Oh, poor child, I thought. You might have had a little more compassion for everyone if you had known how beautiful you were, and you might have thought yourself a little bit stronger and more able to gain something for yourself. A it was, you play sly games on those around you, because you did not have faith in your own self or even know what you were. Economic activity itself, from the dawn of human society to the present time, is sacred to the core. It is not a rational, secular activity designed simply to meet human survival needs. Or, better, it is not only that, never was, and never will be. If it were, how explain being’s drive to create a surplus, from the beginning of society to the present? How explain being’s willingness to forgo pleasure, to deny oneself, in order to produce beyond one’s capacity to consumer? Why do people work so hard to create useless good when they already have enough to eat? We know that primitives amassed huge piles of food and other goods often only to ceremoniously destroy them, just as we continue to do. We know that many of their choicest trade items, such as bits of amber, were entirely superfluous; that many of their most valuable economic possession created with painstaking labors were practically useless, for instance, the big ceremonial axe-blade of the Trobriands. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

And we know that historically this creation of useless goods got out of hand and led to the present plight of beings—immersed in a horizon of polluting junk, besieged by social injustice and class and race oppression, have and have-nots, all grasping, fighting, showing, not knowing how they got into their abysmal condition or what it all means. When attempting to be serious, the mass media must rig up pseudo-problems and solve them by cliché. They cannot touch real problems or real solutions. Plots are packed with actions which obscure the vagueness and irrelevance of meanings and solutions. Similarly, to replace actual individuality, each character and situation is tricked up with numerous identifying details and mannerisms. The more realistic the characteristics, the less real the character usually, r the situation, and the less revealing. Literal realism cannot replace relevance. Mass media inveigh against sin and against all evils accepted as such. However, they cannot question things not acknowledge as evil or appear to support things self as evil. Even Rigoletto, were it a modern work, could not be broadcast since crime and immorality pay and the ending is unhappy for everybody but the villain. Combating legal censorship, organized group pressures, and advertising agencies is gallantly romantic—and as quixotic as being’s rage against one’s own mirrored image. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

These agencies are interested only in presenting what is wanted and in preventing what might often people. They are nuisances perhaps, but things could not be very different without them. Police officers do not create the law, thought becoming the target of the few who would defy it. The very nature of the mass media excludes art, and requires surrogation by popular culture. Though the Hays production code applies only to movies, its basic rule states a principle which all mass media must follow: “Correct standards of life, subject only to the requirements of drama and entertainment” must be upheld. Doubtless “correct standards” are those standards mist of the audience is likely to believe correct. They authorize whatever does not upset or offend the audience, and nothing else. “Correct standards of life” must exclude art (expect occasional classics). For art is bound to differ from the accepted, that is, the customary mora and aesthetic view, at least as it takes shape in the audience’s mind. Art is always a fresh vision of the World, a new experience or creation of life. If it does not break, or develop, or renew in significant aspects the traditional, customary, accepted aesthetic and moral standards, if it merely repeats without creating, it is not art. If it does, it is incompatible with the “correct standards of life” which must control mass media. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Mass media thus never can question being’s fate where it is questionable; they cannot sow doubt about an accepted style of life, or an approved major principle. To be sure, mass media often feature challenges to this and that, and clashes of opinion. These are part of our accepted style of life, as long as challenges do not defy anything but sin and evil in the accepted places and manner. The mass media must hold up “correct standards of life” whereas art must create, not uphold views. When film or broadcast, the visions of the playwright or novelist cannot deviate from the accepted “correct standards” and they must be entertaining. They must conform to the tastes of the audience; they cannot form it. Virtue must triumph entertainingly—virtue as the audience sees it. The poets, Shelly thought, are “the unacknowledged legislators of the World.” Shelley’s poet wrote for a few who would take the trouble to understand them. They addressed an audience that knew and shared the common traditions they were developing. High culture was cultivated in special institutions—courts, monasteries, churches, universities—by people who devoted their lives to the development of its traditions, and were neither isolated nor surrounded by masses wishing to be entertained. (Besides, there were no means of addressing a mass.) #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

There was no need and no temptation for the artist to do anything but to create in one’s own terms. Poets, painters, or philosophers lived in and were of the group for whom they produced, as did most people, were they peasants, artisans or artists. The relations between producers of culture and consumers were so personal (as were the relations between producers and consumers generally) that one can hardly speak of an impersonal market in which one sold, the other bought. In both high and folk culture, each bounded and autonomous Universe—court r village—relied on the particular cultivators and inventors of its arts and sciences no less than the latter relied on their patrons. Each region or court depended on its musicians as it depended on its craftsmen, and vice versa. The mutual personal dependence had disadvantages and advantages, as has any close relationship. Michelangelo or Beethoven depended on irksome individual patrons more than they would today. On the other hand, whatever the patrons’ tastes or demands, they were individual and not average tastes or demands. Folk culture grew without professional help. High culture was cultivated like an orchard or garden. However, both folk and high cultures grew from within the groups they distinguished and remained within them. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

High culture was entirely dominated by people with more than average prestige, power and income—by the elite as a group, who also dominated politics and society in general. This group determined what was to be produced, culturally and otherwise; and they took their toll often by oppression and spoliation of the mass of people whom they ruled. With the development of industry, the elite as a group lost its power. The great mass consumers now determines what is to be produced. Elite status, leadership in any form, is achieved and kept today by catering to the masses, not by plundering or oppressing them. The nobleman may have become rich by robbing (taking from) his peasants. However, the industrialist becomes a millionaire or billionaire by selling to (exchanging with) farmers. And one’s business is helped by giving one’s customers, via television, the entertainers they want. These in turn reach elite status by appealing to the masses. So do politicians. The elite no loner determines what is produced, any more than it dominates society in other respects. Rather, the elite becomes the elite by producing the goods that sell the goods that cater to an average of tastes. With respect to culture, the elite neither imposes any tastes nor cultivates one of its own. It markets and helps homogenize and distribute popular culture—that which appeals to an average of tastes—through the mass media. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

The changes in income distribution, mobility and communication, the economics of mass production already discussed, have caused the power of individual consumers to wane. However, the power of consumers as a group has risen and that of producers as a group has dwindled. From a sample of many diverse societies, the giving of gifts between groups and individuals was the heart of archaic social systems. On the primitive level we see compellingly that social life is a continual dialogue of gift giving and counter gift giving. To the anthropological observer the thing was simply marvelous: goods were shared and freely given; being observed the principle of social reciprocity and respected social obligations to the letter. When there was food, there was food for all; the hunter who killed the game distributed it with pride and often took the least desirable part of the animal for oneself. This was the core of truth in the myth of primitive communism. If someone had something you wanted, you asked for it and received it. However, often this continuous gift giving and taking seemed to the Western observer to be perverse; a native would work very hard at the trading post to earn a shirt, and when he came back a week later someone else would be wearing it. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

Westerners could only think that this represented a basic lack of responsibility, a kind of simplemindedness. It is so alien to our “I got mine—you get yours” philosophy. Or more alarmingly, missionaries would find that natives came to their hut and simply took valuable knives, guns, clothes, and so forth, without so much as a “thank you,” as though these were coming to them. How could traders, missionaries, and administrators understand something that often eluded anthropologists themselves: that primitive beings did not act out of economic principles, that the process of freely giving and receiving was embedded in a much larger, much more important cosmology, that since the explorers had destroyed the old gods and replaced them, one had to give freely just as the gods had done. Primitive life was openly immersed in debt, in obligation to the invisible powers, the ancestors, the dead souls; the group lived partly by drawing its powers from the non-living. Unlike us, primitives knew the truth of being’s relation to nature: nature gives freely of its bounty to beings—this was the miracle for which to be grateful and beholden and give to the gods of nature in return. Whatever one received was already a gift, and so to keep things in balance one had to give in return—to one another and, by offerings, to the spirits. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

The gods existed in order to receive gifts. This helps us understand why primitive society seems so masochistic to us in its willing submission to nature and to dead spirits. It has found the perfect formula for keeping things in balance: In the archaic consciousness the sense of indebtedness exists together with the illusion that the debt is playable; the gods exist to make the debt payable. Hence the archaic economy is embedded in religion, limited by the religious framework, and mitigated by the consolations of religion—above all, removal of indebtedness and guilt. And this explains too the thing that has puzzled thinkers since the beginning of the study of beings: why were not natives content to live in the primitive paradise, why could not beings simply relax and consume nature’s bounty, why was one driven from the very beginning to develop a surplus beyond basic human needs? The answer is that primitive beings created an economic surplus so that one would have something to give to the gods; the giving of the surplus was an offering to the gods who controlled the entire economy of nature in the first place, and so beings needed to give precisely in order to keep oneself immersed in the cosmology of obligation and expiation. The ceremonial destruction of mountains of precious food was just that: a ceremonial, religious act. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

