Home » Nightclub (Page 33)

Category Archives: Nightclub

Give Me a Firm Spot on Which to Stand, and I Will Move the Earth!

January 27, 2020 3:25 am

Experience is something you do not get until just after you need it. “To everything there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the Heaven. A time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which is planted,” reports Ecclesiastes 3.1. It is not import for people to spill their guts in relationship, but to be accessible, capable of being known. When the invitation to pray, experiment, or encounter is repeatedly declined by people, then the delicate problem of resistance must be considered. Resistances are blockages to that which is palpably relevant (for instance, threatening, anxiety-provoking). Resistances are not to be taken lightly, from the experiential standpoint. To the contrary, they are viewed as vital methods of self-preservation. Although such methods may at first seem crude, crippling, or even life-denying, to mist people they are starkly preferable to the alternatives. Individuals invested in smallness, for example, may perceive their only option to be obliteration. With choices like these, it is no wonder beings sabotage their own growth. Accordingly, I always try to be respectful of resistances, acknowledging both their life-giving and their life-taking qualities. I also try to be cognizant of the problems of prematurely challenging peoples’ resistance, which can often end up exacerbating their conditions rather than alleviating them. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

If ignorance is bliss, why are not more people happy? There are two additional point to beat in mind about the experiential approach to resistance. First, it may be overly intense for given clients. To the extent that this is the case, semi- or nonexperiential alternative approaches may be in order. Second, although experiential approaches to resistance are cultivated throughout the treatment process, they are particularly relied upon in the closing stages of therapy—when people face the greatest pressure to change. Now let us focus on two important experiential tools for handling resistances—therapeutic vivification and confrontation. There are many times when it is better to indirectly, rather than directly, confront resistance. This is so, not only because direct confrontation can therapeutically backfire, but also because it can convey the wrong message to people—that the power of transformation is possessed by the therapist. However, from the experiential standpoint, this is a deception. For it is the client who must discover that power, and it is the client who must grapple with its consequences. Vivifying resistance, accordingly, is one way to empower clients to transform. How does vivification proceed? By gradually and methodically “holding a mirror up” to people—helping them to see that kinds of World they have constructed, the kinds of compromises they have made to maintain those World, and the degree of courage necessary to overcome their situations. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

While these means may seem simplistic at first—for what the people would deny such knowledge about one’s World—they are eminently sensible to those who know how deeply one must plumb to risk the anxieties of growth. Put another way, vivification helps clients to—supportively and productively—“hit bottom” in their lives and then mobilizes their commitment to change. It is obvious that the tendency to deprive or exploit, like all the other hostile tendencies we have discussed, not only arises from impaired personal relations but results in further impairment. Particularly if this tendency is more or less unconscious, as is usually the case, it necessarily renders the person self-conscious or even timid toward others. One may behave and feel free and natural toward persons from whom one does not expect anything, but one will become self-conscious as soon as there is any possibility of getting any advantage from someone. The advantage may concern tangible things, such as information or a recommendation, or it may concern something much less tangible, such as the mere possibility of future favours. A neurotic of this type may be frank and natural with people for whom one does not care, but feel embarrassed and constrained toward a being whom one wants to like one, because, for one, obtaining one’s affection is identified with getting something out of one. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Person of this type may have an exceptionally good earning capacity, thus leading their impulses into profitable channels. More often, they will develop inhibitions concerning the earning of money, so that they will hesitate to ask for pay or will do a great deal of work without getting an adequate reward, thus appearing to behave more generously than is really the case. They are likely then to become discontented at their inadequate earnings, often without knowing the reason for the discontentment. If the neurotic’s inhibitions become so ramified that they pervade one’s whole personality the result will be a general incapacity to stand on one’s own feet, and one will have to be supported by others. One will then lead a parasitic kind of existence, thus satisfying one’s exploiting tendencies. This parasitic attitude will not necessarily appear in the gross form of “the World owes me a living,” but may take the more subtle form of expecting others to do one favours, to take the initiative, to give one ideas for one’s work, in short, expecting others to take the responsibility for one’s life. The result is an odd attitude toward life in general: one has no clear conception that this is one’s own life, and that it is up to one to make something out of it or to spoil it, but one lives as if what happens to one were no concern of one’s own, as if good and evil came from the outside without one’s having anything to do about it, as if one had a right to expect the good things from others and to blame them for all bad things. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

Since in these circumstances usually more bad than good is produced, a growing embitterment against the World is almost inevitable. This parasitic attitude can be found also in the neurotic need for affection, especially when the need for affection takes the form of a craving for material favours. Another frequent outcome of the neurotic’s tendency to deprive or exploit is an anxiety that one will be cheated or exploited by others. One may live in a perpetual fear that someone will take advantage of one, that money or ideas will be stolen from one, and one will react to every person one meets with the fear that the person might want something from one. A seemingly disproportionate amount of anger is discharged if one is really cheated, if, for example, an Uber or Lyft driver does not take the shortest route, or if a cashier overcharged one. The psychic value of protecting one’s own abusing tendencies on others is obvious. It is far more pleasant to feel a righteous indignation at others than to face a problem of one’s own. Moreover, hysterical persons often use accusations as a means of intimidation, or bullying the other into feeling guilty and thus letting oneself be abused. The aims and functions of the neurotics striving for power, prestige and possession can be very roughly schematized as follows: #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

It is an achievement to see and emphasize the importance of these strivings, the role they play in neurotic manifestations and the disguises in which they appear. It is, however, often assumed these strivings are the foremost trend in human nature, not in themselves requiring any explanation; their intensification in neurotics can be traced back to feelings of inferiority and to physical in adequacies. Dr. Freud has also seen many of the implications of these strivings, but he does not regard them as belonging together. The striving for prestige he considers an expression of narcissistic tendencies. He would originally have considered the strivings for power and possession, and the hostility involved in them, as derivatives of the “anal-sadistic stage.” Later, however, he recognizes that such hostilities could not be reduced to a sexual basis, and assumed them to be an expression of a “death instinct,” thus remaining faithful to one’s biological orientation. Many psychiatrists have recognized the role that anxiety plays in bringing about such drives, not has either of them seen the cultural implications in the forms in which they are expressed. The ways of obtaining power, prestige, and possession differ in different cultures. They may come by right of inheritance or they may come from the individual’s possession of certain qualities appreciated by one’s cultural group, such as courage, cunning, capacity to cure the sick or communicate with supernatural powers, mental instability, and the like. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

Some people claim to be “baby gods,” as a way of expression their superiority over other humans, and it also indicates their inability to take responsibility for their actions. It is just another justification for mentally ill assuming they are all powerful and above the law, and I suppose their cult leader is their god. It is the same attitude displayed by the followers of Charles Manson. These types of ideas may be acquired also by extraordinary or successful activities, achieved on the basis of given qualities or through the favor of fortuitous circumstances. In our culture inheritance of passion and wealth certainly plays a role. If, however, power, prestige, and possession have to be acquired by the individual’s own efforts one is compelled to enter into competitive struggles with others. From its economic center competition is a problem for everyone in our culture, and it is not at all surprising to find it an unfailing center of neurotic conflicts. In our culture neurotic competitiveness differs from the normal in three respects. First, the neurotic constantly measures oneself against others, even in situations which do not call for it. Although striving to surpass others is essential in all competitive situation, the neurotic measures oneself against persons who are in no way potential competitors and who have no goal in common with one. The question as to who is the more intelligent, attractive, popular, is indiscriminately applied to everyone. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

One’s feeling toward life can be compared to that of a jockey in a race, for whom only one thing matters—whether one is ahead of others. This attitude leads necessarily to a loss of impairment of real interest in any cause. It is not the content of what one is doing that matters so much as the question of how much success, impression, prestige will be gained by it. The neurotic may be aware of this attitude of measuring oneself against others, or one may do it automatically without being aware of doing it. One is scarcely ever fully aware of the role it plays for one. Another difference from normal competitiveness is that the neurotic’s ambition is not only to accomplish more than others, or to have greater success that they, but to be unique and exceptional. While one may think in the comparative one’s aims are always in the superlative. One may be perfectly aware of being driven by relentless ambition. More frequently, however, one either represses one’s ambition entirely or partly covers it. In the latter case one may believe, for example, that one cares not for success, but only for the cause one is working for; or one may believe that one does not want to be in the limelight. One’s feeling may be described as an articulate conviction that “only one can succeed,” which is only another way of expressing the idea that “no one but I shall succeed.” There may be an enormous amount of emotional intensity behind one’s destructive impulses. For example, a being who was writing a play was thrown into a blind fury when one heard that a friend of his was working on a play. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

This impulse to defeat or frustrate the efforts of others may be seen in many relationships. A child with excessive ambition may become impelled by a wish to defeat all one’s parents efforts on one’s behalf. If the parents press one in matters of deportment and social success one will develop a kind of behavior which is socially scandalous. If they concentrate their efforts on one’s intellectual development one may develop such strong inhibitions toward learning that one appears to be feebleminded. I recall two young patents brought to me who were suspected of being feebleminded, although later they proved to be very capable and intelligent. Because of its destructive character competitiveness in neurotic persons gives rise to a huge amount of anxiety, and consequently leads to a recoiling from competition. The question now is, Whence comes this anxiety? It is understandable without any difficulty that one source is a fear of retaliation for the ruthless pursuit of ambition. One who steps on all others, humiliates and crushes them as soon as they have or want to have success, must have the fear that they will want just as intensely to defeat one. However, such a retaliation fear, although it will be active in everyone who achieves success at the expense of others, is scarcely the whole reason for the neurotic’s increased anxiety and one’s consequent inhibition toward competition. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

Experience shows that retaliation fear alone does not necessarily lead to inhibitions. On the contrary, it may result merely in a cold-blooded reckoning with the imaginary or real envy, rivalry or malice of others, or in an attempt to expand one’s power in order to be protected from any defeat. A certain type of successful person has only one goal, the acquisition of power and wealth. However, if the structure of such personalities is compared with that of definitely neurotic persons there is one striking difference. The ruthless success-hunter does not care for the affection of others, neither help nor any kind of generosity. One knows that one can reach what one wants by one’s own strength and efforts alone. One will, of course, make use of people, but one care for their good opinion only in so far as it is useful in attaining one own goals. Affection for its own sake means nothing to one. One’s desires and one’s defenses go along one straight line: power, prestige, possession. Even one who is driven to this kind of behaviour by internal conflicts will not develop the usual neurotic characteristics if there is nothing within one to interfere with one’s strivings. Fear will only push one into enhanced efforts to be more successful and more invincible. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

