue collar workers is matched by the powerlessness of white collars. However, bureaucracy must not be seen as alienating only when it is huge, or because it aims at ever greater efficiency. A cruel work situation is bound to evoke anger or rage, however repressed. But even under ideal conditions of bureaucratic order—where there are neither great creative incentives nor disruptive tensions—the result is an isolated, remote Word of conformists, or what Mills calls the “cheerful robots.” Like industrial management, bureaucracy does not simply turn men and women into automations; it also wants them to like the process and to co-operate in it. #RandolphHarris #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

Since many giant bureaucracies are chiefly selling and marketing institutions, it is not just brain work that is being consumed but personalities as well. Here in the personality market, bureaucracy goes mere industry one better in making a commodity of mortals. The personality market, the most decisive effect and symptom of the great salesroom, underlies the all-pervasive distrust and self-alienation so characteristic of metropolitan people. Without common values and mutual trust, the cash nexus that links one mortal to another in transient contact has been made subtle in dozen ways and made to bite deeper into all areas of life and relations. People are required by the sales person’s ethic and convention to pretend interest in others in order to manipulate them. Mortals are estranged from one another as each secretly tries to make an instrument of the other, and in time a full circle is made: one makes an instrument of oneself, and is estranged from it also. Modern conditions of work under capitalism are alienating largely because the individual worker has lost—or is unable to gain—control over one’s technical and social machines. However, there is more to it. Mortals who experience disorder in their careers must inevitably find disorder in the community life. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

Most people never experience the joys of a life plan because most work situations do not afford the necessary stable progression over the worklife. There is a good deal of chaos in modern labor markets, chaos intrinsic to urban-industrial society. Rapid technological change dilutes old skills, makes others obsolete and creates demand for new ones; a related decentralization of industry displaces millions, creating the paradox of depressed areas in prosperous economies; metropolitan deconcentration shifts the clientele of service establishments, sometimes smashing or restructuring careers; recurrent crises such as wars, depressions, recession, coupled with the acceleration of fad and fashion in consumption, add a note of unpredictability to the whole. The result is retreat from both work and community. We are concerned about our work; it is the basis of our existence. We may love it or hate it; we may fulfill it as a duty or as a hard necessity. However, anxiety grasps us whenever we feel the limits of our strength, our lack of efficiency, the struggle with our laziness, the danger of failure. We are concerned about our relationships to others. We cannot imagine living without their benevolence, their friendship, their love, their communion in body and soul. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

However, when we think about indifference, the outburst of anger and jealousy, the hidden and often poisonous hostility we experience in ourselves as well as in those we love, we are worried and often in utter despair. The anxiety about losing them, about having hurt them, about not being worthy of them, creeps into our hearts an makes our love restless. We are concerned about ourselves. We feel responsible for our development towards maturity, towards strength in life, wisdom in mind, and perfection in spirit. At the same time, we are striving for happiness, we are concerned about our pleasures about having a good time, a concern which ranks very high with us. However, when we look at ourselves in the mirror of self-scrutiny or of the judgments of others, our anxiety strikes us. We feel that we have made the wrong decision, that we have started on the wrong road, that we are failing before mortals and before ourselves. Yet, someone may ask, do we not have higher concerns than those of our daily life? And does not Jesus himself witness to them? When he is moved by the misery of the masses does Christ not consecrate the social concern which has grasped many people in our time, liberating them from many worries of their daily lives? #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

When Jesus is moved by pity for the sick and heals them, does he not thereby consecrate the concern shared by medical and spiritual healers? When Christ gathers around him a small group in order to establish community with it, does he not thereby consecrate the concern about all communal life? When Jesus says he has come to bear witness to the truth, does he not consecrate the concern for truth, and the passion for knowledge which is such a driving force in our time? When Jesus is teaching the masses and his disciples, does he not consecrate the concern for leaning and education? And when he tells the parables, and when he pictures the beauty of nature and creates sentences of classic perfection, does he not consecrate the concern for beauty, and the elevation of mind it gives, and the peace after the restlessness of our daily concerns? However, are those noble concerns the one thing that is needed and the right thing that Mary has chosen? Or are they perhaps the highest forms of what Martha represents? Are we will, like Martha, concerned about many things even when we are concerned about great and noble things? Are we really beyond anxiety when we are socially concerned and when the mass of misery and social injustice, contrasted with our own favored position, falls upon our conscience and prevents us from breathing freely and happily while we are forced to heave the sighs of hundreds of people all over the World? #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

And do you know the agony of those who want to heal but know it is too late; of those who want to educate and meet with stupidity, wickedness and hatred; of those who are obliged to lead and are worn out by people’s ignorance, by the ambitions of their opponents, by bad institutions and bad luck? These anxieties are greater than those about our daily life. And do you know what tremendous anxiety is connected with every honest inquiry, the anxiety about falling into error, especially when one takes new and untrod paths of thought? When you turned from a great work of art to the demands, ugliness and worries of your daily life, have you ever experienced the almost intolerable feeling of emptiness? Even this is not the one thing we need as Jesus indicated when he spoke of the beauties of the Temple being doomed to destruction. Modern Europe has learned that the millennia of human creativity of which it boasted were not that one thing needful, for the monuments of these millennia now lie in ruins. Why are the many things about which we are concerned connected with worry and anxiety? We give them our devotion, our strength, our passion and we must do so; otherwise we would not achieve anything. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