The painstaking fabrication of charms or the dangerous hunting down of rare objects like whale’s teeth represented the sweat of one’s brow for the most vital motive beings knew: to keep the cycle of power moving from the invisible to the visible World. When beings give, the stream of life continues to flow. In order to understand this, we have to abandon our own notions of what a gift is. It is not a bribe by one who is a stranger to you and simply wants to get in god with you, or by a loved one who wants to draw close to you or even selflessly give you pleasure. No serious person would doubt that the ultimate effect of the abolitionist movement was constructive. It is even possible that if it had been more successful, the Civil War, with its inconceivable suffering, might have been averted. Wendell Phillips, Willian Lloyd Garrison, James Gillespie Birney, and Theodore D. Weld are beings that fit our definition of aggression very well. They were actively moving into territory of others (slaves were personal property and sanctified thereby) to accomplish a restructuring of power. Their activities were characterized by great conflict, both inward and outward, the latter including continual threats on their lives and limbs. In their early lives, these for seemed like very unlikely candidates for their later profound aggression in the cause of anti-slavery. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

Wendell Phillips had led the typical life of  a Boston Brahmin of his time, taking a law degree at Harvard; William Lloyd Garrison was attracted first to writing and politics; when one first hears of Theodore Weld, it is as a lecturer on the art of improving one’s memory; James Birney was twice suspended from Princeton for drinking, although he was readmitted and graduated with honors, and eventually became a planter and lived like a young southern aristocrat, drinking and gambling in excess. What characteristics in these men determined the fact that their aggression was to be constructive rather then destructive (like John Brown’s, for example)? When we look back into their childhood, each had been consistently loved by one’s parents. I believe that this is crucial to the understanding of the constructive nature of aggression. When a person has not been loved or has been loved inconsistently or by a mother or father who was oneself radically insecure, there develops in his later aggression a penchant for revenge on the World, a need to destroy the World for others in as much as it was not good for one. Each had—and we must assume that this begins early in infancy—a deep compassion for others, which took the later, particular form of compassion for slaves and the persecuted. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

Garrison and Weld were attracted to the movement by empathy for the Africans held as slaves. Birney wrote: “It is hard to tell what one’s duty is toward the poor creatures; but I have made up my mind to one thing, I will not allow any of them to be treated brutally.” Phillips was first attracted to the abolitionist movement by the mob’s murder of fellow abolitionist Elijah P. Lovejoy, and later joined the movement when he saw the mob threaten Garrison’s life. Thereafter, his motivation differed slightly from the others in that he was continually outraged that in his beloved Boston there should be such a disregard of civil liberties. The physical courage of these four, made necessary by their being under constant threat of mob violence, bears deeper scrutiny. For the kind of aggression in which they moved, they had to have a capacity for risk, for existing in extremis. All four had had an abundant amount of energy as children, which had taken the forms of vigorous play and of fighting with their peers. However, their courage seemed more a triumph over anxiety (as, in the last analysis, courage may always be) rather than something with which they were born. Garrison tells, in a letter to a friend, of his “knees shaking in anticipation” of a lecture he had to give to the Congregational Societies of Boston, and a newspaper account of the day tells of his voice being so faint that the audience could scarcely hear him. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

However, he recovered and gave a strong plea for the emancipation of the slaves. Although Garrison suffered least of the four abolitionists and indeed appeared to enjoy combat, it would be a mistake to overlook the fear he experienced on numerous occasions when his life was in jeopardy from angry mobs. The social courage required here is even more impressive. Birney wrote that the pain of alienation from those with whom we [went] up from Sabbath to Sabbath to the house of God—many of our near relations estranged from us, and the whole community looking upon you as an enemy to its peace, is no small trial. In 1834 he wrote to Weld: “I have not one helper—not one from whom I can draw sympathy on this topic!” Again and again, he faced censure and threats of violence from mobs, while he believed that if ever there was a time, it is now come when our republic with her cause of universal freedom is in a strait, where everything that ought to be periled by the patriot should be freely hazarded for her relief. Men must themselves die freeman [rather] than slaves, or our Country, glorious as has been her hope, is gone forever. “Wherefore, ye must press forward with a steadfastness in Christ, having a perfect brightness of hope, and a love of God and of all men, Wherefore, if ye shall press forward, feasting upon the word of Christ, and endure to the end, behold, thus saith the Father: Ye shall have eternal life,” reports 2 Nephi 31.20. RandolphHarris 13 of 18

The opposition they received served to strengthen them in their commitment. Garrison responded to it with increasing aggression and closer identification with the Africans now in America. He wrote with eloquence: I am aware, that many object to the severity of my language; but is there not cause for severity? I will be as harsh as truth, and as uncompromising as justice. On this subject, I do not wish to think, or speak or write, with moderation. No, no! Tell a man whose house is on fire, to give a moderate alarm; tell him to moderately rescue his wife from the hands of a ravisher; tell the mother to gradually extricate her babe from the fire into which he has fallen; but urge me not to use moderation in a cause like the present! I am in earnest. I will not equivocate—I will not excuse—I will not retreat a single inch—AND I WILL BE HEARD. The apathy of the people is enough to make every statue leap from its pedestal, and to hasten the resurrection of the dead. “For behold, he surely must die that salvation may come; yea, it behooveth him and becometh expedient that he dieth, to bring to pass the resurrection of the dead, that thereby men may be brought into the presence of the Lord. Yes, behold, this death bringeth to pass the resurrection, and redeemeth all humankind from the first death—that spiritual death; for all humankind, by the fall of Adam being cut off from the presense of the Lord, are considered as dead, both as to things temporal and to things spiritual,” reports Helaman 14.15-16. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

No sensitive person can go through such prolonged aggressive activity without serious doubts from time to time about the rightness of one’s position. Birney’s period of doubt and indecision touches us particularly for it hinges on a typical contemporaneous worry. He was continuously afraid that his decisions would be influenced too much by feeling, trying as he was to convince by reasons others as well as himself: “When I remember how calmly and dispassionately my mind has proceeded from truth to truth connected with this subject [for instance, slavery] to another still higher, I feel satisfied that my conclusions are not the fruits of enthusiasm.” He later despaired that the South could ever be reached by reason. Despite failing health he same to New York to serve as secretary of the American Anti-Slavery Society. Interestingly enough, he, who had depended on reason, despaired of gradualism before he died in 1857: “When or how it [slavery] will expire I must say I see not.” “And blessed art thou because thou hast established a church among this people; and they shall be my people. Yea, blessed is this people who are willing to bear my name; for in my name shall they be called; and they are mine. And because thou hast inquired of me concerning the transgressor, thou art blessed,” reports Mosiah 26. 17-19. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

Constructive aggression causes suffering as well as inner conflict. The suffering that dedication to such a cause entails was responsible for the commitment of greater and greater numbers to it. Prominent Bostonians were incensed when the mob threatened the life of Garrison. Dr. Henry Ingersoll Bowditch, a prominent physician, wrote: “Then it has come to this, that a man cannot speak on slavery within sight of Faneuil Hall.” When Bowditch volunteered to help a member of the city government, Samuel Eliot, standing nearby, to suppress the rioters, Eliot, “rather intimated that the authorities, while not wising for a mob, rather sympathized with its object…to forcibly suppress the abolitionists. I was completely disgusted and I vowed from my heart as I left him with utter loathing, ‘I am an abolitionist from this very moment.’” The role of the forces of law and order presents a dismal picture in this period, as in our own. It reveals a truth that we know but, for our own peace of mind, try to forget. Not only did members of the government covertly instigate violence by sympathizing with it, as in the incident quoted above, but there was also an incident the like of which could be multiplied a thousand fold: the good people of Boston watched, ashamed and helpless, as a former slave was taken by force to be shipped back to slavery while their own militia guarded the capture. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

Indeed, many who had regarded the abolitionists as hotheads and spokesmen for the lunatic fringe had second thoughts when they observed incidents like this. The aggression of the abolitionists succeeded in its central aim—to combat the apathy that always emerges in a time of anxiety and guilt. The anxiety was caused by the social upheaval of that historical period; the guilt for holding slaves was felt even among the southerners themselves. However, the abolitionist would not permit escape into apathy. They continued to jar the populace and permitted no man’s conscience to sleep. These four men had a powerful grievance—the inhuman character of slavery. They also had a powerful aim at stake—the possibility of correcting injustice. While destructive aggression sometimes contains only the first, both of these must be present in constructive aggression. In contrast to affirmation and assertion, aggression occurred because the opposition was so entrenched and apathy and inertia were so strong that the greater force was necessary for stirring up effective action. It is the nature of any society to protect the status quo, and aggression, from time to time, moves into violence not only because of the blind rage of mobs but also because of the action of police and militia on the side of “law and order.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

It is inspiring to watch how each of these men gathered his individual strength, not present to start with, and transcended himself with his own effort in bringing the power of his oratory and his example to bear upon the opposition. In this self-transcendence there must often have been the experience of ecstasy. When a being as reached this state of inward detachment, when one has withdrawn from passion and hate, prejudice and anger, all human experience—including one’s own—becomes for one a subject for prayer, a theme for analysis, and a dream bereft of reality. One’s reflection about other being’s experiences is not less important than about one’s own. Fromm this standpoint nothing that happens in the lives of these around one can be without interest, but everything will provide material for detached observation and thoughtful analysis. One who has attained that state of desirelessness has liberated oneself from the need to court, flatter, or deceive others, from the temptation to prostitute one’s powers at the behest of ambition, from the compulsion to drag oneself servilely after conventional public opinion. One neither inwardly desires nor outwardly requires any public attestation to the sincerity of one’s services or the integrity of one’s character. The quiet approval of one’s own conscience is enough. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