If one is at all aware of one’s exaggerated self-valuation one’s conscious reaction to it is rather like that of a healthy person. If in dreams one appears as royalty in disguise one may find such dreams funny. However, one’s grandiose fantasies, although consciously one discards them as unreal, have for one an emotional reality-value similar to the value they have for a psychotic. In both cases the reason is the same: they have an important function. Although slender and shaky, they are the pillar on which one’s self-esteem rests, and therefore one has to cling to them. The danger that lies in this function manifests itself in situations in which some blow is dealt the self-esteem. Then the pillar tumbles, one falls, and cannot recover from one’s fall. For example, a girl who had good reasons to believe that she was loved realized that the man was hesitating to marry her. In a talk he told her that he felt to young, too inexperienced to marry, and that he thought it wiser to know other girls before he tied himself definitely. She could not recover from this blow, became depressed, began to feel insecure in her work, developed an enormous fear of failure, with a subsequent desire to withdraw from everything, from people as well as work. This fear was so overwhelming that even encouraging events, such as the man’s later decision that he wished to marry her, and the offer of a better job with much flattering appreciation of her abilities did not reassure her. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

As we have already indicated, eros (the sum of life-preserving instincts that are manifested as impulses to gratify basic needs, as sublimated impulses, and as impulses to protect and preserve the body and mind) as well as philia (friendly feeling toward) contains an element of epithymia (a longing, especially for what is forbidden; concupiscence, desire, lust). This is most obvious in those cases in which a philia and eros relation is untied with an attraction or fulfilment of pleasures of the flesh. However, it is true not only in these cases. It is always true. In this respect depth psychology has discovered a side of human existence which should not be covered again by idealistic or moralistic fears and postulates. The appetitus (natural/instinctive desire) of every being to fulfill itself through union with other beings is universal and underlies the eros as well as the philia quality of love. There is an element of libido even in the most spiritualized friendship and in the most ascetic mysticism. A saint without libido would cease to be a creature. However, there is no such saint. Up to this point the quality of love which dominates the New Testament, the agape (the highest form of love, charity) quality, has been disregarded. This has been done not because agape is the last and highest form of love, but because agape enters from another dimension into the whole of life and into all qualities of love. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

One could call agape the depth of love or love in relation to the ground of life. One could say that in agape ultimate reality manifests itself and transforms life and love. Agape is love cutting into love, just as revelation is reason cutting into reason and the Word of God is the Word cutting into all words. If love is the drive towards the reunion of the separated, it is hard to speak meaningfully of self-love. For within the unity of self-consciousness there is no real separation, comparable to the separation of a self-centered being from all others beings. Certainly the completely self-centered beings, humans, are self-centered only because one’s self is split into a self which is subject and a self which is object. However, there is neither separation in this structure, nor the desire for reunion. Self-love is a metaphor, and it should not be treated as a concept. The lack of conceptual clarity in the concept of self-love is manifest in the fact that the term is used in three different and partly contradictory sense. It is used in the sense of natural self-affirmation (for instance loving one’s neighbour as oneself). It is used in the sense of selfishness (for instance, the desire to draw all things into oneself). It is used in the sense of self-acceptance (for further illustration, the affirmation of oneself in the way which one is affirmed by God). It would be an important step towards semantic clarification if the term “self-love” were completely removed and replaced by self-affirmation, selfishness, and self-acceptance according to the context. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

Living on the boundary between home and international land is to leave one’s own country over and over again, and to go into a land that is shown unto one, and to trust the promise which for one is purely transcendent. This conviction will draw us beyond the narrow confines of nationalism. Humankind as such is a symbol for that which lies beyond history, the Kingdom of God, in which the border between home and international land has ceased to be a border. Facing the Unconditional, all life is lived on a border-line. In unity with the Unconditional, all boundary situations are ultimate. To stand on many borderlines means to experience in many forms the unrest, insecurity and inner limitation of existence, and to know that inability of attaining serenity, security and perfection. That is true of life as well as of thought. However, there is a boundary of human activity which is no longer the dividing line between two possibilities—the Good and the True. In its presence, even the very centre of our being is only a boundary, and our utmost perfection only a fragment. “And do not fear their intimidation, and do not be troubled, but sanctify Christ as Lord in your hearts, always being ready to make a defense [apologia] to everyone who asks you to give an account [logos] for the hope that is in your, yet with gentleness and reverence reports 1 Peter 3.14-15. Two key words are central to Peter’s meaning: apologia and logos. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

The word apologia means to defend something, for example, offering absolute arguments for and responding to negative arguments against your position in a courtroom. It is important to recognize that this is exactly how the apostle Paul did evangelism (Acts 14.15-17, 17.2,4,17-34; 18.4; 19.8). One persuaded people to become Christians by offering rational arguments on behalf of the truth of the gospel. He even cited approvingly two pagan philosophers, Epimenides and Aratus (acts 17.28), as part of his case for the gospel. In 1 Peter 3.15, the apostle does not suggest that we be prepared to do this, he commands it. The word logos means “evidence or argument which provides rational justification for some belief.” If you know something, what you know must at least be true and you must believe it. If you said you knew it was raining outside, but either it was not raining outside or you did not even believe it was, others would rightly be puzzled at your claim to knowledge. However, knowledge is more than just true beliefs. We all have many true beliefs that do not count as knowledge. IF someone hits you on the head and, as a result, somehow you form the true belief that a methane molecule has four carbon atoms in it, no one would claim that you knew this to be the case, especially compared to a scientist who had spent five years studying methane. You and the scientist both have true beliefs about methane, but one has knowledge and you do not. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

What is the difference? The scientist has a true belief plus logos (evidence) and you fail to have logos. He scientist has good reasons that justify his true belief, you have blind faith that just happens to be true. Applied to our passage, Peter is saying that we are to be prepared to give rational arguments and good reasons for why we believe what we believe, and this involves the mind. Peter’s reference to gentleness and reverence implies that we are to argue but not be argumentative. Have you ever been afraid to stand up for Christ when the opportunity presented itself? Or when you have done so, have you come off as shallow, reactionary, and defensive? If so, there is nothing magical about changing your life in this area. First, as with every other area of life, you have to study hard and gain an intellectual grasp of the issues so you can be confident and courageous. Second, you need to be sure that Jesus Christ is the Lord believers being intimidated by powerful forces outside the church. “Whatsoever thing persuadth people to do evil, and believe not in Christ, and deny him, and serve not God, then ye may know with a perfect knowledge it is of the devil; for after this manner doth the devil work, for he persuadeth no being to do good, no, not one; neither do his angels; neither do they who subject themselves into him,” reports Moroni 7.17. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

Thou righteous and holy Sovereign, in whose hand is my life and whose are all my ways, keep me from fluttering about religion; fix me firm in it, for I am irresolute; my decisions are smoke and vapour, and I do not glorify thee, or behave accordingly to thy will; cut me not off before my thoughts grow to responses and the budding of my soul into full flower, for thou art forbearing and good, patient and kind. Save me from myself, form the artifices and deceits of sin, from the treachery of my perverse nature from denying thy charge against my offences, from a life of continual rebellion against thee, from wrong principles, views, and ends; for I know that all my thoughts, affections, desires and pursuits are alienated from thee. I have acted as if I hated thee, although thou art love itself; have contrived to tempt thee to the uttermost, to wear out thy patience; have lived evilly in word and action. Had I been a prince I would long ago have crushed such a rebel; had I been a prince I would long ago have crushed such a rebel; had I been a father I would long since have rejected my child. O, thou Father of my spirit, thou King of my life, cast me not into destruction drive me not from thy presence, but wound my heart that it may be healed; break it that thine own hand may make it whole. And we forget because we must and not because we will. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

CRESLEIGH RIVERSIDE AT PLUMAS RANCH

Plumas Lake, CA | from the low $400’s

Now Selling!

Cresleigh Riverside is now selling! Nestled at the southern end of Plumas Lake, bordering an orchard to the west, Cresleigh Riverside is home to the largest home sites in the three Plumas Ranch communities. Its executive-style residences feature space and amenities that are well beyond the norm – many on country lots that back up to the Ranch’s adjacent fruit orchards. With four floor plans available, we are certain you will find the home that fits your needs and lifestyle.

Popular design elements include open floor plans, large kitchen islands, and flex spaces are staples in Cresleigh homes. Additional game rooms, bedroom space and three-car garages provide other custom possibilities. https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-riverside-at-plumas-ranch/

Come to Me and You Will Find Rest in Your Souls–I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End!

December 18, 2019 2:11 am

We often worry about what we will be tomorrow, but do not take into account that we are somebody today. Life should be a place of learning suffused with excitement, engagement, passion, challenge, creativity, and joy. When we are in the minority, that is when the test of courage comes; when we are in the majority is when the test of acceptance comes. It is our destiny and the destiny of everything in the World that we must come to an end. Very end that we experience in nature and humankind speaks to us with a loud voice: you also will come to an end! It may reveal itself in the farewell to a place where we have lived for a long time, the separation from the fellowship of intimate associates, the death of someone near to us. Or it may become apparent to us in the failure of a work that gave meaning to us, the end of a whole period of life, the approach of old age, or even in the melancholy side of nature visible in autumn. All this tells us: you will also come to an end. Whenever we are shaken by this voice reminding us of our end, we ask anxiously—what does it mean that we have a beginning and an end, that we come from the darkness of the not yet, and rush ahead towards the darkness of the no more? When Augustine asked this question, he began his attempt to answer it with a prayer. And it is right to do so, because praying means elevating oneself to the eternal. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

In fact, there is no other way of judging time than to see it in the light of the eternal. In order to judge something, one must be partly within it, partly out of it. If we were totally within time, we would not be able to elevate ourselves in prayer, meditation and thought, to the eternal. We would be children of time like all other creatures and could not ask the question of the meaning of time. However, as human beings we are aware of the eternal to which we belong and from which we are estranged by the bondage of time. We speak of time in three ways or modes—the past, present, and future. Every child is aware of them, but no wise being has ever penetrated their mystery. We become aware of them when we hear a voice telling us: you also will come to an end. It is the future that awakens us to the mystery of time. Time runs from the beginning to the end, but our awareness of times goes in the opposite direction. It starts with the anxious anticipation of the end. In the light of the future we see the past and present. So let us first consider our going into the future and towards the end that is the last point that we can anticipate in out future. The image of the future produces contrasting feelings in beings. The expectation of the future gives one a feeling of joy. We may even learn to recapture the will to laugh and the art of laughing at will. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