Why, then, do they make us restless in the deepest ground of our hearts, and why does Jesus dismiss them as not ultimately needed? Degeneration of religions means the degeneration of prayer in them: the relational power in them is buried more and more by objecthood; they find it ever more difficult to say You with their whole undivided being; and eventually mortals must leave their false security for the risk of the infinite in order to recover this ability, going from the community over which one sees only the vaulting dome of the temple and no longer the firmament into the ultimate solitude. This impulse is most profoundly misunderstood when it is ascribed to subjectivism: life before the countenance is life in the one actuality, the only true objectivum; and the mortal that goes forth desires to find refuge in that which has true being, before the merely apparent, illusory objectivum that one flees has disturbed one’s truth. Subjectivism is psychologization while objectivism is reification of God; one a false fixation, the other a false liberation; both departures from the way of actuality, both attempts to find a substitute for it. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

God is close to his forms when mortals do not remove them from him. However, when the spreading movement of religion holds down the movement of return and removes the form from God, then the countenance of the form is extinguished, its lips are dead, its hands hang down, God does not know it any more, and the house of the World built around its altar, the human cosmos crumbles. The decomposition of the word has occurred. The word is present in revelation, at work in the life of the form, and becomes valid in the dominion of the dead form. Thus the path and counter-path of the eternal and eternally present word in history. The ages in which the living word appears are those in which the association of I and World is renewed. The ages in which the active and effective word reigns are those in which the understanding between I and World is preserved; the ages in which the word becomes valid are those in which the deactualization, the alienation of I and World, the emergence of doom takes place—until the great shudder appears, the holding of breath in the dark, and the preparatory silence. However, the path is not a circle. It is the way. Doom becomes more oppressive in every new eon, and the return more explosive. #RandolpHarris 14 of 15

And the theophany comes ever closer, it comes ever closer to the sphere between beings—comes closer to the realm that hides in our midst, in the between. History is a mysterious approach to closeness. Every spiral of its path leads us into deeper corruption and at the same time into more fundamental return. However, the God-side of the event whose World-side is called return is called redemption. Whether a mortal stays within the household and secular society or whether one enters the monastic and ascetic one, one’s enlightenment is neither guaranteed by the second choice nor blocked by the first one. The God within one is one’s secret watcher, be one layperson or hermit. One can defile or purify oneself in either state, grasp the truth or miss the point whether active in the World (as most of us have to be) or enclosed in a religious order, ashram, or temple. “And they are as the Angels of God, and if they shall ray unto the Father in the name of Jesus they can show themselves unto whatsoever mortal it seemeth them good. Therefore, great and marvelous works shall be wrought by them, before the great and coming day when all people must surely stand before the judgment-seat of Christ,” reports 3 Nephi 28.30-31. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

Manifest Destiny—We Have Eaten from the Tree of Knowledge and the United World of America is Our Future!

June 28, 2019 12:51 am

I will see a splendid city where great ideas are born in the minds of the populace, ideas that go forth to illuminate the darkened corners of the World. And I will know people like you, people who have thoughts in their heads and quick tongues with which to voice them, and we will sit in cafes and we will drink together and we will clash with each other violently in words, and we will talk for the rest of our lives in divine excitement. In America, pseudoinnocence has a history as long as the country’s. A “Chosen People” set sail from England, turning its back on a Europe that, for it, stood for sin, injustice, aristocratic exploitation, and religious persecution. These people sought to establish in America a land that would embody the opposites: righteousness, justice, democracy, and freedom of conscience. The very founding of the new nation was an enactment of the myth of the New Jerusalem, not in some distant future but already an actuality before the eyes of the “Chosen.” America began with a belief in perfection, and then it became devoted to progress. However, how do you progress beyond perfection? What about the religious persecution that soon sprang up even in New England? What about the beginning genocide of the Indians? #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

Necessarily, then, there began the long struggle between ideals and reality, a battle in which the idealistic America, which was the approximate of the perfect state, the new Garden of Eden with no snakes in the grass, was pitted against the reality of persecution and extermination of the Indians. An ethical dilemma, indeed! The confusion and hypocrisy to which this led is shown ironically in Benjamin Franklin’s writings: “If it be the design of Providence to extirpate these savages in order to make room for the cultivators of the Earth, it seems not improbable that run may be the appointed means. It has already annihilated all the tribes who formerly inhabited the seacoasts.” Mr. Franklin shows how the citizens identify the design of Providence, the will of God, with their own and their countrymen’s self-interest. Americans are the “cultivators of the Earth,” and genocide of the Indians—an enterprise the guilt for which we have not yet confronted—is the will of God. This is the hallmark of pseudoinnocence: always identify your self-interest with the design of Providence. Probably all nations are given to a kind of historical amnesia or selective recollection that makes unpleasant traumas of the past. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

Certainly Americans since the Puritans have historically regarded themselves as a latter-day “Chosen People” sent on a holy errand to the wilderness, there to create a New Jerusalem. The framers of the Constitution were, furthermore, deathly afraid of exploitative power, as Americans have always been. They formulated their Articles with the intention that no group would ever gain this power; so afraid were they of being exploited that, in the Articles, they stretched its meaning to include all power. Americans now had the difficult ethical task of believing overtly that they did not want power, that their capacity for moral thinking and for serving their fellow mortals obviated their need for power. They saw themselves as the saviors of the needy from Europe. The Statue of Liberty still promises, through the inscription on its base: Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore, send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. I life my lamp beside the golden door. However, since America is no longer a population building nation, some believe the statuette of limitations on the invitation from the Statue of Liberty has expired. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

In this country the Garden of Eden myth, along with the open denial of power, has continuously coexisted with a great amount of violence. The homicide rate here is three to ten times that of European countries; we have had one of the bloodiest labor histories of any of the large powers; the majority of Americas in the large cities seem to be afraid nowadays to walk on the streets at night or hand the cashier a one hundred dollar bill. The essential American soul is hard, isolated, stoic and a killer. This violence exists, oddly enough, side by side with a remarkable tenderness and warmth in the American character. We cannot escape the conclusion that some special conflicts must be present in the consciousness of Americans to account for the simultaneous existence of violence and tenderness. I propose that, primarily, the violence and, second, the tenderness are connected with our conscious denial of power and the pseudoinnocence that accompanies this denial. Violence comes from the powerlessness; it is the explosion of impotence. The denial of our desires for power, when it occurs in the endeavor to cover up an actually high degree of power, sets up an inner contradiction: power then does not allay our feelings of powerlessness. It does not lead to the sense of responsibility that actual power ought to entail. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