Your Master knew these things. He knew. But he was of a pagan time, obdurate and angry, and fusing ever the grace of God. In you, he saw God’s grace, because your soul is pure. You are young and tender and open like the moonflower to take the light of night. You hate of now, but you will come to see the dance today is degenerated survival of an ancient group language, a language which was meant to be a medium of solidarity, of self-expression and release. In our times it is an empty form at best, when it does not serve other ulterior ends. One feels little doubt that the regular patron of the dance hall is bored. Large numbers admit without hesitation that they are bored, but say that as nothing else in the way of amusement is to be found easily, they come to the dance hall. The taxi dance hall represents a logical and therefore not unexpected stage in the history of the dance. Here commercialization is complete and the beginnings of production are apparent. The very forms of dance practiced in the taxi dance halls appears that the form of dance is rhythmic, overtly seductive, and an expressive pastime for thousands of solitary men and a spurious source of income for hundreds of woman, many of whom get cash tips for this work. “I know I may come off quiet, I may come off shy, but I feel like talking, feel like dancing when I see this guy. What’s practical is logical, what the heck, who care? All I know is I’m so happy when you’re dancing there,” (Lyrics from I’m a Slave 4 U by Britney Spears). #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

It is significant to note that the more regular patron is seldom a member of a gang. The institution serves chiefly the distraught, the individualized and the egocentric. There is a little conversation. The patron may sit for hours beside others of his gender while conversing with them. The women, likewise, when not dancing stand for long periods beside each other while talking. At best these recreations are harmless play-forms of the parlor game type or they are ceremonious, socialite show in both of which the dance is merely an optional activity of individuals and not a communal ritual of all those present. Furthermore, on these occasions, the competitive features of social life dominate over the cooperative communal ones: physical attractiveness, wealthy and rank, achievements of many kinds and so on are assessed, compared and approval or rejection registered often through the very media of dance etiquette. The history of the choral dance shows a continuous decline which runs parallel with the long-drawn-out process of desocialization. The choral dance is not merely a symptom of group integration but also a uniquely ancient sustainer of biosocial group life. The decline of the choral dance is a cause and an indication of social development. The choral dance, communal dances, demand a compact social order: they require an association in the dance which is something more than the current execution of a series of figures and moments. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

The breaking up of rural communities by the Industrial Revolution and the rise of individualism stopped the choral dances and surrendered the floor, or the village green, to Shmoney Dance, Wobble, Twerkin’, Harlem Shake, and many others. Some are saying the suppression of the Choral dance has given birth to a new culture to go along with the new music. Critics are saying this is a manifestation of the declining culture, but that is heavily laden with value judgments. On the other had we should stress that the perpetuation and further growth of desocializing culture involves the inevitability of its own eventual destruction. Desocialization is decay which affects the entire social-cultural life of human communities; this decay has been speed up during the last few centuries and contemporary culture is pregnant with catastrophe. The thesis here expounded comprises a claim that this process of desocialization is simultaneous with the process of cultural development; in other words, it seems to be suggested that whilst there is culture there will always be frustrations imposed on being’s biosocial needs. Hence it should be reaffirmed that this prognosis was suggested only if the cultures of chance and of misrepresentation continue. It is necessary to state that culture is not incompatible with a biosocially balanced life provided it comprises an awareness of biological sociality and the institutions through which this awareness can be expressed. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

Taking the whole era of cultures as a phase of human’s phylogenetic history we may say, in the light of the foregoing, that desocialization is, in the first place, a phylogenetic process. We selected the choral dance for the purpose of illustrating this phylogenetic development. Naturally, the choral dance was by no means the only medium of biosocial contact in pre-cultural human society. Yet it was chosen because it is the only known non-economic social form which, having existed preculturally, continues throughout the historically charted centuries. Even if its evidence is not decisive, it is at least the most suggestive indicator of phylogenetic changes in the realm of the social. Recent developments in affective and physiological neuroscience research are beginning to reveal observable interconnections between the body and the functioning of the mind. The brain is the organ that orchestrates our interactions with the World around us. It is responsible for taking in massive amounts of simultaneous sensory information, sorting out and interpreting what we are experiencing based on past associations, and then coordinating our response. This dynamic interchange between body and brain is ongoing, even in stillness, and the functioning of the mind is communicated and experienced through the body. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

Dance/movement therapy actively engages the brain through the body with interventions that impact both physical and psychological functioning. Dance/movement therapy is at the frontier of current trends in psychotherapy, which is just beginning to grasp the significance of the body’s role in the perceptual process. Dance/movement therapy interventions that emphasize proprioception and encourage internal focus on body and sensory awareness may have beneficial effects on the neurophysiological regulation systems. Body awareness approaches initiate a down-regulation of the nervous system, engaging the vagus nerve (the vagus nerve is one of the cranial nerves that connect the brain to the body). Body awareness activities help to create a subjectively beneficial experience in the body, helping the patient to feel relaxed, held, and safe. These interventions provide a foundation for patients to gauge their own experiences and manage their levels of arousal through self-regulation of their own bodies. Over time, through tracking emotion evoked in the moment, the patient/mover can learn to sense feelings and feel safe in the process using integrative body-based approaches. This provides an essential foundation for developing an increased capacity to tolerate more complex emotional states. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

Philosophic discipline relates at every point to the act for living. For once insight has been unfolded, as in body awareness, the philosopher is continuously aware of the oneness of the stuff of the World existence—which includes one’s own existence, too. How does the illuminate react to one’s own karma? After knowledge of the self has been awakened, one who has this higher consciousness permanently will see and experience the outer World like other beings, but one will understand the relation between what one sees and the Real World which is behind it. In the same way, anyone can understand the relation between one’s body and its shadows; but whereas unenlightened beings see the shadow alone, the enlightened one sees both. As beings grow in true understanding, one moves from mere existence to authentic essence. When the wall between one’s little ego and the infinite Being collapses, one is said to have joined one’s soul with God. This disclosure that the whole Universe exists in the mind comes with Reality’s revelation. This is the spiritual climax of one’s life, this dramatic moment when consciousness comes to recognize and understand itself. One will be conscious that inwardly one has been born utterly and unmistakably anew, that not only has the old self passed away but also the belief in the existence and reality of self has passed with it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

What does it give to the dignity of being? It provides a rare link with the Absolute, an answer to What am I? and a touch of the Untouch. It is the gift of an inner security, the blessing of a peace which comes to stay. The Overself will overshadow one. It will take possession of one’s body. There will be a mystical union of its mind with one’s body. The ego will become entirely subordinate to it. Whoever attains this inner liberation rarely finds it reflected in the outer World of human societies. Only by going to the lonely places of nature, to forests and fields, deserted shores and unbuilt-on hills can one match the freedom felt. If one ventures into an ashram—however reputed—the sense of entering a cage is produces. It could be that this is partly caused by the mental pressures of its authorities or inmates, by the smug if unexpressed exclusiveness. If one enters a church, one is at ease only if one is the only worshipper; otherwise sectarian pressure comes to awareness. From the time that this great shift of consciousness has taken place, the event itself as well as its tremendous effects ought to be wrapped in secrecy and revealed only under authentic higher guidance. If one has become enlightened, a discerning eye may note the fact by one’s body and one’s actions, by one’s silences and one’s utterances. However, an ignorant eye may note nothing at all. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

The effects of enlightenment include: an imperturbably detachment from outer possessions, rank, honours, and persons; and overwhelming certainty about truth; a carefree, Heavenly peace above all disturbances and vicissitudes; an acceptance of the general rightness of the universal situation, with each entity and each event playing its role; and impeccable sincerity which says what it means, means what it says. One cannot dwell in that magical state without transforming one’s experience in the World so that in some way or other it serves God’s purpose, thus turning even outer defeats to inner victory. I know history, I read it as others read their Bibles, and I will not be satisfied until I have unearthed all stories that are written and knowable, and cracked the codes of all cultures that have left me any tantalizing evidence that I might pry loose from Earth or stone or papyrus or clay. Christ is a personality, a human, a presence that I felt I knew. And He was the Lord God Father Almighty and He was the maker of the Universe and the whole World. And He was the Saviour or the Redeemer for sins inscribed on my soul before I was born. He was the Second Person of the Holy Trinity, and he was the Theologian expounding from the Holy Mount. Christ was also my brother, and the symbol of all brothers. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