It is a great thing to have a future in which one can actualize one’s possibilities, in which one can experience the abundance of life, in which one can create something new—be it new work, a new way of life, or the regeneration of one’s own being. Courageously one goes ahead towards the new, especially in the earlier part of one’s own life. However, this feeling struggles with other ones: the anxiety about what is hidden in the future, the ambiguity of everything it will bring us, the shortness of its duration that decreases with every year of our life and becomes shorter the nearer we come to the unavoidable end. And finally the end itself, with its impenetrable darkness and the threat that one’s whole existence in time will be judged as a failure. Therefore, it may be a good idea to think before one speaks, and read before one thinks. This may give one something to think about that we did not make up ourselves—a wise move at any age, but most especially at seventeen, when one is at the greatest danger of coming to annoying conclusions. We want to be in the pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in the pursuit of us. The goal is to fully realize the wealth of sympathy, kindness, and generosity hidden in our souls. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

How do beings, how do you, react to this image of the future with its hope and threat and inescapable end? Probably most of us react by looking at the immediate future, anticipating it, working for it, hoping for it, being anxious about it, while cutting off from our awareness the future which is farther away, and above all, by cutting off from our consciousness the end, the last moment of our future. Perhaps we could not live without doing so most of our time. However, perhaps we will not be able to die if we always do so. And if one is not able to die, is one really about to live? How do we react if we become aware of the inescapable end contained in our future? Are we able to bear it, to take its anxiety into a courage that faces ultimate darkness? Or are we thrown into utter hopelessness? Do we hope against hope, or do we repress our awareness of the end because we cannot stand it? Repressing the consciousness of our end expresses itself in several ways. Many try to do so by putting the expectation of a long life between now and the end. For them it is decisive that the end be delayed. Even old people who are near the end do this, for they cannot endure the fact that the end will not be delayed much longer. Many people realize this deception and hope for a continuation of this life after death. They expect an endless future in which they may achieve or possess what has been denied them in this life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

This attitude that we will achieve our hearts desires in the after life is a prevalent attitude about the future, and also a very simple one. It denies that there is an end. It refuses to accept that we are creatures, that we come from the eternal ground of time and return to the eternal ground of time and have received a limited span of time as our time. It replaces eternity by endless future. However, endless future is without a final aim; it repeats itself and could well be described as an image of hell. This is not the Christian way of dealing with the end. The Christian message says the eternal stands above past and future. “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.” The Christian message acknowledges that time runs towards an end, and that we move towards the end of that time which is our time. Many people—but not the Bible—speak loosely of the “hereafter” or the “life after death.” Even in our liturgies eternity is translated by “World without end.” However, the World, by its very nature, is that which comes to an end. If we want to speak in truth without foolish, wishful thinking, we should speak about the eternal that is neither timelessness nor endless time. The mystery of the future is answered in the eternal of which we may speak in images taken from time. However, if we forget that the images are images, we fall into absurdities and self-deceptions. There is no time after time, but there is eternity above time. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

Time is like a jigsaw puzzle. Each edge piece of a puzzle interlocks with two others to form the puzzle’s framework and give structure and support to the puzzle as a whole. Each piece has a unique design and cut that ensures just the right place to fit within the puzzle. Each morning, people from the edge pieces that interlock to create a safe environment and give support to one another and the whole. Each morning, they provide just the right place for every individual to fit safely and securely. The community members are strength and stability, and like the edge pieces, they do not stand alone in this responsibility. There are always others to support and assist, ensuring that every person has a place. The spirits temper the movements of bodily parts. Some infectious diseases are chiefly in the spirits, and not so much in the humours. We have complex and contradictory feelings toward the freedom and independence and self-determination of the individuals and countries: we desire these and are proud of the past support we have given to such tendencies, and yet we are often frightened by what they may mean. We tend to value and respect the dignity and worth of each individual, yet when we are frightened, we move away from this direction. Suppose we presented ourselves in some such fashion, openly and transparently, in our foreign relations. We would be attempting to be the nation which we truly are, in all our complexity and even contradictoriness. What would be the result? #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

If we, as a country, were more open and transparent in our foreign relations, it seems the results would be similar to the experiences of a client when one is more truly that which he or she is. Let us look at some of the probable outcomes. We would be much more comfortable, because we would have nothing to hide. We could focus on the problem at hand, rather than spending our energies to prove that we are moral or consistent. We could use all of our creative imagination in solving the problem, rather than in defending ourselves. We could openly advance both our selfish interests, and our sympathetic concern for others, and let these conflicting desires find the balance which is acceptable to us as a people. We could freely change and grow in our leadership position, because we would not be bound by rigid concepts of what we have been, must, ought to be. We would find that we were much less feared, because others would be less inclined to suspect what lies behind the façade. We would, by our own openness, tend to bring forth openness and realism on the part of others. We would tend to work out the solutions of World problems on the basis of the real issues involved, rather than in terms of the facades being worn by the negotiating parties. In short what I am suggesting by this fantasied example is that nations and organizations might discover, as have individuals, that it is a richly rewarding experience to be what one deeply is. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

I am suggesting that this view contains the seeds of a philosophical approach to all of life, that it is more than a trend observed in the experience of clients. Feeling rules are what guide emotion work by establishing the sense of entitlement or obligation that governs emotional exchanges. This emotion system works privately, often free of observation. It is a vital aspect of deep private bonds and also affords a way of talking about them. It is a way of describing how—as parents and children, wives and husbands, friends and lovers—we intervene in feelings in order to shape them. What are feeling rules? How do we know they exist? How do they bear on deep acting? We may address these questions by focusing on the pinch between “what I do feel” and “what I should feel,” for at this spot we get our best view of emotional convention. Now, when we take a closer look at the whole person, we find that there are six basic aspects in our lives as individual human beings—six things inseparable from every human life. These together and in interplay make up human nature. Thought (images, concepts, judgments, inferences), feeling (sensation, emotion), choice (will, decision, character), body (action, interaction with the physical World), social context (personal and structural relations to others), and soul (the factor that integrates all of the above to form one life. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

Simply put, every human being thinks (has a thought life), feels, chooses, interacts with one’s body and its social context, and (more of less) integrates all of the foregoing as parts of one life. These are the essential factors in a human being, and nothing essential to human life falls outside of them. The ideal of the spiritual life in the Christian understanding is one where all of the essential parts of the human self are effectively organized around Go, as they are restored and sustained by him. Spiritual formation in Christ is the process leading to that ideal end, and its result is love of God with all of the hearts, soul, mind, and strength, and of the neighbor as oneself. The human self is then fully integrated under God. The salvation or deliverance of the believer in Christ is essentially holistic or whole-life. David the psalmist, speaking of his own experience but prophetically expressing the understanding of Jesus the Messiah, said, “I bless the LORD who gives me counsel; in the night also my heart instructs me. I keep the LORD always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved. Therefore my heart is glad, and my soul rejoices; my body also rests secure,” reports Psalm 16.7-9. Note how many aspects of the self are explicitly involved in this passage: the mind, the will, the feeling, the soul, and the body. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

A major part of understanding spiritual formation in the Christian traditions is to follow closely the way the biblical writings repeatedly and emphatically focus on the various essential dimensions of the human being and their role in life as a whole. We will draw from spiritual understanding the incentive to keep on with our quest and the courage to set higher goals. To learn from God in this total-life immersion is ow we seek first His kingdom and His righteousness. The outcome is that we increasingly are able to do all things, speaking or acting, as I Christ were doing them. As apprentices of Christ we are not learning how to do some special religious activity, but how to live every moment of our live from the reality of God’s kingdom. I am learning how to live my actual life as Jesus would if He were me. No matter what my profession is, I am in full-time Christian service no less than someone who earns his or her living in a specifically religious role. Jesus stands beside me and teaches me in all I do to live in God’s World. He shows me how, in every circumstance, to reside in His word and thus be a genuine apprentice of His—His disciple indeed. This enables me to find the reality of God’s World everywhere I may be, and thereby to escape from enslavement to sin and evil. We become able to do what we know to be good and right, even when it is humanly impossible. Our lives and words become constant testimony of the reality of God. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

When, for example, an architect facing a difficult architectural job, one must know how to integrate it into the kingdom of God as much as someone attempting to win another to Christ or preparing a lesson for a congregation. Until we are clear on this, we will have missed Jesus’ connection between life and God and will automatically exclude most of our everyday lives from the domain of faith and discipleship. Jesus lived most of His life on Earth as a blue-collar worker, someone we might describe today as an independent contractor. In His vocation He practiced everything He later taught about in life in the kingdom. It is important to move away from derogatory language against others, calling them twits, jerks, or idiots, and increasingly mesh with the respect and endearment for persons that naturally flows from God’s way. This in turn transforms all of my dealings with others into tenderness and makes the usual coldness and brutality of human relations, which lays a natural foundation for unspeakable actions, simply unthinkable. Our mind and heart will keep coming back to God’s grace. The grace of God is so inexhaustible and at times overwhelming. “Grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and forever more! Amen,” reports 2 Peter 3.18. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

Growing in the grace of God allows one to become acquainted with elements of our experience which have in the past been denied to awareness as too threatening, too damaging to the structure of the self. One finds one’s experiencing these feelings fully, completely, in the relationship, so that for the moment one is one’s fear, or one’s anger, or one’s tenderness, or one’s strength. And as one lives these widely varied feelings, in all their degrees of intensity, one discovers that one has experienced oneself, that one is all these feelings. One finds that one’s behavior changing in constructive fashion in accordance with one’s newly experienced self. One approaches the realization that one no longer needs to fear what experience may hold, but can welcome it freely as a part of one’s changing and developing self. However, it seems to me that the good life is not any fixed state. It is not, in my estimation, a state of virtue, or contentment, or nirvana, or happiness. It is not a condition in which the individual is adjusted, or fulfilled, or actualized. It is not a state of drive-reduction, or tension-reduction, or homeostasis. I believe that all of these terms have been used in ways which imply that if one or several of these states is achieved, then the goal of life have been achieved. Certainly, for many people happiness, or adjustment, are seen as states of being which are synonymous with the good life. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

Social scientists have frequently spoken of the reduction of tension, or the achievement of homeostasis or equilibrium as if these states constituted the goal of the process of living. So it is with a certain amount of surprise and concern that I realize that my experience supports none of these definitions. If I focus on the experience of those individuals who seem to have evidenced the greatest degree of movement during the spiritual and therapeutic relationship, and who, in the years following this relationship, appear to have made and to be making real progress toward the good life, then it seems to me that they are not adequately described at all by any of these terms which refer to fixed states of being. I believe they would consider themselves insulted if they were described as adjusted, and they would regard it as false if they were described as happy or contented or even actualized. As I have known them I would regard it as most inaccurate to say that all their dive tensions have been reduced, or that they are in a state of homeostasis. So I am forced to ask myself whether there is any way in which I can generalize about their situation, any definition which I can give of the good life which would seem to fit the facts as I have observed them. I find this not at all easy, and what follows is stated very tentatively. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination. The direction which constitutes the good life is that which is selected by the total organism, when there is psychological freedom to move in any direction. This organismically selected direction seems to have certain discernible general qualities which appear to be the same in a wide variety of unique individuals. The good life, from the point of view of my experience, is the process of movement in a direction which the human organism selects when it is inwardly free to move in any direction, and the general qualities of this selected direction appear to have a certain universality. Many people, however, seem to be morally bankrupt—completely devoid of any decent moral qualities. And it is just about the worst thing you can say about a person. A lot of people are also spiritually bankrupt. Spiritual bankruptcy is a most absolute state. It means we have nothing to give to God. Salvation is a gift from God; it is entirely by grace through faith—not by works. People living the good life are righteous and the process seems to involve an increasing openness to the experience. It is the polar opposite of defensiveness. Defensiveness is an organism’s response to experiences which are perceived or anticipated as threatening, as incongruent with the individual’s existing picture of oneself, or of oneself in relationship to the World. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