We cannot act upon our power directly, for we always carry an element of guilt at having it. If we were to admit it, we would have to confront our guilt. That is why power is customarily translated into money in America. At least money is external. Cold cash we give to other people and nations; we share it profusely with charities, indicating out guilt in possessing it. So we behave like a nation of wolves in rabbits’ skins. As a nation America has also failed to develop a viable sense of tragedy, which would serve, through making for empathy with our enemies, to mitigate our cruelty. One has only to read the reports of the men who fly the bombers over Indochina (“I do not think of the women and children below,) the fliers say. “I think only I have a job to do, and I get a joy out of doing it well.”) to find proof of our insulation of the evil of the World. “Two World wars have not induced in [Americans] either a sense of sin or that awareness of evil almost instinctive with Old World peoples.” Lacking this sense of our own complicity, most Americas also lack the element of mercy, which may well turn out to be a sine qua non of living in the World with an attitude of humanity. We tend to have sympathy with the aims and the spirits of people who are driven by success for the corporate state is rich and important. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

Many rightly see the American dream and even the problem of innocence in the first centuries of America’s history. We can appreciate the manner in which the sense of powerlessness eats away at the confidence of our people and their capacity to act, the willful ignorance in American life, and our tendency to try to get rid of evil by forbidding it. However, ironically, the promise to the young people and to all of us in the second half is pseudoinnocence writ large. “There are no enemies…There is nothing on the other side…Nobody wants war except the machine…And even business people, once liberated, would like to roll in the grass and lie in the Sun. There is no need, then, to fight any group of people in American.” Woodstock is cited as a myth of the new age now realized in all its ease and splendor, with no recognition at all of its aftermath, namely Altamont, where Hell’s Angels, brought in as bodyguards for singers, committed murder. It is an impressionistic painting of the Garden of Eden, with all of the glow of innocence and the ease and delight of children romping in the fields to rock music, the age before the fall, before the sense of anxiety or guilt intruded. However, alas! It is for children and not for adults. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

Far from Consciousness III being an answer, it would be no consciousness at all, for it lacks the dialectic movement between “yes” and “no,” good and evil, which gives birth to consciousness of any sort. The hard questions—if by that it meant political and economic organizations—are insignificant, even irrelevant. All will be done by Consciousness III, which will not require violence. We are then lulled into a blissful ease that is remarkably similar to those pictures on ancient Greek vases of gods lolling on Mount Olympus. Are there really no enemies? Can we call to mind the Berrigan bothers and think of that? Or the Soledad brothers? Or Angela Davis? Or the convicts at Attica, who, after the slaughter, were forced to run the gantlet naked? Or Vietnam—yes, the defoliation and dehumanized cruelty of Vietnam? Some have no understanding of the creeping fascism already discernible in our country: the turning of youth against their fathers, the anti-intellectualism, the growth of violence coupled with the sense of powerlessness of the mass of people, the tendencies of bureaucracies to make decision on the basis of what works mechanically with all human sense drowned in opportunism. It could be that some lack an understanding of the isolation, the loneliness, the despair that motivates many young people, especially in the drug scenes. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

At Coachella I once went to a hipster wedding; everybody was colorfully dressed as a stage set for the Beyonce Black Greek life step show along with strolling by pledges. However, I could not escape seeing the isolation in practically everyone’s eyes, each young person seeming alienated and lonely even in the crowd devoted to innocence and joy. With alienation we must be careful to prohibit and reduce violence so that people do not become apathetic. Once I was sitting at breakfast with a young man, one of a group of flower children, perhaps nineteen or twenty, with a clear, open face and guileless blue eyes. In the course of our talk he showed me a letter he had written and was sending to his chancellor at his college. In this confident letter that he composed, Klaus would be thereby excused from the final exams. Addressing the chancellor by his first name, the letter stated: “I do not believe in taking tests”; then several more sentences to the same effect; and finally the signature, “Klaus.” I asked Klaus if he had made a copy of the letter. “No, I don’t think it is necessary—the chancellor will read this one.” As I looked at him now, his eyes and face seemed too clear and too open—I felt the doom toward which he and his comrades were marching; I felt the heavy books under which they felt their brains were being crushed by, crushed like flowers indeed, with the students feeling no more than books could feel. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

I saw how much importance these youngster placed on their academic performance, and although it is for their own good, I felt like crying out: “Harmless as doves you are, but where is your wisdom of serpents?” Some people always equate power to the corporate state, the power of the military; totalitarianism is defined as pure power. They never look at the good power. In their minds it always corrupts. However, it is the misuse of power that is the evil; the very existence of power is a good thing. You need power to get out of bed and use the restroom. You need power to control your own life and get an education. You need power to have control over your own behavior. You need power to have self-esteem to accept yourself and not bother others. Innocence in our day is the hope that there are no enemies, that we can move into a new Garden of Eden, a community characterized by freedom from all want, guilt, and anxiety. However, this also means freedom from responsibility; it means going back prior to the birth f consciousness, for guilt is the only other side of moral consciousness—we have eaten of the tree of knowledge. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