Christ is the Lord, and that is why His core is simply love. Many fail to grasp the complexity of what Christ is. People who call themselves Christians—parents, teachers, preachers—tell us that we should be “good” and obey the will of God. For many of them the will of God is not very different from the will of those socially correct people whose conventions they ask us to accept. If we only willed such goodness, they say, we could achieve it, and would be rewarded in time and eternity—but first of all, in time. One can thank God that such preaching has become more and more suspect, for it does not strike at the real human situation. How can any institution, whether it be the family or the government or the church, be better character than the persons who comprise it, and certainly those who rule or lead it? To expect a Spiritual Master to repeat oneself in the institution, organization, or order which gathers around one, is to expect what history tells us never happens. Shelley, Michelangelo, and Phidias did not found organization to produce further Shelleys, Michelangelos, and Phidias. New persons must arise to express their own inspirations. Why then found strangling institutions at all, why gather followers together into exclusive sects, why create still more monasteries and lamaseries, why make leader worship a substitute for Spirit-and-truth worship? #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

Attachment to the group surrounding a master sheds a kind of prestige on them, and gives each one a borrowed light or strength, which may be real or false. No association of spiritually minded persons can as such rise higher than the Personality who has inspired it, and in whose superior power and knowledge it has rested its roots. An institution is the lengthened shadow of one being. Europe and America, for instance, are dotted with groups working along routes of mental and semi-spiritual development, but in every such group you will find that it draws its real life from it Founder or from its Head. The point in development reached by the Head marks the limitation to which one can bring one’s followers, and one can take them no further. In earlier centuries, the illumined being left one’s spiritual legacy in the hearts and minds of those who had felt one’s power, or been guided by one’s light, or known one’s peace. The institutions and organziations were usually the creation of disciples who lived later. However, today there may be a legacy of printed books, recorded tapes, televised film. The foundation of every effort to better human life is not an organized movement but the being who inspires it. The eyes of many serious people in our time have been opened to an awareness of their predicament as beings. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

If in the end we have to walk this Earth on our own feet, why not begin to do so now? When we could cultivate our strength, why continue to cultivate our weakness? Where there is no attempt at self-improvement there is inevitable deterioration. Nature does not let us stand still. We have to be careful not to be driven by some power to act against our good will. For who amongst us is not full of good will? However, perhaps is we come to know ourselves better, we may begin to suspect that some of this good will is not so good after all, and that we are driven by forces of which we might not even be aware of. It is not necessary to described those who embody good will and work towards just the opposite on a level hidden beneath their goodness. Psychologist and others have done this so fully that it needs no repetition. Despite what critics have to say of our time, one of the great things to have come out of it is the difficulty of anyone’s being able to hide permanently from oneself and from others the motives for one’s actions. Whatever we may think about the methods employed to reach this insight, the insight itself is infinitely precious. It has also become difficult for a being who works with dedication and success at one’s business or profession to feel assured about the goodness of what one is doing. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

One cannot from oneself that one’s commitment to one’s work may also be a way of escaping genuine human commitments and, above all, a way of escaping oneself. And it has become difficult for a mother who loves her children passionately to be sure that she feels only love for them. She can no longer conceal from herself that her anxiety concerning their well-being may be an expression of her will to dominate them or a form of guilt for a heavily veiled hostility that desires to get rid of them. And we cannot applaud every act of moral self-restraint, knowing that it cause may be cowardice preventing a revolution against inherited, though already questioned, rules of behavior. Nor can we praise every act of daring non-conformism, knowing that its reason may be the inability of an individual to resist the persuasive irresponsibility of a group of nonconformists. In these and countless other cases, we experience a power that dwells in us and directs our will against itself. The name of this power is sin. Nothing is more precarious today than the mention of this word among Christians, as well as among non-Christians, for in everyone there is a tremendous resistance to it. It is a word that has fallen into disrepute. To some of us it sounds almost ridiculous and is apt to provoke laughter rather than serious consideration. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

To others, who take the word sin more seriously, it implies an attack on their human dignity. And again, to others—those who have suffered from it—it means the threatening countenance of the disciplinarian, who forbids them to do what they would like and demands of them what they hate. Therefore, even Christian teachers, including myself shy away from the use of the word sin. We know how many distorted images it can produce. We try to avoid it, or to substitute another word for it. However, it has a strange quality. It always returns. We cannot escape it. It is as insistent as it is ugly. And so it would be more honest—and this I say to myself—to face sin and ask what it really is. The application of these ideals is hard, but let no one deceive oneself into thinking that their nonapplication is much easier. Those who live without such life-purposes are subject to troubles that could have been avoided and to afflictions of their own making. It is easy to drift, as so many others do, through a life of self-indulgence. It is hard to try continually to practice a life of self-control. Yet the deferred penalties of the first course are painful, the consequent rewards of the second course are satisfying. The gaining of such flashes has been accidental. It should stimulate us to know that is we want to make it deliberate, there is a detailed technique, ready at hand for the purposes. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

Intellectuals who know how and why these flashes come have formulated the technique for the benefit of those who want to elevate themselves. From the first day that one began to tread this path, one automatically assumed the responsibility of growth. Henceforth there had to be continuity of effort, an ever-extending line of self-improvement. The prize will not be sent to you. You win it. No one except the being oneself can develop the needed qualities and practise them. Similar operations can be perceived at the level of societies. Societies that stress protectionism and moral strictness, for example, can be correlated with a pervasive dread of life. The subtler problems of overspecialization, social malaise, and complacency are also relevant there. Conversely, societies that indulge in national and cultural chauvinism or, to a lesser extent, myriad forms of hero worship can be associated with a global revulsion for death. At the same time that we fear separation and attachment, however, we also desire them to some degree. By the same token, most of us seek a modicum of dependency, safety, and order in our lives. The question becomes one of negotiating between these desires and fears. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

We must find some kind of balance within which to live. In our quest for vital experience, we must honor both our capacity for greatness and our (cosmic) eagerness. It is important to be here and now, and allow the actual conditions of life to flow. Address your (separation/attachment) concerns more focally, and mobilize your resources for growth. If one wishes to enter the portal of philosophy one will most likely begin with others, with what philosophers have thought and taught; but in the end one must make a second beginning—with one’s self. One will have to have to reexamine one’s own psyche, one’s own personality, but from a detached position, standing far to one side. One will have to decide each hour of each day how to apply the truth, gathered from books and teachers, to the events, duties, occasion, and thoughts of that day. Effort at self-improvement and self-development, consciously and deliberately made, is an indispensable requirement. All talk of dispensing with it because one has surrendered to a master is self-deceiving. All avoideance of its is self-disappointing in the end. One cannot shift the burden of responsibility from off one’s shoulders so easily as that. It remains inalienably one’s own by virtue of one’s membership in the human race. One must begin to cease living at second hand, to help one’s self, to try one’s own powers, or one will never grow. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

Only as a matter of fact do we find our passional nature influencing us in our opinions, but there are some options between opinions in which this influence must be regarded both as an inevitable and as a lawful determinant of our choice. I fear here that some of you my hearers will begin to scent danger, and lend an inhospitable ear. Two first steps of passion you have indeed had to admit as necessary,–we must think so as to avoid dupery, and we must think so as to gain truth; but the surest path to those ideal consummations, you will probably consider, is from now onwards to take no further passional step. Well, of course, I agree as far as the fact will allow. Wherever the option between losing truth and gaining it is not momentous, we can throw the chance of gaining truth away, and at any rate save ourselves from any chance of believing falsehood, by not making up our minds at all till objective evidence has come. In scientific questions, this is almost always the case; and even in human affairs in general, the need of acting is seldom so urgent that a false belief to act on is better than no belief at all. The responsibility for one’s spiritual development is possessed squarely upon one’s own shoulders. In trying to evade it, either by getting a master to carry it or by making a Short Path leap into enlightenment, one indulges in an illusion. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

Law courts, indeed, have to decide on the best evidence attainable for the moment, because a judge’s duty is to make law as well as to ascertain it, and (as a learned judge once said to me) few cases are worth spending much time over: the great thing is to have them decided on any acceptable principle, and got out of the way. The truth cannot be had by muttering a mantram ad infinitum although that may yield a curious kind of transient relief from thoughts which case one another. Nor may it be had by paying one week’s income to a guru. If a being is determined to succeed in this enterprise and optimistically believes that one will succeed, one’s efforts will increase and be strengthened, chances will be taken from which one would otherwise shrink; and even if one falls short of one’s hopes, the going is likely to be farther. This is the surest way to disable oneself, this burdening of one’s mind with the fear of failure and the thoughts of one’s failings. The greatest error of a being is to think that one is weak by nature. One can and must conquer. This is the ideal, but to translate it into the actual, to asset it in the midst and against the opposition of a grossly materialistic environment, calls for firmness and determination. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

Let one not be satisfied with the amount of true knowledge one has got, nor with the quality of personal character which one has developed. Let one press forward to the more and better. In our dealings with objective nature we obviously are recorders, not makers, of the truth; and decisions for the mere sake of deciding promptly and getting on to the next business would be wholly out of place. Throughout the breadth of physical nature facts are what they are quite independently of us, and seldom is there any such hurry about them that the risks of being duped by believing a premature theory need be faced. The questions here are always trivial options, the hypotheses are hardly living (at any rate not living for us spectators), the choice between believing truth or falsehood is seldom forced. The attitude of sceptical balance is therefore the absolutely wise one if we would escape mistakes. What difference, indeed, does it makes to most of us whether we have or have not a theory of the Rontgen rays, whether we believe or not in mind stuff, or have a conviction about the causality of conscious states? In makes no difference. Such options are not forced on us. On every account it is better not to make them, but still keep weighing reasons pro et contra with an indifferent hand. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