These threatening experiences are temporarily rendered harmless by being distorted in awareness, or being denied to awareness. I quite literally cannot see, with accuracy, those experiences, feelings, reactions in myself which are significantly at variance with the picture of myself which I already possess. A large part of the process of therapy is the continuing discovery by the client that one is experiencing feelings and attitudes which heretofore one has not been able to be aware of, which one has not been able to own as being a part of oneself. If a person could be fully open to one’s experience, however, every stimulus—whether originating within the organism or in the environment—would be freely relayed through the nervous system without being distorted by any defensive mechanism. There would be no need of the mechanism of subception whereby the organism is forewarned of any experience threatening to the self. On the contrary, whether the stimulus was the impact of a configuration of form, color, or sound in the environment on the sensory nerves, or a memory trace from the past, or visceral sensation of fear or pleasure or disgust, the person would be living it, would have it completely available to awareness. Thus, one aspect of this process which I am naming the good life appears to be a movement away from the pole of defensiveness toward the pole of openness to experience. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

The individual living the good life is becoming more able to listen to oneself, to experience what is going on within oneself. One is more open to one’s feelings of fear and discouragement and pain. One is also more open to one’s feelings of courage, and tenderness, and awe. One is free to live one’s feelings subjectively, as they exist in one, and also free to be aware of these feelings. One is more able fully to live the experiences of one’s organism rather than shutting them off. Almighty and everlasting God, Who hast made known the Incarnation of Thy Word by the testimony of a glorious star, which when the wise men be held, they adored Thy Majesty with gifts; grant that the star of Thy righteousness may always appear in our hearts, and our treasure consist in giving thanks to Thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord. O God, the Enlightener of all nations, grant Thy people to enjoy perpetual peace; and pour into our hearts that radiant light which Thou didst shed into the minds of the wise men; thought Jesus Christ Our Lord. “Behold, O Lord, thou hast smitten us because of our iniquity, and hast driven us forth, and for these many years we have been in the wilderness; nevertheless, thou hast been merciful unto us. O Lord, look upon me in pity, and turn away thine anger from this thy people, and suffer not that they shall go forth across this raging deep in darkness; but behold these things which I have molten out of rock,” reports Ether 3.3. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

CRESLEIGH MEADOWS AT PLUMAS RANCH

Plumas Lake, CA | from the mid $300’s

Coming Soon!

Cresleigh homes gives emphasis to detail and authenticity in their designs, remaining true to a style architecturally, while updating floor plans to create a modern, comfortable home. This combination of classic architectural style and easy livability add up to solid, long-lasting value. Today, there is a return to traditionalism and pure styles. People want the look and feel of an older home with the amenities and comforts of modern floor planning. Elaborate master bedroom suites, cozy country kitchens, libraries, media centers, and great rooms are all part of what makes a plan livable.

Cresleigh Meadows is coming soon! Found just north of Feather River Boulevard, Cresleigh Meadows is home of the largest neighborhood in Plumas Ranch as well as the popular Bear River Park. With four floor plans available, ranging from approximately 2,000 – 3,500 square feet offering, three to five bedrooms, we are certain you will find the home that fits your needs and lifestyle. Popular design elements include open floor plans, large kitchen islands, and flex spaces are staples in Cresleigh homes. Multi-generational living options also available in select homes. https://cresleigh.com/cresleigh-meadows-at-plumas-ranch/

#CresleighHomes

The Challenges You Face in Your Own Life Experience Will be Trying, to Say the Least, for it Has a Glory and Naught Else Can Share it!

October 24, 2019 12:51 am

I have guest here! Where exactly did you come from? It is once in a blue Moon a boat ties up at my dock. However, you are most welcome. We are very private here, you understand, I cannot invite you to stay. But these are all golden dreams. On, tell me, who was it first announced, who was it first proclaimed, that beings only do nasty things because one does not know one’s own interests; and that if one were enlightened, if one’s eyes were opened to one’s real normal interests, beings would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once become good and noble because, being enlightened and understanding one’s real advantage, one would see one’s own advantage in the good and nothing else, and we all know that not one being can, consciously, act against one’s own interests, consequently, so to say, through necessity, one would begin doing good? Oh, the babe! Oh, the pure, innocent child! Why, in the first place, when in all these thousands of years has there been a time when beings have acted only from their own interest? What is to be done with the millions of facts that bear witness that beings, consciously, that is, fully understanding their real interest, have left them in the background and have rushed headlong on another path, to meet peril and danger, compelled to this course by nobody and by nothing, but, as it were, simply disliking the beaten track, and have obstinately, willfully, struck out another difficult, absurd way, seeking it almost in the darkness. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

So, I suppose, this obstinacy and perversity were pleasanter to them than any advantage…Advantage! What is advantage? And will you take it upon yourself to define with perfect accuracy in what the advantage of beings consists? And what, if it so happens that a being’s advantage, sometimes, not only may, but even must, consist in one’s desiring in certain cases what is harmful to oneself and not advantageous. And if so, there can be such a case, the whole principle falls into dust. What do you think—are there such cases? You laugh; laugh away gentlemen, but only answer me: have being’s advantages been reckoned up with perfect certainty? Are there not some which not only have been included but cannot possibly be included under any classification? You see, you gentlemen and ladies have, to the best of my knowledge, taken your whole register of human advantages from the averages of statistical figures and political-economical formulas. Your advantages are prosperity, wealth, freedom, peace—and so on, and so on. So that the being who should, for instance, go openly and knowingly in opposition to all that list would, to your thinking, and indeed mine too, of course, be an obscurantist or an absolute mad person: would not one be? However, you know, this is what is surprising: when they reckon up human advantages, why does it so happen that all these statisticians, sages, and lovers of humanity invariably leave out one? #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

They do not even take it into their reckoning in the form in which it should be taken and the whole reckoning depends upon that. It would be no great matter, they would simply have to take it, this advantage, and add it to the list. However, the trouble is, that this strange advantage does not fall under any classification and is not in place in any list. I have a friend for instance…Ech! Gentlemen and ladies, but of course he is your friend, too; and indeed there is no one, no one, to whom he is not a friend! When he prepares for any undertaking this gentleman immediately explains to you, elegantly and clearly, exactly how he must act in accordance with the laws of reason and truth. What is more, he will talk to you with excitement and passion of the true normal interest of humans; with irony he will upbraid the short-sighted fools who do not understand their own interests, nor the true significance of virtue; and, within a quarter of an hour, without any sudden outside provocation, but simply through something inside one which is stronger than all one’s interests, one will go off on quite a different track—that is, act in direct opposition to what one just been saying about oneself, in opposition to the laws of reason, in opposition to one’s own advantage—in fact, in opposition to everything…I warn you that my friend is a compound personality, and therefore it is difficult to blame him as an individual. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

The fact is, gentlemen and ladies, it seems there must really exist something that is dearer to almost every being than one’s greatest advantages, or (not to be illogical) there is a most advantageous advantage (the very one omitted of which we spoke just now) which is more important and more advantageous than all other advantages, for the sake of which a being if necessary is ready to act in opposition to all laws; that is, in opposition to reason, honour, peace, prosperity—in fact, in opposition to all those excellent and useful things if only one can attain that fundamental, most advantageous advantage which is dearer to him than all. “Yes, but it is advantage all the same” you will retort. However, excuse me, I will make the point clear, and it is not a case of playing upon words. What matters is, that this advantage is remarkable from the very fact that it breaks down all our classifications, and continually shatters every system constructed by lovers of humankind for the benefit of humankind. In fact, it upsets everything. However, before I mention this advantage to you, I want to compromise myself personally, and therefore I boldly declare that all these fine systems—all these theories for explaining to humankind their real normal interests, in order that inevitably striving to pursue these interests they may at once become good and noble—are, in my opinion, so far, mere logical exercises! Yes, logical exercises. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

Why, to maintain this theory of the regeneration of humankind by means of the pursuit of one’s own advantage is to my mind almost the same thing as…as to affirm, for instance, following Buckle, that through civilization humankind becomes softer, and consequently less bloodthirsty, and less fitted for warfare. Logically it does not seem to follow from one’s arguments. However, beings have such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that one is ready to distort the truth intentionally, one is ready to deny the evidence of one’s senses only to justify one’s logic. I take this example because it is the most glaring instance of it. Only look about you: blood is being spilt in streams, and in the merriest ways, as though it were champagne. Take the whole of the nineteenth century in which Buckle lived. Take Napoleon—the Great and also the present one. Take North America—the eternal union. Take the farce of Schleswig-Holstein…And what is it that civilization softens in us? The only gain of civilization for humankind is the greater capacity for variety of sensations—and absolutely noting more. And through the development of this many-sidedness beings may come to finding enjoyment in bloodshed. In fact, this has already happened to them. Have you noticed that it is the most civilized gentlemen who have been the subtlest slaughterers, to whom the Attilas and Stenka Razins could not hold a candle, and if they are not so conspicuous as the Attilas and Stenka Razins it is simply because they are so often met with, are so ordinary and have become so familiar to us. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

In any case civilization has made humankind if not more bloodthirsty, at least more vilely, more loathsomely blood-thirsty. In old days one saw justice in bloodshed and with one’s conscience at peace exterminated those one thought proper. Now we do think bloodshed abominable and yet we engage in this abomination, and with more energy than ever. Which is worse? Decide that for yourselves. They say that Cleopatra (excuse an instance from Roman history) was fond of sticking gold pins into her slave-girls breasts and derived gratification from their screams and writhings. You will say that that was in the comparatively barbarous times; that these barbarous times too, because also, comparatively speaking, pins are stuck in even now; that though beings have now learned to see more clearly than in barbarous ages, one is still far from having learnt to act as reason and science would dictate. However, yet you are fully convinced that one will be sure to learn when one gets rid of certain old bad habits, and when common sense and science have completely re-educated human nature and turned it in a normal direction. You are confident that then beings will cease from intentional error and will, so to say, be compelled not to want to set one’s will against one’s normal interests. That is not all; then, you say, science itself will teach beings (through to my mind it is a superfluous luxury) that one never has really had any caprice or will of one’s own, and that one is something of nature of a piano-key or the stop of an organ, an that there are, besides, things called the laws of nature; so that everything one doe is not done by one’s willing it, but is done of itself, by the laws of nature. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