We valiantly try to persuade ourselves that if we only find the key, we can easily create a society in which vulnerability, guilt, anxiety will all be things of the unmourned past. Unmourned and unstudied—here is possessed the contemporary uninterest in history and the refusal to study it. To hang to this picture of innocence, you must deny this history. For history is the record, among other things, of mortal’s sins and evils, of wars and confrontations of power, and all the other manifestations of mortal’s struggle toward an enlarged and deepened consciousness. Hence so many of the new generation turn their backs on history as irrelevant; they do not like it, they are not part of it, they insist we are in a brand-new ball game with new rules. And they are completely unaware that this is the ultimate act of hubris. Such innocence is particularly tempting in America because we actually ack a long history. We have very little sense of the sacredness of place, of roots, of homeland. In the Untied States of American, many people build houses in which to spend their old age, and they sell them before the roof is on. They settle in a place, which they soon afterwards leave to carry their changeable longings elsewhere. One will travel fifteen hundred miles to shake off one’s happiness. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

This, in contrast to Europeans who have lived in the same city for a thousand years, and whose very walls around the city bespeak the centuries of struggle by which they earned their convictions and their culture. However, the United States is waking up again. Many people want to come to the United States of America because we are a nation of Law and Order and protect our citizen. The cry not to build a wall to protect our boards is only enflaming the nation to make the realize we need one. People are drowning to sneak into the Untied State of America. There are also others who are legally waiting in line to get here and not being allowed entrance because a quota has been met. There are also security concerns when we do not know who is coming into America or where they are living. Why do so many people want to be American? Because they also believe in Manifest Destiny. That Americans are ordained by God to expand their boarders. If some many people want to be American and want Americans to take care of them, it means that they also want our government to expand, so we can institute Law and Order in their countries, create jobs and safe housing for their people so they do not have to flee. Many people would love to go back to their home country, the land they love, the land of their ancestors, but it is not safe for them. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

It is important to also understand that it is what we expect from ourselves that will be more effective than what someone else expects from one. Rules and regulations thrust upon them from outside which one is unwilling or unable to enforce will be of much less use. As human beings, one of the things that we do to understand our World is to create systems of meaning that help us organize the sensations, experience, and objects we encounter. However, too often we use these seemingly descriptive systems to determine the worth of others. These human-made hierarchies of value can cause division, contention, and skewed understanding of self-worth. Conversely, God’s system of valuing us promotes connection, compassion, and love. We are God’s children. He loves us unconditionally, eternally, and unchangingly. Our worth is infinite because are his sons and daughters. No one spirit is more valuable then others. There are some people who still use an intricate set of codes, such as the very wealthy, to dictate behavior and measure worth. However, as the children of God we are also expected to abide by certain standards—to be loving, honest, show respect, and be slow to anger. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

We are also supposed to have joy in our lives. Even though we cannot yet control those external forces that impact our lives here on Earth, as we strive to become father disciples of the Lord Jesus Christ, we can find peace, joy, and happiness despite the Worldly troubles that swirl around us. The scriptures teach us that Satan desires to lead people into darkness. His every effort is to shut out the light and truth of Jesus Christ and his gospel. The Devil seeks that all people might be miserable like unto himself. If Heavenly Father’s work and glory is to bring to pass the immortality and eternal life of men and women, Lucifer’s work is to bring to pass the misery and endless woe of God’s children. Sin and transgression dim the Light of Christ in our lives. That is why our quest is to bask in the Light of Christ, which brings peace, joy, and happiness. The way to full realization of God may be possessed through a monastery or a nunnery for one person and through a family home or a career in the World for another. If any mortal assets that it must be possessed solely through a particular one of these two, one is mistaken. If one insists on forcing this idea on all aspirants, one is sinning. If one claims illumination as authority, it could be only a partial, limited, and incomplete illumination. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13

And Distance Has Come and Taken You Far Away Again, but I Will See You Soon, My Friend!

June 25, 2019 1:52 am

I showed my power to understand. Yes, illusions before, I admit it, but the thing I have spoken here are true. Already you despise your son for his love of mortals, his need to be ever near them, his yielding to the violinist. “Lie awake watching you run through my head, I am alone again, but not for long my friend. We face another day and distance has come and taken you far away again, but I will see you soon my friend, and then I will sing you my song. I cannot go home alone again. No I cannot my friend. Until then, eyes, I recognize taking me back familiar to me from some other time or maybe another life. Remember out times, and know who I am. The memory stays, until we can breathe as one again,” Until then by Sully Erna. Power and the sense of significance, I have said, are intertwined. One is the objective form and the other the subjective form of the same experience. While power is typically extrovert, significance may not be extrovert at all but may be shown (and achieved) by prayer or other introvert, subjective methods. It is nevertheless experienced by the person as a sense of power in that it helps one integrate oneself and subsequently makes one more effective in one’s relations with others. Power is always interpersonal; is it is purely personal we call it strength. Power is social and consists of person in groups acting in concert. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

This is why the interpersonal view point, the tap root of the cultural school of psychoanalysis, is so important. If one believes the feeling of power in the sense of having influence in interpersonal relations with significant others is crucial for the maintenance of self-esteem and for the process of maturity, when the sense of significance is lost, the individual shift one’s attention to different, and often perverted or neurotic, forms of power to get some substitute for significance. “Here I am, what a nice place to be. I never thought I would see the skies separate for me and here I am. What a nice surprise. If only I had known what life was like on this side. You always bring me light, and you help me find my way. A gentle kiss goodnight is the innocence I crave. Here I am humbled and amazed. This beautiful little miracle of life was gifted to me, and here I am. I never thought I would say, if I could live my life again, I would live it your way. You always brought me life, and you have helped me find my way. I will never waste you time, I will never cause you pain. I will love you all my life, I will love you everyday. Under the light you shine on me, I promise I will be there for you baby. I would never want to leave you anyway, you have become my light. I cross my heart that is in your hands with hope that you will always be my best friend. I promise I will be there until the end,” My Light by Sully Erna. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