I speak, of course, here of the purely judging mind. For purposes of discovery such indifference is to be less highly recommended, and science would be far less advance than she is if the passionate desires of individuals to get their own faiths confirmed had been kept out of the same. See for example the sagacity which Spencer and Weismann now display. On the other hand, if you want an absolute duffer in an investigation, you must, after all, take the being who has no interest whatever in its results: one is the warranted incapable, the absolute fool. The most useful investigator, because the most sensitive observer, is always one whose eager interest in one side of the question is balanced by an equally keen nervousness lest one become deceived. Science has organized this nervousness into a regular technique, her so-called method of verification; and she has fallen so deeply in love with the method that one may even say she has ceased to care for truth by itself at all. It is only truth as technically verified that interests her. The truth of truths might come in merely affirmative form, and she would decline to touch it. Such truth as that would be stolen in defiance of her duty to humankind. Human passions, however, are stronger than technical rules. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

Le coeur a ses raisons que la raison ne connait pas; and however indifferent to all but the bare rules of the game the umpire, the abstract intellect, may be, the concrete players who furnish one the materials to judge of are usually, each one of them, in love with some pet live hypothesis of one’s own. Let us agree, however, that wherever there is no forced option, the dispassionately judicial intellect with no pet hypothesis, saving us, as it does, from dupery at any rate, ought to be our ideal. Yet, are there not somewhere forced options in our speculative questions, and can we (as beings who may be interested at least as much in absolutely gaining truth as in merely escaping dupery) always wait with impunity till the coercive evidence shall have arrived? It seems a priori improbable that the truth should be so nicely adjusted to our needs and powers as that. In the great boarding-house of nature, the cakes and the butter and the syrup seldom come out so even and leave the plates so clean. Indeed, if they did, we should view them with scientific suspicion. “These are they that are redeemed of the Lord; yea, these are they that are taken out, that are delivered from that endless night of darkness; and thus they stand or fall; for behold, they are their own judges, whether to do good or evil,” reports Alma 4.7. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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Oh, how innocent he sounded, how it came from his heart, ancient and childlike, a heart so preternaturally strong that it had taken hundreds of years to render it safe to beat in the company of mortal hearts. In order to evaluate the role played in neuroses by the various attempts at protection against the basic anxiety it is necessary to realize their potential intensity. They are prompted not by a wish to satisfy a desire for pleasures or happiness, but by a need for reassurance. This does not mean, however, that they are in any way less powerful or less imperative than instinctual drives. Experience shows us that the impact of a striving for ambition, for instance, may be equally as strong as or even stronger than an impulse for pleasures of the flesh. Any one of the four devices which include securing affection, submissiveness, power, or withdrawal, pursued exclusively or predominantly, can be effective in bringing the reassurance wanted, if the life situation allows its pursuit without incurring conflicts—even though such a one-sided pursuit is usually paid for with an impoverishment of the personality as a whole. For example, a woman following the path of submissiveness may find a great deal of secondary satisfaction in a culture which requires from a woman obedience to family or husband and compliance with the traditional forms. #RandolphHarris 1 of 19

If it is a monarch who develops a restless striving for power and possession, the result again may be reassurance and a successful life. As a matter of fact, however, a straightforward pursuit of one goal will often fail to fulfill its purpose because the demands set up are so excessive or so inconsiderate that they involve conflicts with the surroundings. More frequently reassurance from a great underlying anxiety is sought not in one way only, but in several ways which, moreover, are incompatible with one another. Thus the neurotic persona many at the same time be driven imperatively toward dominating everyone and wanting to be loved by everyone, toward complying with others and imposing one’s will on them, toward detachment from people and a craving for their affection. It is these utterly unsoluble conflicts which are most often the dynamic center of neuroses. The two attempts which most frequently clash are the striving for affection and the striving for power. Yet, the clash between individual desires and social requirements does not necessarily bring about neuroses, but may just as well lead to factual restrictions in life, that is, to the simple suppression ore repression of desires or, in most general terms, to factual suffering. A neurosis is brought about only if this conflict generates anxiety and if the attempts to allay anxiety lead in turn to defensive tendencies which, although equally imperative, are nevertheless incompatible with one another. #RandolphHarris 2 of 19

Our drift toward violence and nuclear war is not only due to biological factors beyond our control. Rather, if one opens one’s eyes, it is clear that these unfortunate circumstances are also caused by social, political, and economic circumstances of our own making. Human aggressiveness is an instinct fed by an ever-flowing fountain of energy, and not necessarily the result of a reaction to outer stimuli. That energy is specific for an instinctive act and accumulates continuously in the neural centers related to that behavior pattern, and if enough energy has been accumulated an explosion is likely to occur even without the presence of a stimulus. However, the animal and humans beings usually find stimuli which release the dammed-up energy of the drive; they do not have to wait passively until the proper stimulus appears. They search for, and even produce stimuli. This is called appetitive behavior. Humans say they create political parties being the cause of aggression. However, in cases where no outside stimulus can be found or produced, the energy of the dammed-up aggressive drive is so great that it will explode, as it were, and be acted out in vacuo, i.e., without demonstrable external stimulation, the vacuum activity performed without an object—exhibits truly photographic similarity to normal performance of the motor actions involved. This demonstrates that the motor coordination patterns of the instinctive behavior pattern are hereditarily determined down to the finest detail. #RandolphHarris 3 of 19

Therefore, aggression is primarily not a reaction to outside stimuli, but a built-in inner excitation that seeks for release and will find expression regardless of how adequate the outer stimulus: It is the spontaneity of the instinct that makes it so dangerous. It is a hydraulic model, in analogy to the pressure exercised by dammed-up water or steam in a closed container. This hydraulic concept of aggression is, as it were, one pillar which refers to the mechanism through which aggression is produced. The other pillar is the idea that aggression is in the service of life, that it serves the survival of the individual and of the species. Broadly speaking, intraspecific aggression (aggression among members of the same species) has the function of furthering the survival of the species. Aggression fulfills this function by the spacing out of individuals of one species over the available habitat; by selection of the better being, relevant in conjunction with the defense of the female, and by establishing a social rank order. Aggression can have this preservative function all the more effectively because in the process of evolution deadly aggression has been transformed into behavior consisting of symbolic and ritual threats which fulfil the same function without harming the species. The instinct that served the animal’s survival has become grotesquely exaggerated and has gone wild in humans. Aggression has been transformed into a threat rather than a help to survival. #RandolphHarris 4 of 19

Above all, it is more than probably that the destructive intensity of the aggressive drive, still a hereditary evil of humankind, is the consequence of a process of intra-specific selection which worked on our forefathers for roughly forty thousand years, that is, throughout the Early Stone Age. When humans had reached a stage of having weapons, clothing, and social organization, so overcoming the dangers of starving, freezing, and being eaten by wild animals, and these dangers ceased to be the essential factors influencing selection, an evil intra-specific selection must have set in. The factor influencing selection was now the wars waged between hostile neighboring tribes. These must have evolved in an extreme form of all those so-called warrior virtues which unfortunately many people still regard as desirable ideals. This picture of the constant war among the savage hunters-food-gatherers since the full emergence of modern beings around 40,000 or 50,000 B.C. is a widely accepted idea. The assumption of forty thousand years of organized warfare is basically saying that war is the natural state of humans, and is presented as an argument to prove the innateness of human aggressiveness. The logic is that humans are aggressive because their ancestors were aggressive. However, this opens a question about genetic reasoning. If a certain trait is to have a selective advantage this must be based on the increased production of fertile offspring of the carriers of that trait. #RandolphHarris 5 of 19

However, in view of the likelihood of a higher loss of the aggressive individuals in wars, it is doubtful whether selection could account for the maintenance of a high incidence of this trait. In fact, if one considers such a loss as negative selection, the gene frequency should diminish. Actually, the population density in that age was extremely low, and for many of the human tribes after the full emergence of Homo sapiens there was little need to compete and to fight each other for food or space. Humans are among the thousands of species of animals that fights their own species. However, on the other hand, they are among the thousand of species that fight, the only one in which fighting is disruptive. Humans are the only species that is a mass murderer, the only misfit in one’s own society. Why should this be so? By a number of complicated and often questionable constructions, defensive aggression is supposed to be transformed in humans into a spontaneously flowing and self-increasing drive that seeks to create circumstances which facilitate the expression of aggression, or that even explodes when no stimuli can be found or created. Hence even in a society that is organized from a socioeconomic viewpoint in such a way that major aggression could find no proper stimuli, the very demand of the aggressive instinct would force its members to change it or, if they would not, aggression would explode even without any stimulus. Love itself is a product of the aggressive instinct. #RandolphHarris 6 of 19