Consequently we have only to discover these laws of nature, and beings will no longer have to answer for their actions and life will become exceedingly easy for one. All human actions will then, of course, be tabulated according to these laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms up to 108,000, and entered in an index; or, better still, there would be published certain edifying works of the nature of encyclopedic lexicons, in which everything will be so clearly calculated and explained that there will be no more incidents or adventures in the World. Then—this is all what you say—new economic relations will be established, all ready-made and worked out with mathematical exactitude, so that every possible question will vanish in the twinkling of an eye, simply because every possible answer to it will be provided. Then the “Palace of Crystal” will be built. Then…In fact, those will be halcyon days. Of course there is no guaranteeing (this is my comment) that it will not be, for instance, frightfully dull then (for what will one have to do when everything will be calculated and tabulated?), but on the other hand everything will be extraordinarily rational. Of course boredom may lead you to anything. It is boredom sets one sticking golden pins into people, but all that would not matter. What is bad (this is my comment again) is that I dare say people will be thankful for the gold pins then. Beings are stupid, but one is so ungrateful that you could not find another like one in all creation. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

I, for instance, if all of a sudden, apropos of nothing, in the midst of general prosperity a gentleman with an ignoble, or rather with a reactionary and ironical, countenance were to arise and putting his arms akimbo, say to us all: “I say, gentlemen, had not we better kick over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds, simply to sent these logarithms to the devil and to enable us to live once more at our own sweet foolish will!”, I would not be in the least surprised. That again would not matter; but what is annoying is that one would be sure to find followers—such is the nature of beings. And all that for the most foolish reason, which, one would think, was hardly worth mentioning: that is, that beings everywhere and at all times, whoever one may be, has preferred to act as one chose and not in the least as one’s reason and advantage dictated. And one may choose what is contrary to one’s own interests, and sometimes one absolutely ought (that is my idea). One’s own free unfettered choice, one’s own caprice—however wild it may be, one’s own fancy worked up at times to frenzy—is that very “most advantageous advantage” which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms. And how do these wiseacres know that beings want a normal, a virtuous choice? What has made them conceive that beings must want a rationally advantageous choice? #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

What beings want is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice. For some time now I have been talking to people who have served as subjects (Ss) in psychologists’ experiments. They have told me of their experience, and it has troubled me. I want to share my concern with my colleagues. The letter that follows is my effort to consolidate the attitudes and feelings of the people to whom I talked. Dear E (Experimenter): My name is S. You do not know me. I have another name my friends call me by, but I drop it, and become S number 27 as soon as I take part in your research. I serve in your surveys and experiments. I answer your questions, fill out questionnaires, let you wire me up to various machines that record my physiological reactions. I pull levers, flip switches, track moving targets, trace mazes, learn nonsense syllables, tell you what I see in inkblots—do the whole barrage of things you ask me to do. I have started to wonder why I do these things for you. What is in it for me? Sometimes you pay me to serve. More often I have to serve, because I am a student in a beginning psychology course, and I am told that I will not receive a grade unless I take part in at least two studies; and if I take part in more, I will get extra points on the final exam. I am part of the Department’s “subject-pool.” When I have asked you what I will get out of your studies, you tell me that, “It is for Science.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

When you are running someone particular study, you often lie to me about your purpose. You mislead me. It is getting so I find it difficult to trust you. I am beginning to see you as a trickster, a manipulator. I do not like it. In fact, I lie to you a lot of the time, even on anonymous questionnaires. When I do not lie, I will sometimes just answer at random, anything to get through with the hour, and back to my own affairs. Then, too, I can often figure out just what it is you are trying to do, what you would like me to day or do; at those times, I decide to go along with your wishes if I like you, or foul you up if I do not. You do not actually say what your hopes or hypotheses are; but the very setup in your laboratory, the alternatives you give me, the instruction you offer, all work together to pressure me to day or do something in particular. It is as if you are whispering in my ear, “When the light comes on, pull the left switch,” and then you forget to deny that you have whispered. However, I get the message. And I pull the right or the left one, depending on how I feel toward you. You know, even when you are not in the room—wen you are just the printed instructions on the questionnaire or the voice on the tape recorder that tells me what I am supposed to do—I wonder about you. I wonder who you are, what you are really up to. I wonder what you are going to do with the “behavior” I give you. Who are you going to show my answers to? Who is going to see the marks I leave on your response-recorders? #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

Do you have any interest at all in what I think, feel, and imagine as I make the marks you are so eager to study and analyze? Certainly, you never ask me what I mean by them. If you asked, I would be glad to tell you. As a matter of fact, I do tell my roommate or my girl friend what I thought your experiment was about and what I meant when I did what I did. If my roommate could trust you, he could probably give you a better idea of what your data (my answers and responses) mean than the idea you presently have. God knows how much good psychology has gone down the drain, when my roommate and I discuss your experiment and my part in it, at the beer-joint. As a matter of fact, I am getting pretty tried of being S. It is too much like being a punched IBM card in the University registrar’s office. I feel myself being pressured, bulldozed, tricked, manipulated every where I turn. Advertisements in magazines and commercials on TV, political speeches, salesmen, and con men of all kinds put pressure on me to get me to buy, say, or do things that I suspect are not for my good at all. Just for their good, the good of their pocketbooks. Do you sell your “expert knowledge” about me to these people? Is this why you keep reviewing my case every month for four years and then sending the packets all over the Untied States of America? Is this why you are asking third parties to fill out forms my condition that my health information privacy rights, and then what I tell you is leaked all over the World? If that is true, then you are really not in good faith with me. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

You have told me that when I show myself to you and let you study me, that in the long run it will be for my good. I am not convinced. You really seem to be studying me in order to learn how to influence my attitudes and my actions without realizing it. I resent this more than you realize. It is not fair for you to get me to show how I can be influenced and then for you to pass this information along to people who pay your salary or pay your bribes, or give you money to equip your laboratory, and then not acknowledge there is a data breach of my information, which you are responsible and can be held civically and legally responsible for. I do not like that you put my life in danger. I do not like that you are a threat to my health and safety. I feel used, like a science experiment, and I do not like it. However, I protect myself by not showing you my whole self or by lying. Did you ever stop to think that your articles, and the textbooks you write, the theories you spin—all based on your data (my disclosures to you)—may actually be a tissue of lies and half-truths (my lies and half-truths) or a joke I have played on you because I do not like you or trust you? That should give you cause for some concern. Now look, Mr. E, I am not “paranoid,” as you might say. Nor an I stupid. And I do believe some good can come out of my serving in your research. Even some good for me. I am not entirely selfish, and I would be glad to offer myself up for study, to help others. However, somethings have to change first. Will you listen to me? Here is what I would like from your researchers: #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

I would like you to help me gain a better understanding of what has made me the way I am today. I would like to know this because I want to be more free than I feel. I would like to discover more of my own potentialities. I would like to be more whole, more courageous, more enlightened. I would like to be able to experience more, learn better, remember better, and express myself more fully. I would like to learn how to recognize and overcome the pressures of other people’s influences, of my background, that interfere with my going in the paths I choose. Now, if you would promise to help me in these ways, I would gladly come into your lab and virtually strip my body and soul naked. I would be there meaning to show you everything I could that was relevant to your particular interest of the moment. And I can assure you, that is different from what I have been showing you thus far, which is as little as I can. In fact, I cross my fingers when I am in your lab, and say to myself, “What I have just said or done here is not me.” Would not you like to change? Can you handle my truth, the full truth? Do you even really know what you are investigating? If you will trust me, I will trust you, if you are trustworthy. I would like you to take the time and trouble to get acquainted with me as a person, before we go through your experimental procedures. And I would like to get to know you and what you are up to, to see if I would like to expose myself to you. Can you imagine your body being violated by strangers you never met without your consent? #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

Sometime, you remind me of physicians. They look at me as the unimportant envelope that conceals the information they are really interested in. You have looked at me as the unimportant package that contains “responses,” and this is all I am for you. Let me tell you that when I feel this, I get back at you. I give your responses, all right; but you will never know what I meant by them. You know, I can speak, not just with words, but with my action. And when you have thought I was rending to a “stimulus” in your lab, my response was really directed at you; and what I meant by it was, “Take this, you unpleasant so-and-so.” Does that surprise you? It should not. Another ting. Those tests of yours that have built-in gimmicks to see if I am being consistent, or deliberately lying, or just answering at random—they do not feel me. Actually, if you would get on level with me, they would not be necessary. There are enough con men and women in the World, without your joining their number. I would hope that psychologist would be more trustworthy than politicians or salesmen. I will make a bargain with you. You show me that you are doing your research for me—to help me become freer, more self-understanding, better able to control myself—and I will make myself available to you in any way you ask. And I will not play jokes and tricks on you. I do not want to be controlled, not by your or anyone else. And I do not want to control other people. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

I do not want you to help other people to understand how I am or can be “controlled,” so that they can then control me. Show me that you are for me, and I will show myself to you. You work for me, Mr. E, and I will truly work for you. Between us, we may produce a psychology that is more authentic and more liberating. Some lead an austere life and emaciate themselves; some give clear instructions to their disciples; some rule kingdoms quite justly and rightly; some openly hold disputations with other schools of thought; some write down their teachings and experiences; others simulate ignorance; a few do even responsible actions; but all these are famous as wise beings in the World. Some of the enlightened ones sit as recluses in prayer, others travel and preach, still others create centers where they teach, a fourth class heal the sick, and a fifth write. Each does what one’s tendency or mission dictates. The sage may sit under a village tree, head an ashram, or live as a sequestered hermit. One may also live in a luxurious palace, head a business organization, or farm land. These things are not the point, which is one’s consciousness of divine presence. The World, its pleasures and treasures, does not deceive one: one sees through its values even if one is active in the midst of it. These powers will seep into the physical plane by drawing upon the power of the ley lines as well as the power hidden within nature. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

Turning the cord inside our represents backward knowledge and the passage of the consciousness from the limited confines of the body into the other Worlds unseen by the masses. This is to gain the power to move though Worlds to create change within this realm of illusory limits, to make things easy. To help fuel and facilitate the process of soul introspection and open up psychic vision while also providing a more internal endurance needed to face this World. Understand that you are in control. Negative energy that attacks you in this realm are gnats to be swatted, despite how others may be tormented by them. They are reflections of their fear, not yours and you do not have to have anything to do with such folly. The infernal forces will gain momentum in the direction of becoming your allies in creation. Oppressive circumstance that may be experienced here becomes tension to be harnessed and mastered for your own liberation. It becomes a tool within your toolbox of becoming. Like all of these realms it is your will and personal power which can liberate you. Ground this power by investing time in the corporeal plane toward consciously applying effort toward ascent and personal evolution. Look for obstacles to overcome for the sake of overcoming them alone. Do hard thing. Become superior. Work harder, exercise harder, pray longer. Run until you sweat and keep running. Push yourself to the Heavenly extremes until it hurts. Then keep moving through the torment to further connect to the powers of Heaven so you can access them. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

Cresleigh Homes

We know fall is here when the orange pillows come out to play! 🎃🍁🧡 How would you decorate your #CresleighRanch Brighton Station Residence 2? Let us know below!👇

https://cresleigh.com/brighton-station/

#CresleighHomes

The Power of the Ballot We Need in Sheer Self-Defence—Else What Shall Save Us from a Second Slavery?