Our particular problem in America at this point in history is the widespread loss of the sense of individual significance, a loss which is sensed inwardly as impotence. A situation in our day more tragic than the violence about us is that so many people feel they do not and cannot have power, that even self-affirmation is denied them, that they have nothing left to assert, and hence that there is no solution short of a violent explosion. Consider a recurring nightmare from a radical student at Columbia University. In this dream, the student Salvatore, came home from school and rand the bell to his house. He was told by his mother that she did not know him and that he did not belong there. He went to his cousin’s house and they told him the same thing. Finally he walked across the country to his father’s house in California and was told by his father that he did not know him and he did not belong there. The dream ended with him disappearing into the Pacific Ocean. “In separation, we come together. It never ends, change has just begun. Believing as we release the departed to know, what no one else could know. A way, into the unexplained. Redeem my soul into my body. To think my souls have been damned again, and again and again,” The Departed by Sully Erna. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

Judging from how often this kind of dream—“My parents did not recognize me; they closed the door in my face,” “I do not belong to any place”—comes up in therapy, it seems to be an important clue to understanding our times. The student who had that dream was a member of the revolutionary movement not by accident. Violence, or acts close to it, gives one a sense of counting, of mattering, of power (whether the feeling be ersatz or not is unimportant at the moment). This in turn gives the individual a sense of significance. No human being can exist for long without some sense of significance. No human being can exist for long without some sense of one’s own significance. Whether one gets it by shooting a haphazard victim on the street, or by constructive work, or by rebellion, or by psychotic demands in a hospital, or by Walter Mitty fantasies, one must be able to feel this I-count-for-something and be able to live out that felt significance. It is the lack of this sense of significance, and the struggles for it, that underlies much violence. Writing in the Report to the Nation Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence appointed by the president after the assassination of Robert Kennedy and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., the historian Richard Maxwell Brown makes sobering statements about American violence. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

“The first and must obvious conclusion is that there has been a huge amount of it. We have resorted so often to violence that we have long since become a trigger happy people. It is not merely that violence has been mixed with the negative features of our history such as criminal activity, lynch mobs, and family feuds. On the contrary, violence has formed a seamless web with some of the noblest and most constructive chapters of American history.” The aftermath of the 1968 political assassination saw a bevvy of opinions and researches spring up on the causes of violence and its cures, consisting largely of debates between those emphasizing nature, and those emphasizing nurture. The former (stemming back, in the main, to Dr. Freud) held the general viewpoint that aggression is instinctive, part of the genetic equipment of mortals, and human beings are inherently aggressive. According to this view, it is a cross we must bear, an expression of the old Adam inevitably tainting human beings, and the most we can hope for is to control this evil in our hearts or let it out in wars and other culturally approved forms of violence. The other chief view, nurture, claims that aggression is a cultural phenomenon, caused—or at least augmented—by mass communication, faulty education, and especially TV. It is to be attacked and gotten rid of by changing our educational methods and controlling programs on TV. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

What all too often is tiresomely ignored is that these two approaches are not mutually exclusive. Aggression is part of the basic equipment of mortals, but it is also culturally formed, exacerbated, and can be, at least in part, redirected. Out culture is not simply a given, but is also us. We “homo called sapiens,” as Edna St. Vincent Millay put it in her sonnet, are the kind of creatures who create a vast TV and other forms of mass communication and, using these means, covertly teach aggression to our children. At the same time we endlessly sermonize against aggression. The contradiction this creates adds to the impotence everyone feels and to the hypocrisy with which we surround the issue of power in our culture. However, the real argument against many of these either/or explanation is that they leave out of the discussion exactly what is most important in the problem—that is, the question of the values, rooted in both nature and nurture, that link the two and are bound up with aggression and violence. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

Richard Maxwell Brown concludes his part of the Report to the Commission on Violence by citing two problems which confront us: “One is the problem of self-knowledge…When that is done…we must realize that violence has not been the action only of roughnecks and racists among us but has been the tactic of the must upright and respected of our people. Having gained this self-knowledge, the next problem becomes the ridding of violence, once and for all, from the real (but unacknowledged) American value system.” However, is there not a flagrant contradiction in this? If violence has been part and parcel of “our highest and most idealistic endeavors” and had been the tactic of the “most upright and respected” people, should we not inquire whether these people find something, perhaps unconsciously, in violence that they value? Furthermore, one can never change a value system by willing it changed or by other conscious means, as though plucking weeds from a garden. The roots of values lie deep in the archetypal and unconscious symbols and myths of the society. Changing the values system first of all requires a probing into the questions: What does violence do for the individual? What purposes does one achieve through aggression and violence? #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

In the utopian aim of removing all power and aggression from human behavior, we run the risk of removing self-assertion, self-affirmation, and even the power to be. If it were successful, it would breed a race of docile, passive eunuchs and would lay the groundwork for an explosion in violence that would dwarf all those that have occurred so far. Thus oversimplifying the issue, we talk as though our choice were only between aggression on the one hand and a race of eunuchs on the other. Caught in the contradiction which this breeds, it is not surprising that we wake up with bad dreams, sensing that the essence of ourselves, the self-affirmation and self-assertion that makes us persons and without which we have no reason for living, is taken from us. What we have failed to see is that aggression has been, on the beneficial side, in the service of those values of life which would, if discarded, leave us bereft, indeed. “How many ways can you break my spirit down…again and how many times have I peeled my face up off the ground…for you. In case that you are starting to think you can run my life…I would think again. Or cripple my faith, when you judge and criticize me…but I am still standing. I do not know if I can say I have lived through everything, but I have walked this Earth with bare feet broken in the snow and my father said to me it never seems to be a simple walk down an icy cold broken road. I will fight with what is inside of me…this warrior spirit inside of me,” Broken Road by Sully Erna. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