The failure to express aggression in action is unhealthy. Repression of sexuality can lead to mental illness. Present day civilized beings suffer from insufficient discharges of their aggressive drive. Aggressive-destructive energy is continuously produced, and very difficult, if not impossible in the long run, to control. The so-called evil in animals becomes a real evil in humans, even though its roots are not evil. The ego hates, abhors and pursues with intent to destroy all objects which are the source of pain. Aggression is primarily against one’s self—I am the one who ultimately dies—and it must be turned against others and external objects to avoid this self-destruction. The death instinct is a metaphor which is by no means the whole truth, but it is an important part of the truth that cannot be neglected. Depression is often the return of the repressed, namely the indirect expression of unconfronted aggressive tendencies. Aggression is always the result of frustration, and wherever there is frustration there will be aggression. The theoretical flaw, however, is that it tacitly assumes that all aggression is negative, and implies that when we some day construct a society without frustration in it, there will be no aggression. However, most important of all, the theory fails to take seriously the cruel realities of life, such as impoverished communities or oppression, abuse, and corruption. How can aggression in the prisons, where men and women are fighting for their loves as human beings, be encompassed in the term frustration? #RandolphHarris 7 of 19

It is possible that aggression is will to power in human life. People, like Napoleon, the democratic party, and the fake news media, develop a compensatory striving for power. Civilization itself arises out of a being’s need to increase one’s power vis-à-vis nature. They are striving for superiority. Humans create symbols and bases their culture upon them; the flag and patriotism are examples, as are status, religion, and language. The capacity to create and deal with symbols, actually a superb achievement, also accounts for the fact that we are the cruelest species on the planet. We skill not out of necessity but out of allegiance to such symbols as the flag and fatherland; we kill on principle. Thus our aggression occurs on a different level from that of animals, and not much can be learned from animals about this distinctively human form of aggression. Therefore, to say that people are behaving like animals insults animals for most animals seems to be well behaved. As ritual is an organization for life, it has to be carried out according to a particular theory of prosperity—that is, how exactly to get nature to give more life to the tribe. The most striking thing to us about the primitive theory of prosperity is how elemental it was—or organic, as we would say today. Primitive beings observed nature and tried to discern in it what made the dance of life—where the power came from, how things became fecund. #RandolphHarris 8 of 19

If you are going to generate life, you have to determine its principles and imitate the things that embody them. Organisms respond naturally to the Sun, which gives heat and light, and find their richness in the Earth, which produces food out of noting—or rather out of its mysterious bowels. The Australian aborigines have an expression about the Sun’s rays having intercourse with the Earth. Very early humans seems to have isolated the principles of fecundity and fertilization and tried to promote them by impersonating them. And so beings identified with sky or the Heavens, and the Earth, and divided themselves into Heavenly people and Earthly ones. In cosmic rites the whole World is involved, but in two parts, Sky and Earth, because all prosperity is conceived to be due to the orderly interaction of the Sky and Earth. They sky alone cannot create, nor the Earth alone bring forth. Therefore in the ritual that regulates the World there must be two principles and they must be male and female, for the interplay of the Earth and Sky is analogous to the intercourse of the genders. The World was divided not only into Sky and Earth but also into right and left, light and darkness, power and weakness—and even life and death. The point is that reality in the round has to be represented in order for it to be controlled. The primitive knew that death was an important part of creation, and so one embodied death in order to control it. #RandolphHarris 9 of 19

There are two ways of looking at our duty in the matter of opinion,–ways entirely different, and yet ways about whose difference the theory of knowledge seems hitherto to have shown very little concern. We must know the truth; and we must avoid error,–these are our first and great commandments as would-be knowers; but they are not two ways of stating an identical commandment, they are two separable laws. Although it may indeed happen that when we believe the truth A, we escape as an incidental consequence from believing the falsehood B, it hardly ever happens that by merely disbelieving B we necessarily believe A. We may in escaping B fall into believing other falsehoods, C or D, just as bad as B; or we may escape B by not believing anything at all, not even A. Believe truth! Shun error!—these, we see, are two materially different laws; and by choosing between them we may end by coloring differently out whole intellectual life. We may regard the chase for truth as paramount, and the avoidance of error as secondary; or we may, on the other hand, treat the avoidance of error as more imperative, and let truth take its chance. It may be best to believe nothing, keep your mind in suspense forever, rather than by closing it on insufficient evidence incur the awful risk of believing lies. You, on the other hand, may think that the risk of being in error is a very small matter when compared with the blessing of real knowledge, and be ready to be duped many times in your investigation rather than to postpone indefinitely the chance of guessing true. #RandolphHarris 10 of 19

Some find it impossible to doubt everything. We must remember that these feelings of our duty about either truth or error are in any case only expressions of our passional life. Biologically considered, our minds are as ready to grind out falsehood as veracity, and one who says, “Better go without belief forever than believer a lie!” merely shows one’s own preponderant private horror of becoming a dupe. One may be critical of many of one’s desires and fears, but this fear one slavishly obeys. One cannot imagine any one questioning its binding force. For my own part, I have also a horror of being duped; but I can believe that worse things than being duped may happen to a being in this World. Some believe fantastically they rather doubt everything. It is like a general informing his or her soldiers that it is better to keep out of battle forever than to risk a single wound. Not so are victories either over enemies or over nature gained. Our errors are surely not such awfully solemn things. In a World where we are so certain to incur them in spite of all our caution, a certain lightness of hearty seems healthier than this excessive nervousness on their behalf. At any rate, it seems the fittest thing for the empiricist philosopher. Unwise people think that in the World of essence there should be no bloom of flowers and no fall of leaves. The Master here shows that in the mind of the enlightened being the external World appears as for the ordinary being and remains a mere mentation for the mentalist. #RandolphHarris 11 of 19

The permanence which ordinary normal people seem to find in merely living does not exist for one. One finds only transience. This affects both the bright and dark sides of existence, the good fortune and ill fortune. All is unstable and subject to change. The enlightened being has the same kind of body and the same five sense as unenlightened beings have. One’s experience of the World must be the same, too. However—and this is a vast difference—one experiences it along with the Overself. For incarnate beings the cosmic dream is always going on. This is also the case for the sage. However, one has the knowledge of what is happening and the power to intromit it one step further back. We are all in this dream which is itself the product of, and hidden within, a greater dream. Is God, the Dreamer, then asleep? This is the mystery: that one is both awake and asleep at the same time. How can being’s tiny mind understand such a thing? Of course not. Let one be still and seek not to carry one’s profane curiosity into the Holy of Holies. In the end it shall be as if one were never existent, but this cannot be the same as death. For the dream—of which one is a part—goes back into the Dreamer, into the Living God. If the illuminate detaches oneself from the World because of its immediate transiency, one re-attaches oneself to it again because of its ultimate unity with one’s own innermost being. #RandolphHarris 12 of 19

One lives in the knowledge of the World-Idea—not in its fullness of detail but in its general outline—which is fulfilling itself in the whole Universe and wit which one tries to co-operate according to one’s knowledge. This it is which supports one’s inner being, counters one’s everyday experience of human weakness and evil, and transfigures one when leaving the hour of communion to resume that experience. “For I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do. Now if I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me,” reports Romans 7.19-20. Do these words of Paul correctly describe our nature? Is the split between willing the good and achieving it as radical as they would indicate? Or do we resist the indictment by insisting that we often do good that we want and avoid the evil that we do not want? Is not Paul perhaps grossly exaggerating the evil in beings in order to emphasize the brightness of grace by depicting it against a very dark background? These are questions that every critic of Christianity asks. However, are they not also the questions that we ask—we, who call ourselves Christians, or at least who desire to be what the Christian message will us to be? Actually, none of us believes that one always does the evil one would like not to do. #RandolphHarris 13 of 19

We know that we sometimes do achieve the good that we want—when, for example, we perform an act of love towards a person with whom we do not sympathize, or an act of self-discipline for the sake of our work, or an act of courageous non-conformity in a situation where it may endanger us. Our moral balance sheet is not as bad as it would be without these acts! And have we ever really known a preacher of what is called the total depravity of beings who did not show, in one’s own behavior, reliance on a positive moral balance sheet? Perhaps even Paul did. At least, one tries to tell us so when one boasts about one’s sufferings and activities in a letter to the Corinthians. Certainly, one calls one’s boasting foolishness. However, do we not also insist that our boasting is foolish? Yet we do not stop boasting. Are not perhaps those who believe, in the surface, that they have noting to boast about, being sick, disintegrated, and without self-esteem? They may even be proud of the depth of despair in which they visualize themselves. For without a vestige of self-esteem no one can live, not even one who bases one’s self-esteem on despairing of oneself. However, why then do we not simply dismiss Paul’s words? Why do we react positively to his statement that “I do not do the good that I want?” It is because we feel that it is not a matter of balance sheets between good and evil that the words express, but rather a matter of our whole being, or our situation as beings, of our standing in the face of the eternal—the source, aim and judge of our being. #RandolphHarris 14 of 19