October 21, 2019 3:33 am

It was a drenching storm inside of me. However, I am so very strong. That is a given, is it not? And when you love another as I loved Rowan, you do not strive to hurt. Never. The trivial operations of the heart are burnt away in quietude. Burnt away in humility that I could feel this, know this, and contain it within my prudent soul. “O water, voice of my heart, crying in the sand, all night long crying with a mournful cry, as I lie and listen, and cannot understand the voice of my heart in my side of the voice of the sea, o water, crying for rest, is it I, is it I? All night long the water is crying to me. Unresting water, there shall be weary and wonder and cry like the sea, all life long crying without avail, as the water all night long is crying to me,” says Arthur Symons. Between me and the other World there is ever an unasked question: unasked by some through feelings of delicacy; by others through the difficulty of rightly framing it. All, nevertheless, flutter rough it. They approach me in a half-hesitant sort of way, eye me curiously or compassionately, and then, instead of saying directly, How does it feel to be a problem? They say, I know an excellent colored man in my town; or, I fought at Mechanicsville; or, Do not these Southern outrages make your blood boil? At theses I smile, or am interested, or reduce the boiling to a simmer, as the occasion may require. To the real question, How does it feel to be a problem? I answer seldom a word. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

And yet, being a problem is a strange experience—peculiar even for one who has never been anything else, save perhaps in babyhood and in Europe. It is in the early days of rollicking boyhood that the revelation first bursts upon one, all in a day, as it were. I remember well when the shadow swept across me. I was a little thing, away up in the hills of New England, where the dark Housatonic winds between Hoosac and Tagkanic to the sea. In a wee wooden schoolhouse, something put it into the boys’ and girls’ heads to buy gorgeous visiting-cards—ten cents a package—and exchange. The exchange was merry till one girl, a tall newcomer, refused my card—refused it peremptorily, with a glance. Then it dawned upon me with a certain suddenness that I was different from the others; or like, mayhap, in heart and life and longing, but shut out from their World by a vast veil. I had thereafter no desire to tear down that veil, to creep through; I held al beyond it in common contempt, and lived above it in a region of blue sky and great wandering shadows. That sky was bluest when I could beat my mates at examination time, or beat them at a foot race, or even beat their stringy heads. Alas, with the years all this fine contempt began to fade; for the Worlds I longed for, and all their dazzling opportunities were theirs, not mine. However, they should not keep these prizes, I said; some, all, I would wrest from them. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

Just how I would do it I could never decide: by reading law, by healing the sick, by telling the wonderful tales that swam in my head—some way. With other Black boys the strife was not so fiercely sunny: their youth shrunk into tasteless sycophancy, or into silent hatred of the pale World about them and mocking distrust of everything White; r wasted itself in a bitter cry, Why did God make me an outcast and a stranger in mine own house? The shades of the prison house closed round about us all: walls strait and stubborn to the Whitest, but relentlessly narrow, tall, and unscalable to sons of night who must plod darkly on it resignation, or beat unavailing palms against the stone, or steadily, half hopelessly, watch the streak of blue above. After the Egyptian and Indian, the Greek and Roman, the Teuton and Mongolian, the Negro is a sort of seventh son, born with a veil, and gifted with second-sight in this American World—a World which yields him no true self-consciousness, but only lets him see himself through the revelation of the other World. It is a peculiar sensation, this double-consciousness, this sense of always looking at one’s self through the eyes of others, of measuring one’s soul by the tape of a World that looks on in amused contempt and pity. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

One ever feels one’s twoness—an American, a Negro; two souls, two thoughts, two unreconciled strivings; two warring ideals in one dark body, whose dogged strength alone keeps it from being torn asunder. The history of the American Negro is the history of this strife—this longing to attain self-conscious manhood, to merge one’s double self into a better and truer self. In this merging one wishes neither of the older selves to be lost. One would not Africanize America, for America has too much to teach the World and Africa. One would not bleach one’s Negro soul in a flood of White Americanism, for one knows that Negro blood has a message for the World. One simply wishes to make it possible for a man to be bot a Negro and an American, without being cursed and spit upon by one’s fellows, without having the doors of Opportunity closed roughly in one’s face. This, then, is the end of one’s striving: to be co-worker in the kingdom of culture, to escape both death and isolation, to husband and use one’s best powers and one’s latent genius. These powers of body and mind have in the past been strangely wasted, dispersed, or forgotten. The shadow of a mighty Negro past flits through the tale of Ethiopia the Shadowy and of Egypt the Sphinx. Throughout history, the powers of single Black men flash here and there like falling stars, and die sometimes before the World has rightly gauged their brightness. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

Here in America, in the few days since Emancipation, the Black man’s turning hither and thither in hesitant and doubtful striving has often made one’s very strength to lose effectiveness, to seem like absence of power, like weakness. And yet it is not weakness—it is the contradiction of double aims. The double-aimed struggle of the Black artisan—on the one hand to escape White contempt for a nation of mere hewers of wood and drawers of water, and on the other hand to plough and nail and dig for a poverty-stricken horde—could only result in making one a poor craftsman, for one had but half a heart in either cause. By the poverty and ignorance of one’s people, the Negro minister or doctor was tempted toward quackery and demagogy; and by the criticism of the other World, toward ideal that made one ashamed of one’s lowly tasks. The would-be Black savant was confronted by the paradox that the knowledge one’s people needed was a twice-told tale to one’s White neighbors, while the knowledge which would teach the White World was Green to one’s own flesh and blood. The cold, the Canaan was always dim and far away. If, however, the vistas disclosed as yet no goal, no resting-place, little but flattery and criticism, the journey at least gave leisure for reflection and self-examination; it changed the child of Emancipation to the youth with dawning self-consciousness, self-realization, self-respect. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

In those somber forests of one’s striving one’s own soul rose before one, and one saw in oneself, darkly as through a veil; and yet one saw in oneself some faint revelation of one’s power, of one’s mission. One began to have a dim feeling that, to attain one’s place in the World, one must be oneself, and not another. For the first time one sought to analyze the burden one bore upon one’s back, that dead-weight of social degradation partially masked behind a half-named Negro problem. One felt one’s poverty; without a cent, without a home, without land, tools, or savings, one had entered into competition with rich, landed, skilled neighbors. To be a less affluent man is hard, but to be a poor race in a land of dollars is the very bottom of the hardships. One felt the weight of one’s ignorance—not simply of letters, but of life, of business, of humanities; the accumulated sloth and shirking and awkwardness of decades and centuries shackled one’s hands and feet. Nor was one’s burden all poverty and ignorance. The red stain of bastardy which three centuries of systematic legal defilement of Negro women had stamped upon one’s race, meant not only the loss of ancient African chastity, but also the hereditary weight of a mass of corruption from American adulterers, threatening almost the obliteration of the Negro home. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

A people thus handicapped ought not to be asked to race with the World, but rather allowed to give all its times and thought to its own social problems. But alas! while sociologists gleefully count one’s bastards and one’s women of the evening, they very soul of the toiling, sweating Black man is darkened by the shadow of a vast despair. Beings call the shadow prejudice, and learnedly explain it as the natural defense of culture against barbarism, learning against ignorance, purity against crime, the higher against the lower races. To which the Negro cries Amen! and swears that to so much of this strange prejudice as is founded on just homage to civilization, culture, righteousness, and progress, one humbly bows and merely does obeisance. However, before that nameless prejudice that leaps beyond all this one stands helpless, dismayed, and well-nigh speechless; before that personal disrespect and mockery, the ridicule and systematic humiliation, the distortion of fact and wanton license of fancy, the cynical ignoring of the better and the boisterous welcoming of the worse, all-pervading desire to inculcate disdain for everything Black, from Toussaint to the Devil—before this there rises a sickening despair that would disarm and discourage any nation save that black host to whom “discouragement” is unwritten word. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

However, some of that is changing. Having a black credit card usually means that you are affluent and have perfect credit. Financially speaking, being in the black is good because it means your company is making a profit or breaking even. Even some designers are starting to pain the trim of houses black, and some walls in the rooms black, and the classic tuxedo is black, and many people love black luxury cars. I have heard authors like Anne Rice talk about how beautiful it was to see a man so dark that his skin looked like polished onyx, and many bodybuilders tan because it makes the muscle glisten more under the light and defines them more. And an African American called Tyler Perry opened a new Atlanta studio location when he purchased 330 acres to make the home of Tyler Perry Studios, which is the largest film production studio in the nation. Tyler Perry is also the first African-American to outright own a major film production studio. Furthermore, Tyler Perry was listed as the highest paid man in entertainment by Forbes, in 2011, earning $130,000,000.00 USD. So the Black history is not as bleak as it may seem. And Tyler Perry actually makes really good Movies, one of my favorites that I have seen was The Family that Preys for it was nice to see a diverse cast, predominantly African-American with women working as heads of the company and wearing the latest fashions, and men opening their own corporations. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

However, the facing of so vast a prejudice could not but bring the inevitable self-questioning, self-disparagement, and lowering of ideals which every accompany repression and breed in an atmosphere of contempt and hate. Whisperings and portents came borne upon the four winds: Lo! We are diseased and dying, cried the dark hosts; we cannot write, our voting is vain; what need of education, since we must always cook and serve? And the Nation echoed and enforced this self-criticism, saying: Be content to be servants, and noting more; what need of higher culture for half-men? Away with the Black man’s ballot, by force or fraud—and behold the suicide of the race! And that is exactly what you are saying to a Black person who was successful and then meets with illegal oppression every time they express their frustration about a system that systemically robs them of what they have earned when you tell them, “Be thankful you are not homeless.” The bottom-line is if you all followed these laws that are in place to protect citizens, some of us would be better off anyway. You can do better and will do better, as did Lindsey in Tyler Perry’s Good Deeds. However, what we are also finding is in reality, Black women are no longer the backbone of the community, they are helping to set up and discourage their sons, brothers, husbands, and fathers as they have been infected with racism and self-hate as was Andrea in Tyler Perry’s The Family that Preys. They would rather see a White man win at the displacement of their own. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