It has long been my belief that understanding aggression and violence requires that power be seen as basic to the problem. I believe, also, that the data given to us by depth psychology cast an especially revealing light on the springs of human power and on aggression and violence. In my concern with power, I am tying to reach a level below both the nature and nurture theories, below both the instinct and culture arguments. I am seeking the answer to the question: What does individual person achieve through aggression and violence? If the pre-industrial World was in many ways no less insecure than our own, at least work and community life were ordered on a human scale. First of all, most mortals lived in small, tightly knit communities in which the family was the productive unit. Second, the tools that mortals used, the pace of work, the distribution of things that were made—all of those were controlled by human capacities and needs. Perhaps most important, instead of being separated from what we now call leisure activities, work itself—ordinarily some craft—was closely integrated in the total life of individuals and communities. Some call this the World we have lost. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

It was by no means an idyllic Word, but time was, and it was all time up to 250 years ago when the whole of life went forward in the family, in a circle of loved, familiar faces, know and fondled objects, all to human size. That time has gone forever. It makes us very different from our ancestors. Different chiefly because of the technological revolution with its transformation of working conditions, the communities in which mortal life, and the whole complex social order that governs our lives. What happened, however, was companying change in human personality or character; and companying change in human personality or character; and it is the characterological revolution which must be understood if we are to determine whether alienation today differs in form and degree from the miseries of which earlier mortals complained. However, like the scientific and political upheavals which is accompanied, this characterological change had no sudden beginning or point in time at which earlier mortals complained. However, like the scientific and political upheavals which it accompanied, this characterological change had n sudden beginning or point in time at which spontaneously modern mortals replaced feudal mortals. History here is inadequate, and our evidence largely intuitive, or derived from literary works with their descriptions of social types, or from language itself. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

As much as anything else, one needs personal freedom in this search after truth. Every form of interference and obstruction comes from sources which have acquired only a partial or false insight into truth. However, such freedom is permitted only insofar as one is good enough, wise enough, balanced enough, judicious enough, and discriminating enough to use it properly. Otherwise it leads to non-truth and self-deception. One must learn to think for oneself and to practise discrimination for oneself, if one want to find one’s way to truth. “A veil of sparkling white soothes and bathes me in the light, it feels me with the Suns and visions of the ancient ones. Descend to me, and sooth my disarray, and so it is done—hear my words Avalon. Fields are swaying like dancers in the Moonlight, rivers field with dreams-Unbroken and still promising. Warm inside-open the way in flat into the night—embrace what is to be, Avalon” Avalon by Sully Erna. Avalon is the mythical island, in Arthurian legend. The island’s legendary healing powers were said to restore King Arthur after he was injured in a major battle. His sword, Excalibur, was forged there too. It is a utopian paradise where the legends of English knights and political wholeness unite in a kingdom lost in the mists of time. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

If a seeker find no one in one’s surroundings, contacts, or society near enough to one’s level of spiritual interests, then one must accept one’s loneliness, because one has chosen to draw away from the common preoccupation. For in order to be a working philosopher, a mortal must go one’s own way. This demand for individuality requires courage and wisdom. If one lack higher knowledge, intuitional feeling, and intellect—whose combination is wisdom—then one must seek to develop them and this demands works. Meanwhile, one can take help from personal guides and superior books. Without wisdom, or at least genuine efforts to work towards it, one’s course could be wrongly set to arrive at disaster. To withdraw from sectarian community life and walk alone requires qualities that only few possess. There is security, comfort, mortal and Worldly support in it. To be able to abandon these things a mortal must have strong inner urge as well as a continuous clear perception of philosophy’s meaning. “Breathe deep, bracing and strong, coming alive. Take back all that is lost, honour your pride. Time stops, silence is now, moving around hands raised fading to black, fall to the ground. From within, you will begin to feel the rise!” (The Rise by Sully Erna) #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

The weakling cannot walk this path. A mortal needs strength to follow out what one’s deep intuition tells one to do, especially where it departs from the allegedly rational or the socially conventional. If one’s guided attitude or actions meets with criticism or opposition, what is that to one? One is not answerable for what other people think about one. That is their responsibility. One is answerable only for what one oneself thinks and does. Only the mortal who has a passion to acquire the certainty of truth, who has the courage to hold unorthodox views and come to independent conclusions, who lives in an atmosphere of original thought, and to whom the charge of heresy is no charge at all, is at all likely to find one’s way to the truth. In truth, however, the pure relation can be built up into spatiotemporal continuity only be becoming embodied in the whole stuff of life. It cannot be preserved but only put to the proof in action; it can only be done, poured into life. Mortals can do justice to the relation to God that has been given to one only by actualizing God in the World in accordance with one’s ability and the measure of each day, daily. This is the only genuine guarantee of continuity. “Time is so wasted it wastes away, resurrect me Jesus Christ, I am so lonely for you. Taken away the innocence of live. Deliver me. Deliver me out of this pain and I will live through you again,” Eyes of a Child by Sully Erna. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13

Whenever I Found the Living, there I Found the Will to Power—I Have Been through All the World and I Will Take You to Safe Places!