It is our human predicament that a power takes hold of us, that does not comes from us but is in us, a power that we hate and at the same time gladly accept. We are fascinated by it; we play with it; we obey it. However, we know that it will destroy us if we are not grasped by another power that will resist and control it. We are fascinated by what can destroy us, and in moments even feel a hidden desire to be destroyed by it. This is how Paul saw himself, and how a great many of us see ourselves. The belief that a fully illumined master or religious prophet can be succeeded generation after generation by a chain of equally illuminated leaders following the same tradition, is delusive. One cannot bequeath the fullness of one’s attainment to anyone, one can only give others an impetus toward it. One one’s self is irreplaceable. If churches and ashrams would only admit that they are led by faulty fallible people, liable to weaknesses and error, they would render better spiritual service than by continuing to maintain the partial imposture that they are not so led. If there were such public acknowledgement that their authority and inspiration were very limited, religious and mystical institutions would be more preoccupied with helping others than with themselves. #RandolphHarris 15 of 19

Something else that occurred in the breakthrough of this insight is that everything around me became suddenly vivid. I can remember that on the particular street down which I walked that houses were painted an ugly shade or orange that I would normally prefer to forget immediately. However, by virtue of the vividness of this experience, the colors all around were sharpened and were imbedded in my experience, and that ugly orange still exists in my memory. The moment the insight broke through, there was a special translucence that enveloped the World, and my vision was given a special clarity. I am convinced that this is the usual accompaniment of the breakthrough of unconscious experience into consciousness. Here is again part of the reason the experience scares us so much: the World, both inwardly and outwardly, takes on an intensity that may be momentarily overwhelming. This is one aspect of what is called ecstasy—the uniting of unconscious experience wit consciousness, a union that is not in abstracto, but a dynamic, immediate fusion. I want to emphasize that I did not get my insight as though I were dreaming, with the World and myself opaque and cloudy. It is a popular misconception tat perception is dull when one is experiencing this state of insight. I believe that perception is actually sharper. #RandolphHarris 16 of 19

True, one aspect of it resembles a dream in that self and World may become kaleidoscopic; but another aspect of the experience is a sharpened perception, a vividness, a translucence of relationship to the things around us. The World becomes vivid and unforgettable. Thus the breakthrough our material from unconscious dimensions involves a heightening of sensory experience. We could, indeed, define the whole experience that we are talking about as a state of heightened consciousness. Unconsciousness is the depth dimension of consciousness, and when it surges up into consciousness in this kind of polar struggle the result is an intensification of consciousness. It heightens not only the capacity to think, but also the sensory processes; and it certainly intensifies memory. There is another thing we observe when such insights occur—that is, the insight never comes hit or miss, but in accordance with a pattern of which one essential element is our own commitment. The breakthrough does not come by just taking it easy, by letting the unconscious do it. The insight, rather, is born from unconscious levels exactly in the areas in which we are most intensively consciously committed. The insight came to me on that problem to which, up till the moment I put my books and papers away in the little office that I occupied, I had devoted my best and most energetic conscious of thought. #RandolphHarris 17 of 19

The idea, the new form which suddenly becomes present, came in order to complete an incomplete Gestalt with which I was struggling in conscious awareness. One can quite accurately speak of this incomplete Gestalt, this unfinished pattern, this unformed form, as constituting the call that was answered by the unconscious. Another characteristic of this experience is that the insight comes at a moment of transition between work and relaxation. It comes at a break in periods of voluntary effort. My breakthrough came when I had put away my books and was walking toward the subway, my mind far away from the problem. It is as though intense application to the problem—thinking about it, struggling with it—starts and keeps the work process going; but some part of the pattern that is different from what I am trying to work out is struggling to be born. Hence the tensions that ins involved in creative activity. If we are too rigid, strict, or bound to previous conclusions, we will, of course, never let this new element come into our consciousness; we will never let ourselves be aware of the knowledge that exists on another level within us. However, the insight often cannot be born until the conscious tensions, the conscious application, is relaxed. Hence the well-known phenomenon that the unconscious breakthrough requires the alternation of intense, conscious work and relaxation, with the unconscious insight often occurring, as in my case, at the moment of the shift. #RandolphHarris 18 of 19

Albert Einstein once asked a friend of mine in Princeton, “Why is it I get my best ideas on the morning while I am shaving?” My friend answered, as I have been trying to say here, that often the mind needs the relaxation of inner controls—needs to be freed in reverie or day dreaming—for the unaccustomed ideas to emerge. Human consciousness is driven by two basic concerns—fear of life and fear of death. The fear of life is concerned about separating (from others), venturing forth or standing out on one’s own. Put another way, it is fear of becoming free. The fear of death, on the other hand, is a concern about attaching (to others), retreating back to the womb, or returning to a state of matter. It is a fear, in other words, of becoming limited. These fears can be the cause of a variety of psychological dysfunctions. Depression and dependency, for example, can be traced to a dire fear of life (separation anxiety); narcissism and mania can be linked to a pronounced fear of death (attachment anxiety). The greater one’s life or death fear, moreover, the greater one’s tendency to swing in the opposite direction. “Nevertheless, Alma labored much in the spirit, wrestling with God in mighty prayer, that he would pour out his Spirit upon the people who were in the city; that be would also grant that he might baptize them unto repentance,” reports Alma 8.10. #RandolphHarris 19 of 19

In the following months, I learned more than I can ever recount here. I studied vigorously, and paid attention even to the government of the city, which I thought basically as tiresome as any government, and read voraciously the great Christian scholars, completing my time with Abelard, Duns, Scouts and other thinkers. Whether the ostensible purpose of these primitive dances we learned about are animistic-religious or magical-material, one constant feature in them is that they are group performances and not solo or couple acts. The main crises of human life are dramatized, couched in movement and shared by all who participate in the dace, thus alleviating the inflictions which inevitably follow from human existence, and enriching and ornamenting the joys which are incidental to life. The choral dace is the physical manifestation of groupward drives. Whatever vital experience the primitive group has to face, its sharing by every member is made possible by the translation of that experience into rhythmic muscular movements simultaneously executed by all. The speechless eloquence of posture and gesture supplemented the primitive vocabulary of prehistoric humanity and became a powerful medium of social intercourse. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

The choral dance was not merely instrumental in securing group unity for ulterior purposes like a good harvest or the propitiation of evil demons. The groupward drives, the yearning for a tangible, physically manifested unity exist on their own account and suffuse the dance ritual whatever its ostensible purpose. In the choral dance an inarticulate consensus and an absolute fraternity are reaffirmed from time to time, thus tightening up group cohesion and conserving solidarity. In it the individual member finds a reassurance that one is not alone. The Australian aborigines—who were living in the Stone Age—seemed the most paradoxical of all, with their luxuriant systems of kinship classification and their complex divisions of their tribe into half and half and then half again. This passion for splitting things into two polar opposites that were complementary was a most striking and widespread feature of primitive being’s social organization. (The Chinese Yin and Yang is a survival of this phenomenon.) A person belonged either to one half or the other, traced one’s descent from a common ancestor, often identified with a particular animal totem representing one’s half, usually married someone in the other half, and had rigorously specified types of relationship with people in the other half, including the duty to bury them and mourn for them. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

One of the main things that took place between the halves was something Homo sapiens seem to thrive on: contest of skill and excellence. It is believed that the teasing and mocking behaviors which anthropologists call “joking relationships” may have had their origin there. In fact, it is possible that all team games arose out of the dual organization. The primitive mind was just as intelligent as ours, just as intent on them. Primitive beings fed into their cerebral computer all the important natural facts of this World as one observed and understood them, and tried to relate them intimately to one’s life just we try to relate the mechanical laws of the Universe to our own. Did we wonder at the complexity of primitive symbolism and social organization? Well, it was because primitive beings tried to organize their society to reflect their theory of nature. Anthropology has shown with increasing clarity how social life in the archaic period normally rests on the antagonistic and antithetical structure of the community itself, and how the whole mental World of such a community responds to this profound dualism. The human mind has a natural tendency to split things into contrasts and complementarities, which is called binary opposites. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

Binary opposites is a term that has given a great boost to the computer freaks, this binary tendency of the primitive mind, because it seems to show that beings function naturally just like the computer—and so the computer can be championed as the logical fulfillment of basic human nature, and the mystery of mind and symbolism might well be traceable down to simple neural circuits and so forth. People divine themselves into two groups in order that they may impart life to one another, that they may intermarry, compete with one another, make offerings to one another, and do to one another whatever is required by their theory of prosperity. The reason for the dual organization is so foreign to us that we may not at first see it: it was necessary for ritual. The fundamental imperative of all ritual is that one cannot do it alone; beings cannot impart life to oneself but must get if from their fellow beings. If ritual is a technique for generating life, then ritual organization is a necessary cooperation in order to make that technique work. In some early civilizations this potential of the choral dance was recognized, for instance, the training of the Greek soldier included the performance of marital dances. The dance was a means of giving soldiers carriage, agility and health, and cultivating esprit de corps. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

War dances not only constitute a popular form of entertainment but serve at the same time to crystallize group solidarity.  Dance was originally nothing but a vehicle of religious mysticism, to us it appears that it was a medium of a paradigmatic experience which at its core was strictly and social or communal. The experience of a union, however, is not merely a gratification of social hunger, of the instinct of gregariousness, that is, of biosocial need. The satisfaction of this propensity is often accompanied by an auto-intoxication comparable only to ecstasy involved in pleasures of the flesh which results in a temporary draining of the will from stubborn self-regard and in the gathering of reckless sacrificial emotions. Under these conditions individual separateness disappears and phylic unity is complete; and it is under these conditions that the group’s reality is supreme and exclusive. Through the choral dance primitive beings successfully achieved two objectives: the effective sharing of the burdens of one’s conflicts and tensions, a sharing which reaffirmed and deepened the bonds of fellow-feeling; a catharsis through the rhythmic communal rapture which renewed and strengthened the individual. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