Still, Meghan Markle, Prince Harry, and Tyler Perry have become beacons of success and healers of racism for have overcome obstacles and oppression to reach the elite and most highly coveted roles in the World, which some will never obtain no matter how hard they try. Out of the evil came something of Good—the more careful adjustment of education to real life, the clearer perception of the Negroes’ social responsibilities, and the sobering realization of the meaning of progress. So dawned the time of Sturm and Drang: storm and stress today rock our yacht on the mad waters of the World-sea; there is within and without the sound of conflict, the burning of the body and rending of soul; inspiration strives with doubt, and faith with vain questionings. The bright ideals of the past—physical freedom, political power, the training of brains and the training of hands—all these in turn have waxed and waned, until even the last grows dim and overcast. Are they all wrong, all false? No, not that, but each alone was oversimple and incomplete—the dreams of a credulous race-childhood, or the fond imaginings of the other World which does not know and does not want to know our power. To be really true, all these ideals must be melted and welded into one. The training of the schools we need today more than ever—the training of deft hands, quick eyes and ears, and above all the broader, deeper, higher culture of gifted minds and pure hearts. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

The power of the ballot we need in sheer self-defence—else what shall save us from a second slavery? Freedom, too, the long-sought, we still seek—the freedom of life and limb, the freedom to work and think, the freedom to love and aspire. Work, culture, liberty—all these we need, not singly but together, not successively but together, each growing and aiding each, and all striving toward that vaster ideal that swims before the Negro people, the ideal of human fraternity, gained through the unifying ideal of Race; the ideal of fostering and developing the traits and talents of the Negro, not in opposition to or contempt for other races, but rather in large conformity to the greater ideals of the American Republic, in order that some day on American sol two World-races may give each to each those characteristics both so sadly lack. We the darker ones come even now not altogether emptyhanded: there are today no truer exponents of the pure human spirit of the Declaration of Independence than the American Negroes; there is no true American music but the wild sweet melodies of the Negro slave; the American fairy tales and folklore are Indian and African; and, all in all, we Black men seem to have the sole oasis of simple faith and reverence in a dusty desert of dollars, bitcoins, and smartness. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

If she replaces her brutal dyspeptic blundering with light-hatred but determined Negro humility, will America be poorer? Or coarse and cruel wit with loving jovial good-humor? or her vulgar music with the soul of the Sorrow Songs? Merely a concrete test of the underlying principles of the great republic is the Negro Problem, and the spiritual striving of the freedmen’s sons is the travail of souls whose burden is almost beyond the measure of their strength who bear it in the name of an historic race, in the name of this land of their fathers’ father, and in the name of human opportunity. Like the flower children, this kind of character has been set up for the ultimate tragedy. One may be attracted to your beauty and spontaneous grace, and on the other he or she hates you for the very purity and innocence you represent. Innocence expects something from us, demands something, draws out our tendencies for care and sustenance; and many a man or woman hates these tendencies in oneself, and hates more whatever causes one to act on them. When we are confronted by authentic childlike innocence, we are touched by it and want to protect the child, but we hope one will grow to the age when one can protect oneself. However, when this innocence is present in adults—as in some nonviolent or pacifist persons, or flower children—we are attracted by it, our consciences are pricked, but we are also bothered by our own sympathies being drawn out in spite of ourselves, and we vaguely feel that we are being exploited. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

These innocents are a thorn in the flesh of the World; they threaten to annihilate “law and order,” the police and the authority of government. The innocence threatens to upset the World as we know it. Authentic innocence is a kind of goodness, and this also throws many people into a state of ambivalence. The citizens of ancient Athens, one remembers, voted out of office a candidate known as “Aristides the Good” because they were tired of hearing him always referred to as “the Good.” Goodness makes demands on us, and the naïve belief that people simply love the good is one of our earliest illusions. Many cannot stand such pure innocence in their World. The development of one’s ambivalence is pictured as envy and antipathy that feed upon themselves. Evil is a force that feels good to people and it grips them beyond even their own needs for survival, that make them challenge the whole Universe to combat; and thus feeding on itself, sooner or later it comes to a tragic end as it seeks to overthrow nature itself. There are people who have the spirit, a pure heart and lack of revenge, but they are rare. We cannot let our judgment or our ethics hinge upon a split-second use of muscles, for that would make us entirely dependent upon the individual’s self-control. We would then end up with a legalism without ethical content. This is the error of all strict and rigid doctrines, whether it is religiously or computer directed, and our primary purpose is to avoid such tyranny. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

Innocence can also be a blinder for many people, which makes them veiled to the true motives of others and only life experience will unveil them. Experience tempers the self, deepens consciousness and awareness, purges and sharpens our sight—where as innocence acts as a blinder and tends to keep us from growing, from new awareness, from identifying with the sufferings of humankind as well as its joys (both being foreign to the innocent person). Theses are two potential poles of experience: to remain innocent, blocking out what does not appeal to you, striving to preserve the Garden of Eden state; or to strive toward spirituality and move to the “deeper music of humanity.” Does a victim have something to do with making oneself the prey? Wha does the interdependence of human beings mean—the fact that we are all bound in a web, which includes unconscious as well as conscious factors, that spreads out from ourselves and our parents and children like rings from a wave to include ultimately whole oceans of humanity? Can one be excused from responsibility for sensing the effect of one’s beauty and innocence—on others around them? What about the blithe existence built on one’s own convictions and one’s own integrity alone, unaware of the outreaching waves from one to others? Is this not a kind of unreal purity—a mortal life fashioned as though one is not a mortal—which can no longer, in our interdependent World, be accepted, let alone praised as righteous? #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

Because the likelihood is that this kind of innocence has as it purpose to cover up something; it is the innocence of the child when the person is no longer a child. Having the capacity to experience the World, one has at the same time the responsibility for not closing one’s sensibilities to that experience. The choice is clear: we must pay our human sacrifice to the Sphinx outside the city gates, or we must accept guilt and responsibility as realities within ourselves. One who cannot accept one’s guilt with responsibility will find oneself projecting one’s guilt on the Sphinx outside the city. Why so we always sacrifice the innocents? Hey obviously have a special attraction for the human-flesh-eating creature; it loves the tender, the helpless, and the powerless rather than the experiences. We know that this is true in the fantasies of all of us—the innocent and powerless, the inexperienced, have a special attraction. It is that we can give them the experience, thus augmenting our own self-esteem? We never hear of the dragon devouring an eighty-year old corrupt district attorney, or a haggardly seventy-year old former garden, prompting to news anchor for preying on the innocent. However, it is the youths and virgins that are required to satisfy the taste of the dragon. It is obvious that the establishment is envious of youth, envious of the innocent, whose lives are ahead of them. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

This envy of youth is exacerbated, particularly in America, by the worship of youth; it is usually always better to be young. The older people, those who have lost their innocence long since, declare wars that these virginal youths are required to fight; and we go through the complex ritual of uniforms and bands and songs and disseminating an enormous amount of propaganda which is largely a projection of society’s own aggression and violence. The established people, who represent established ways, are also afraid of the youth. This is particularly obvious in our own day and society. Envy and fear—these are two motives for the sacrifice, and while they do not go very deep, they may help us for the moment. Curiously, but understandably, there seems to be inherent in human life an urge to get over innocence. Is this related, in some curious way, to the urge to get beyond the age when we can be so easily scarified? The normal child wants to grow up, to experience what is about one, to become a man or woman of the World; and although one possesses natural guards against too precipitous experiences, one looks forward to the age when one will be sufficiently self-reliant to let down those guards. There is a tendency for normal innocence to get lost. The flirtatiousness shown by girls just entering into their teen, most of it quite unconscious, is also part of the drama in the age-old urge to get over innocence. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

The temptation of Adam and Eve, symbolized by eating the apple and thus gaining the knowledge of good and evil, was a headlong drive to experience and be experienced, to leave innocence behind, to make it something of the past. It is not by accident that pleasures of the flesh is take as the symbol for the loss of innocence, the attainment of experience. The headlong push to get rid of virginity at an early age can well backfire into a loss of experience rather than a gain. The experience itself is not very momentous (some of my female patients tell of saying to the man who has deflowered them: “Is that all?” or “I was not ready.” or “You make me feel inferior.” “I did not want it.” “I am dirty and shamed.” Even some men get tired of pleasures of the flesh saying, “I got expletive.” or “I am tired of expletive.” If they are ready to leave their innocence behind, the girl/woman and boy/man can be released into a while new dimension of experience, and can present them with infinitely more possibilities for awareness and tenderness than life had before. In rebellions on campus and the by the likes of Greta Thunberg, one can often observe the curious need—generally unconscious—on the part of the student to get themselves caught and in this way to overcome one’s innocence. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

For instance, my friends and his cohorts held students hostage on campus and they were arrested by the police and were promptly dismissed from university for the rest of the year. One of the best students in the university, my friend found himself thrown out of his class and with plenty of leisure on his hands. What did he do? He went up into New England and took the next few weeks to pray. One had the feeling that this was the purpose of it all: he had wanted to be caught. He was calling for a structureless World to give him some structure; a young mand with a steady stream of success behind him, son of a famous father, never anything against which he could test his strength, nothing yet that would stand in one’s path and require him to try his mettle. In such students, this is a cry for experience equivalent to their previous innocence. Young people have already lost their innocence in one sense: concentration camps and atom bombs and 9/11 have rendered their World structureless, but they are without the equivalent experience to go with it. They cry for experience to match their precociously lost innocence. The dragon and the Sphinx are within you. If that is where the dragon and the Sphinx are really located, we must first become aware of them. Out error is not in our myth-making; this is a health, necessary function of the human imagination, a help toward mental health; our denial of it on the basis of rationalistic doctrines only makes the evil in ourselves and our World harder to get at. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

No, the dragon and the Sphinx are not in themselves the problem. The problem is only whether you project them or confront and integrate them. To admit them in ourselves means admitting that evil and good dwell within the same being, and that potentialities for evil increase in proportion to our capacity for good. The good we seek is an increased sensitivity, a sharpened awareness, a heightened consciousness of both good and evil. Violence has the face of the fallen Angels. However, what are fallen Angels expect human beings; and what are human beings expect fallen Angels? Surely enough. Forgive the humans their violence…for violence has a human face. Through the vision of your intent takes form it originates from darkness and unlimited possibility. This is the manipulation of reality. You have to take back the essence of your creation as your on. This is internal power and the externalization of it to create change in your World. It is the power of counter creation. It is your birthright as a child of God. Remember people bend reality. It something is true for one, another has the opportunity to think otherwise making the others truth a lie. All that exists is within the perception of the observer alone. This paradox is a direct result of the illusion of the limits of creation. All is true and so nothing exists but the lie. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