June 21, 2019 1:08 am

These demons are mindless, immature, and deviant, but I had studied their conduct and I have learned from all the evidence why it is that they rage. They are maddened that they do not have bodies, that that cannot feel as we feel. They make the innocent scream filth because the rites of love and passion are things that they cannot possibly know. They can work the body parts but not truly inhabit them, and so they are obsessed with the flesh that they cannot invade. And with their feeble powers they bump upon objects, they make their victims twist and jump. This longing to be carnal is the origin of their anger, the indication of the suffering which is their lot. Power is essential for all living things. Mortals in particular, cast on this barren crust of Earth aeons ago with the hope and the requirement that one survive, finds one must use one’s powers and confront opposing forces at every point in one’s struggle with the Earth and with one’s fellows. Insecure as one has been through the ages, buffeted by limitations and weakness, laid low by illness and ultimately by death, one nevertheless asserts one’s powers in creativity. One product of this is civilization. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

The word power comes from the Latin posse, meaning to be able. We can see the vicissitudes of the emergence of power as soon as a baby is born into the World—in his cry and in the waving of his arms in demand that he be fed. The cooperative, loving side of existence goes hand in hand with coping and power, but neither the one nor the other can be neglected if life is to be gratifying. Our appreciation of the Earth and the support of our fellows are not gained by abdication of our powers, but by cooperative use of them. The infant’s capacity to cope with necessities becomes, in the growing adult, the struggle for self-esteem and for the sense of significance as a person. This latter is his psychological reason for living in contrast to the infant’s biological one. They cry for recognition becomes the central psychological cry: I must be able to say I am, to affirm myself in a World into which, by my capacity to assert myself, I put meaning, I create meaning. And I must do this in the face of nature’s magnificent indifference to my struggles. It is important that we remind ourselves that we mean neither will nor power in the competitive sense of the modern day, but rather self-realization and self-actualization. If we are freed from thinking of power only in the pejorative sense, we are better able to agree with others. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

Far from treating power only as a term of abuse, one which is to be applied to our enemies (for instance, they are power-driven, but we are motivated only by benevolence, reason, and morality), I use it as a description of a fundamental aspect of the life process. It is not to be identified with life itself; there is much in human existence—like curiosity and love and creativity—that may be and normally is related to power but is not to called power in itself. However, if we neglect the factor of power, as is the tendency in our day of reaction against the destructive effects of the misuse of power, we shall lose values that are essential to our existence as human. A great deal of human life can be seen as the conflict between power on one side (for instance, effective ways of influencing others, achieving the sense in interpersonal relations of the significance of one’s self) and powerlessness on the other. In this conflict our efforts are made much more difficult by the fact that we block out both sides, the former because of the evil connotation of power drives, and the latter because our powerlessness is too painful to confront. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

Indeed, the chief reason people refuse to confront the whole issue of power is that if they did, they would have to face their own powerlessness. As soon as powerlessness is referred to by its more personal name, helplessness or weakness, many people will sense that they are heavily burdened by it. Indeed, no social emotion is more widespread today then the conviction of personal powerlessness, the sense of being beset, beleaguered, and persecuted. Majority rule, for which mortals have struggled for centuries, has produced a situation in which mortals are more important, more powerless to influence their government then 200 years ago. The juggernaut of the state grinds on with no attention paid to you or me. And now multitudes are having to get used to living without their usual confidence that America is the World’s most powerful nation, a confidence to which, inadequate as it was, many people clung for their past sense of personal status. To admit our own individual feelings of powerlessness—that we cannot influence many people; that we count for little; that the values to which our parents devoted their lives are to us insubstantial and worthless; that we feel ourselves to be faceless others, insignificant to other people, and therefore, not worth much to ourselves—this is, indeed, difficult to admit. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

I cannot recall a time during the last four decades when there was so much talk about the individual’s capacities and potentialities and so little actual confidence on the part of the individual about one’s power to make a difference psychologically or politically. The talk is at least partially a compensatory symptom for our disquieting awareness of our very loss of power. It is, therefore, understandable in this transitional age, when we have at our fingertips the power to blow each other off the face of the planet, that certain persons should purpose we give up the human experiment. We live in times too dangerous to trust to human individual mood or choice…We can no longer control the people in power, and we therefore must resort to pacifying drugs to control our leaders. We can appreciate this despair, especially when we consider the powerlessness of the Blacks, out of which the impetus for this proposal arises. However, this does not prevent our also realizing, as we read with sinking heart of the new discoveries of chemicals that purport to cure modern mortals of their aggressiveness and develop in one a cooperative personality, that use of them goes with depersonalization and loss of our sense of personal responsibility. This alternative would mean, indeed, a gradual abdication of mortal’s humanity. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

Other psychologist, noting that we have not done very well in controlling ourselves, propose to do that controlling for us in the form of operant conditioning. We hear of new methods of bringing up our children which will train out of them aggressive tendencies and make them docile and placid. Have everyone forgotten this despair in which people are polarized into two groups, the majority domesticated into docile, sheeplike passivity, their flesh soft and tender, who are then eaten by a tougher group, the engineers of this social program? The failure of nerve theories arise out of the true observation that the exercise of power has done colossal harm in the modern World. The proposals have the double attraction of expressing the reaction against power and promising a utopia in the same breath. They will have a strong following among people threatened by importance and hoping against hope for some substitute for power. American’s concern about the possible misuse of power verges at times on a neurotic obsession. The important question, however, is not whether these theories are right or wrong. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

Rather it is whether or not we would, by trying to rid ourselves of our tendencies toward aggression, be discarding those values essential to our humanity—our self-affirmation and self-assertion, just to mention two. And would we not then be adding greatly to our feeling of powerlessness and this setting the stage for an eruption of violence that would dwarf everything so far? For violence has its breeding group in impotence and apathy. True, aggression has been so often and so regularly escalated into violence that anyone’s discouragement and fear of it can be understood. However, what is not seen is that the state of powerlessness, which leads to apathy and which can be produced by the above plans for the uprooting of aggression, is the source of violence. As we make people powerless, we promote their violence rather than its control. Deeds of violence in our society are performed largely by those trying to establish their self-esteem, to defend their self-image, and to demonstrate that they, too, are significant. Regardless of how derailed or wrongly used these motivations may be or how destructive their expression, they are still the manifestations of beneficial interpersonal needs. We cannot ignore the fact that, no matter how difficult their redirection may be, these needs themselves are potentially constructive. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