The choral dance, therefore, was not only a socio-political vehicle of group solidarity but also a primitive method of group psychotherapy. Repressed powers are loosed and seek expression; an innate sense of rhythm orders them into lively harmony. Harmony deadens and dissipates the will, the dancer gives oneself over to the supreme delights of play prescribed by custom, gives oneself over to the exhilaration which carries one away from the monotony of everyday life, from palpable reality, from the sober facts of experience. Inn the ecstasy of the dancer, beings bridge the chasm between this and the other World. Captivated and entranced one bursts one’s Earthly chain and trembling feelings oneself in tune with all the World. The “chasm” here referred to is that which exists between one solitary individual and another. The transcending of solitariness has always appeared to mystics, poets, and philosophers as a communion with the Godhead, a surrender to the essential beauty of nature or an acceptance of the Universe. Whilst all that they experienced was a spiritualized, symbolical expression of their biosocial life. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

The deeper level of explanation for the dual organization is so simple we may not see it: it is phenomenological. Beings need to work their magic with the materials of this World, and human beings are the primary materials for the magic wrought by social life. One of the main motives of organismic life was the urge to self-feeling, to the heightened sense of self that comes with success in overcoming obstacles and incorporating other organisms. The expansion of the self-feeling in nature can come about in many different ways, especially when we get to the human level of complexity. Beings can expand their self-feeling not only by physical incorporation but by any kind of triumph or demonstration of one’s own excellence. One expands one’s organization in complexity by games, puzzles, riddles, mental tricks of all types by boasting about their achievements, taunting and humiliating one’s adversaries, or torturing and killing them. Anything that reduces the other organisms and adds to one’s own size and importance is a direct way to gain self-feeling; it is a natural development out of the simple incorporation and fighting behavior of lower organisms. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

By the time we get to beings we find that one is in an almost constant struggle against not to be diminished in one’s organismic importance. However, as one is also and especially a symbolic organism, this struggle against being diminished is carried on on he most minute levels of symbolic complexity. To be outshone by another is to be attacked at some basic level of organism durability. To lose, to be second rate, to fail to keep up with the best and the highest sends a message to the nerve center of the organism’s anxiety: “I am overshadowed, inadequate; hence I do not qualify for continued durability, for life, for eternity; hence I will die.” However, is not the attitude of basic anxiety and hostility toward people, described as an essential constituent of neuroses, a normal attitude which secretly all of us have, though perhaps in a lesser degree? When considering this question one has to distinguish two points of view. If “normal” is used in the sense of a general human attitude, one could say that the basic anxiety has indeed a normal corollary in what German philosophical and religious language has termed the Angst der Kreatur. All of us are helpless toward forces more powerful than ourselves, such as death, illness, old age, catastrophes of nature, political events, accidents. The first time we recognize this is in the helplessness of childhood, but the knowledge remains with us for our entire life. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

This anxiety of the Kreatur has in common with basic anxiety the element of the helplessness toward greater powers, but it does not connote hostility on the part of those powers. If “normal” is used, however, in the sense of normal for our culture, one could say this much: in general experience will lead a person in our culture, provided one’s life is not too sheltered, to become more reserved toward people as one reaches maturity, to be more cautious in trusting them, more familiar wit the fact that often people’s actions are not straightforward but are determined by cowardice and expediency. If one is an honest person one will include oneself; if not one will see all of this more clearly in others. In short one develops an attitude which is definitely akin to the basic anxiety. There are these differences, however: the healthy mature person does not feel helpless toward these human failings and there is in one none of the indiscriminateness that is found in the basic neurotic attitude. One retains the capacity of bestowing a god deal of genuine friendliness and confidence on some people. Perhaps the differences are to be accounted for by the fact that the healthy person made the bulk of one’s unfortunate experiences at an age when one could integrate them, while the neurotic person made them at an age when one could not master them, and as a consequence of one’s helplessness reacted to them with anxiety. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

Failure, then failure! So the World stamps us at every turn. We strew it with our blunders, our misdeeds, our lost opportunities, with all the memorials of our inadequacy to our vocation. And with what a damning emphasis does it then blot us out! The subtlest forms of suffering known to beings are connected with the poisonous humiliations incidental to these results. And they are pivotal human experiences. A process so ubiquitous and everlasting is evidently an integral part of life. We just say way: because it is connected to the fundamental motive of organismic appetite: to endure, to continue experiencing, and to know that one can continue because one possesses some special excellence that makes one immune to diminution and death. This explains too the ubiquitousness of envy. Envy is the signal of danger that the organism sends to itself when a shadow is being cast over it, when it is threatened with being diminished. Fear of being reduced almost seems to have a life of its own inside one’s being. The basic anxiety has a definite implications for the person’s attitude toward oneself and others. It means emotional isolation, all the harder to bear as it concurs with a feeling of intrinsic weakness of the self. It means a weakening of the very foundation of self-confidence. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

The implications of basic anxiety carries the germ for a potential conflict between the desire to rely on others, and the impossibility to do so because of deep distrust of and hostility toward them. It means that because of intrinsic weakness the person feels a desire to put all responsibility upon others, to be protected and taken care of, whereas because of the basic hostility there is much too much distrust to carry out this desire. And invariably the consequences is that one has to put the greatest part of one’s energies into securing reassurance. The more unbearable the anxiety the more thorough the protective means have to be. There are in our culture four principal ways in which a person tries to protect oneself against the basic anxiety: affection, submissiveness, power, withdrawal. First, securing affection in any form may serve as a powerful protection against anxiety. The motto is: If you love me you will not hurt me. Second, submissiveness can be roughly subdivided according to whether or not it concerns definite persons or institutions. There is such a definite focus, for example, in submission to standardize traditional views, to the rites of some religious or to the demands of some powerful person. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

To obey these rules or comply with these demands will be the determining motive for all behavior. This attitude may take the form of having to be good, although the connotation of good varies with the demands or the rules that are complied with. When the attitude of compliance is not attached to any institution or person it takes the more generalized form of compliance with the potential wishes of all persons and avoidance of everything that might arouse resentment. In such cases the individual represses all demands of one’s own, represses criticism of others, is willing to let oneself be abused without defending oneself and is ready to be indiscriminately helpful to others. Occasionally people are away of the fact that anxiety underlies their actions, but usually they are not at all aware of this fact and firmly believe they act as they do because of an ideal of unselfishness or self-sacrifice which goes so far as a renunciation of their own wishes. In both the definite and the general forms of submissiveness the motto is: If I give in, I shall not be hurt. The submissive attitude may also serve the purpose of securing reassurance by affection. If affection is so important to a person that one’s feeling of security in life depends on it, the one is willing to pay any price for it, and in the main this means complying with the wishes of others. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

Frequently, however, a person is unable to believe in any affection, and then one’s complying attitude is directed not toward winning affection but toward winning protection. There are persons who can feel secure only by rigid submission. In them the anxiety is so great and the disbelief in affection so complete that the possibility of affection does not enter after all. A third attempt at protection against the basic anxiety is through power—trying to achieve security by gaining factual power or success, or possession, or admiration, or intellectual superiority. In this attempt at protection the motto is: If I have power, no one can hurt me. The fourth means of protection is withdrawal. The preceding groups of protective devices have in common a willingness to contend with the World, to cope with it in one way or another. Protection can also be found, however, by withdrawing from the World. This does not mean going into a desert or into complete seclusion; it means achieving independence of others as they affect either one’s external or one’s internal needs. Independence in regard to external needs may be achieved, for example, by piling up possession. This motivation for possession is entirely different from the motivation for the sake of power or influence, and the use made of the possession is likewise different. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

Where possessions are amassed for the sake of independence there is usually too much anxiety to enjoy them, and they are guarded with an attitude of parsimony because the only objective is to be safeguarded against all eventualities. Another means that serves the same purpose of becoming externally independent of others is a restriction of one’s needs to a minimum. Independence in regard to internal needs maybe found, for example, by an attempt to become emotionally detached from people so that nothing will hurt or disappoint one. It means choking off one’s emotional needs. One expression of such detachment is the attitude of not taking anything seriously, including one’s self, an attitude often found in intellectual circles. Not taking one’s self seriously is not to be confounded with not thinking one’s self important. In fact these attitudes may be mutually contradictory. These devices of withdrawal have a similarity with the devices of submissiveness or compliance, inasmuch as both involve a renunciation of one’s own wishes. However, while in the latter group renunciation is the service of being good or of complying with the desires of others in order to feel safe, in the former group the idea of being good plays no role at all, and the object of renunciations is attaining independence of others. Here the motto is: If I withdraw, nothing can hurt me.  #RandolphHarris 14 of 14

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