Violence arises not out of superfluity of power but out of powerlessness. Violence is the expression of impotence. Confused as to one’s place in the scheme of a World growing each day closer yet more impersonal, more densely populated yet in face-to-face relations more dehumanized; a World appealing ever more widely for one’s concern and sympathy with unknown masses of mortals, yet fundamentally alienating one even from one’s next neighbor, today Western mortals have become mechanized, routinized, made comfortable as an object; but in the profound sense displaced and thrown off balance as a subjective creator and power. This theme of the alienation of modern mortals runs through the literature and drama of two continents; it can be traced in the content as well as the form of modern art; it preoccupies theologians and philosophers, and to many psychologists and sociologists, it is the central problem of our time. In various ways they tell us that ties have snapped that formerly bound Western mortals to themselves and to the World about them. In diverse language they say that mortals in modern industrial societies are rapidly becoming detached from nature, from one’s old gods, from the technology that has transformed one’s environment and now threatens to destroy it. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

From one’s work and its products, and from one’s leisure; from the complex social institutions that presumably serve but are more likely to manipulate one; from the community in which one lives; and above all from oneself—from one’s body and one’s gender, from one’s feelings of love and tenderness, and from one’s art—one’s creative and productive potential. The alienated mortal is every mortal and no mortal, drifting in exercises no power, a stranger to oneself and to others. Alienation as we find it in modern society is almost total; it pervades the relationship of mortals to one’s self. An indefinable sense of loss; a sense that life has become impoverished, that mortals are somehow deracinate and disinherited, that society and human nature alike have been atomized, and hence mutilated, above all that mortals have been separated from whatever might give meaning to their work and their lives. Too frequently, there is a tyranny from above, imitated by followers, which forbids any independent thought and does not tolerate any real search. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

Mortal’s search for truth cannot be properly carried on unless one as full freedom in it. Where is the religious or religio-mystical institution which is willing to grant that to him? Is there a single one which lets one start out without being hampered by authoritarian doctrines, taboos, limitations, and traditions which it would impose upon one? Lectures, societies, and group-movements are of limited value: they can never replace nor achieve what is gained by one’s own individual efforts made in the right way. The seeker after truth will not find one’s way easy to travel. One may find that an institution, an authority, or an organization is suffocating one mentally or oppressing one emotionally. This may be the hour when one must claim one’s freedom. It is illusory to believe that, by blindly handing or humbly submitting one’s character and credo, one’s standards and values, one’s spiritual purposes and practices, to any organized group or established church, to a teacher, guide, or guru, to form and formulate, a mortal can evade the responsibility of judging them for oneself, accepting or rejecting by oneself. It is required of every fully human being that one be individual, not a parasite, and that one be oneself, not someone else. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

People speak of the religious mortal as one who can dispense with all relations to the World and to beings because the social stage that is allegedly determined from outside is supposed to have been transcended here by a force that works entirely from within. However, two basically different notions are confused when people use the concept of the social: the community built of relation and the amassing of human units that have no relation to one another—the palpable manifestation of modern mortal’s lack of relation. The bright edifice of community, however, for which one can be liberated even from the dungeon of sociability, is the work of the same force that is alive in the relation between mortals and God. However, this is not one relation among others; it is the universal relation into which all rivers pour without drying up for that reason. Sea and rivers—who would make a bold to separate here and define limits? There in only the one flood from I to You, ever more infinite, the one boundless flood of actual life. One cannot divide one’s life between an actual relationship to God and an inactual I-It relationship to the World—praying to God in truth and utilizing the World. Whoever knows the World as something to be utilized knows God the same way. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

One’s prayers are a way of unburdening oneself—and fall into the ears of the void. One—and not the atheist who from the night and longing of one’s garret window addresses the nameless—is God. And so we use them for a kind of pleasure which can be called fun. However, it is not the creative kind of fun often connected with play; it is, rather, a shallow, distracting, greedy way of having fun. And it is not by chance that it is that type of fun which can easily be commercialized, for it is dependent on calculable reactions, without passion, without risk, without love. Of all the dangers that threaten our civilization, this is on of the most dangerous ones: the escape from one’s emptiness through a fun which makes joy impossible. Rejoice! This Biblical exhortation is more needed for those who have much fun and pleasure than for those who have little pleasure and much pain. It is often easier to unite pain and joy than to unite fun and joy. Does the Biblical demand for joy prohibit pleasure? Do joy and pleasure exclude each other? By no means! The fulfillment of the center of our being does not exclude partial and peripheral fulfillments. And we must say this with the same emphasis with which we have contrasted joy and pleasure. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

We must challenge not only those who seek pleasure for pleasure’s sake, but also those who reject pleasure because it is pleasure. Mortals enjoy eating and drinking, beyond the mere terrestrial need of them. It is a partial ever-repeated fulfillment of one’s striving for life; therefore, it is pleasure and gives joy of life. Mortals enjoy playing and dancing, the beauty of nature, and the ecstasy of life. They fulfill some of one’s most intensive strivings for life; therefore, they are pleasure and give joy of life. Mortals enjoy the power of knowledge and the fascination of art. They fulfill some of one’s highest strivings for life; therefore, they are pleasure and give joy of life. Mortals enjoy the community of mortals in family, friendship, and the social group. They fulfill some fundamental strivings for life; therefore, they are pleasure and give joy of life. “And they had power given unto them, insomuch that they could not be confined in dungeons; neither was it possible that any mortal could slay them; nevertheless they did not exercise their power until they were bound in bands and cast into prison. Now, this was done that the Lord might show forth his power in them. And it came to pass that they went forth and began to preach and to prophesy unto the people, according to the spirit and power which the Lord had given them,” reports Alma 8.31-32. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13

Randolph Harris II International Institute