Being centered within your own God like power is of utmost importance upon the path. Even when evoked to create change directly, keep in mind that you are the God that wields these powers for the cause of Counter Creation. Just be careful! As a God you will be tested and so how these powers are wielded is a powerful initiatic test in its own right. “That ye contend no more against the Holy Ghost, but that ye receive it, and take upon you the name of Christ; that ye humble yourselves even to the dust, and worship God, in whatsoever place ye may be in, in spirit and in truth; and that ye live in thanksgiving daily, for the many mercies and blessings which he doth bestow upon you,” Alma 34.38. We must recognize what is not always recognized, that the growth of mind and character takes time, just as the growth f trunk and limb takes time. A being does not begin to mature and become what one is likely to be until one is past thirty. The young being who has the wisdom to devote some of one’s abundant energies to this quest will one day be the envy of the antiquated being who would devote only one’s slackened forces and shortened days to it. Give substance to your desire so it can take shape upon their spiritual planes and manifest here on the corporeal realm of existence. This process creates a reciprocal gateway of energy which has intense alchemical effects. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

Thee for Enlivening All the Cheerful Eyes that Glance so Brightly at the New Sun-Rise!

October 13, 2019 12:13 am

All my life I had believed in Heaven and Hell. Did Heaven look down upon this metamorphosis? We have described some of the effects of migration. People’s relatives are no longer neighbors sharing the intimacies of daily life. Their new neighbors are strangers, drawn from every part of the East End, and they are, as we have seen, treated with reserve. In point of services, neighbors do not make up for kin. Our informants were so eager to talk about their neighbors, and generally about their attitude to other residents on the estate, that we feel bound to report them. They frequently complained of the unfriendliness of the place, which they found all the more mysterious because it was so different from Bethnal Green. Why should Greenleigh be considered so unfriendly? The prevailing attitude is expressed by Mr. Morrow. “You cannot get away from it, they are not so friendly down here. It is not ‘Hello, Joe,’ ‘Hello, mate.’ They pass you with a side-glance as though they do not know you.” And by Mr. Adams. “We all come from the slums, not Park Lane, but they do not mix. In Bethnal Green you always used to have a little laugh on the doorstep. There is none of that in Greenleigh. You are English, but you feel like a foreigner here, I do not know why. Up there you had lived for years, and you knew how to deal with the people there. People here are different.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

And by Mr. Prince. “The neighbors round here are very quiet. They all keep themselves to themselves. They all come from the East End but they all seem to chance when they come down here.” Of the 41 couples, 23 considered that other people were unfriendly, eight were undecided one way or another and ten considered them friendly: the recorded opinions are those of the couples because in no interview did husband and wife appear to hold strongly different view. How does this majority who consider their fellow residents unfriendly feel about themselves? Do they also label themselves unfriendly? No one admits it, some indignantly deny it. If they are hostile themselves, they do not acknowledge it, but attribute the feelings to others. Yet they mostly reveal that their own behavior is the same as they resent in others; that (since others are unfriendly) to withdraw will avoid trouble and keep the peace; that coexistence is safer, because more realistic, than cooperation. “The policy here is do not have a lot to do with each other, then there will not be any trouble,” says Mr. Chortle succinctly. Neurotic conflicts may be concerned with the same general problems as perplex the normal person. However, they are so different in kind that the question has been raised whether it is permissible to use the same term for both. I believe it is, but we must be aware of the differences. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

This attitude is supported by reference to the skirmishes and back-biting which have resulted from being “too friendly” in the past. “It is better if you just talk to neighbors and do not get too friendly,” concludes Mr. Sandeman from his past experience. “You stop friends if you do not get to know them well. When you get to know then you are always getting little troubles breaking out. I have had too much of that and so I am not getting too friendly now.” Mr. Young told his wife, “When I walk into these four walls, I always tell her ‘Do not make too many friends. They turn out to be enemies.’” And one experience had turned Mr. Yule into a recluse. “We do not mix very well in this part of the estate. At first I used to lend every Tom, Dick, and Harry all my tools or lawn mower or anything. Then I had $1,000 pinched from my wallet. Now we do not want to know anyone—we keep ourselves to ourselves. There is a good old saying—the Englishman’s home is his castle. It is very true.” Usually the troubles are shadowy affairs which have always happened to people other than oneself. “We are friendly,” says Mr. Oliver in the usual style, “But we do not get too involved, because we have found that causes gossip and trouble. We have seen it happen with other people, so we do not want it to happen to us. Now we keep ourselves to ourselves.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

Whatever the justification, the result is the same. People do not treat others either as enemies or friends. They are wary, though polite. They pass the time of day in the road. They have an occasional word over the fence or a chat at the garden gate. They nod to each other in the shops. Neighbors even borrow and lend little things to each other, and when this accommodation is refused, it is a sign that acquaintance has turned into enmity. Mrs. Chortle has broken off trading as well as diplomatic relations with one of her neighbors. “These people are very dirty,” she said, “and I have told the I do not want to borrow or lend.” So has Mrs. Morrow, for the different reason that “Just because they have got a couple of ha’pence more than you they do not want to know you. In Bethnal Green it was different—neighbors were more friendly.” Even where relations have not been served, there is little of the mateyness so characteristic of Bethnal Green. Mr. Stirling summed it up by remarking, “I do not mind saying hello to any of them, or passing the time of say with them, but if they do not want to have anything to do with me, I do not want to have anything to do with them. I am not bothered about them. I am only interested in my little family. My wife and my two children—they are the people that I care about. My life down here is my home.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

Women feel the lack of friends, as of kin, more keenly than their menfolk. Those who do not follow their husbands into the society of the workplace—and loneliness is one of the common reasons for doing so—have to spend their day alone, “looking at ourselves all day,” as they say. In one interview the husband was congratulating himself on having a house, a garden, a bathroom and a TV—“the tellie is a bit of a friend down here”—when his wife broke in to say,” It is all right for you. What about the time I have to spend here on my own?” This difference in their life may cause sharp contention, especially in the early years. “When we first came,” said Mrs. Haddon, “I have just had the baby and it was all a misery, not knowing anyone. I sat on the stairs and cried my eyes out. For the first two years we were swaying whether to go back. I wanted to and my husband did not. We used to have terrible arguments about it. I use to say, “It is all right for you. I have to sit here all day. You do get a break.’” Not that all women resent it. A few, like Mrs. Painswick, actually welcome seclusion. She had been more averse to the quarrels amongst the “rowdy, shouty” Bethnal Greeners than appreciative of the mateyness to which quarrels are the counterpart, and finds the less intense life of Greenleigh a pleasant contrast. “In London people had more squabbles. We have not seen neighbors out here having words.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

What, then, are the characteristics of neurotic conflicts? A somewhat simplified example by way of illustration: An engineer working in collaboration with others at mechanical research was frequently afflicted by spells of fatigue and irritability. One of these spells was brought about by the following incident. In a discussion of certain technical matters his opinion were less well received than those of his colleagues. Shortly afterward a decision was made in his absence, and no opportunity was given him subsequently to present his suggestions. Under these circumstances, he could have regarded the procedure as unjust and put up a fight, or he could have accepted the majority decision with good grace. Either reaction would have been consistent. However, he did neither. Though he felt deeply slighted, he did not fight. Consciously he was mere aware of being irritated. The murderous rage within him appeared only in his dreams. This repressed rage—a composite of his fury against the others and of his fury against himself for his own meekness—was mainly responsible for his fatigue. His failure to react consistently was determined by a number of factors. He had built up a grandiose image of himself that required deference from others to support. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

This self-inflated image was, of course, unconscious at the time: he simply acted on the premise that there was nobody as intelligent and competent in his field as he was. Any slight could jeopardize this premise and provoke rage. Furthermore, he had unconscious sadistic impulses to berate and humiliate others—an attitude so objectionable to him that he covered it up by overfriendliness. To this was added an unconscious drive to exploit people, making it imperative for him to keep in their good graces. The dependence on others was aggravated by a compulsive need for approval and affection, combined as it usually is with attitudes of compliance, appeasement, and avoidance of fight. There was thus a conflict between destructive aggression—reactive rage and sadistic impulses—on the one hand, and on the other the need for affection and approval, with a desire to appear fair and rational in his own eyes. The result was inner upheaval that went unnoticed, while the fatigue that was its external manifestation paralyzed all action. Looking at the factors involved in the conflict, we are struck first by their absolute incompatibility. It would be difficult indeed to imagine more extreme opposites than lordly demands for deference and ingratiating submissiveness. Second, the whole conflict remains unconscious. The contradictory tendencies operating in it are not recognize but are deeply repressed. Only slight bubbles of the battle raging within reach the surface. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

The emotional factors are rationalized: it is an injustice; it is a slight; my ideas were better. Third, the tendencies in both directions are compulsive. Even if he had some intellectual perception of his excessive demands, or of the existence and the nature of his dependence, he could not change these factors voluntarily. To be able to change them would require considerable analytical work. He was driven on either hand by compelling forces over which he had no control: he could not possibly renounce any of the needs acquired by stringent inner necessity. However, none of them represented what he himself really wanted or sought. He would want neither to exploit nor to be submissive; as a matter of fact he despised these tendencies. Such a state of affairs, however, has a far-reaching significance for the understanding of neurotic conflicts. It means that no decision is feasible. A further illustration presents a similar picture. A free-lance designer was stealing small sums of money from a good friend. The theft was not warranted by the external situation; he needed the money, but the friend would gladly have given it to him as he had on occasion in the past. That he should resort to stealing was particularly striking in that he was a decent fellow who set great store by friendship. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

The following conflict was at the bottom of it. The man had a pronounced neurotic need for affection, especially a longing to be taken care of in all practical matters. Alloyed as this was with an unconscious drive to exploit others, his technique was to attempt both to endear and intimidate. These tendencies by themselves would have made him willing and eager to receive help and support. However, he had also developed an extreme unconscious arrogance which involved a correspondingly vulnerable pride. Others should feel honored to be of service to him: it was humiliating for him to ask for help. His aversion to having to make a request was reinforced by a strong craving for independence and self-sufficiency that made it intolerable for him to admit he needed anything or to place himself under obligation. So he could take, but not receive. The content of this conflict differs from that of the first example but the essential characteristics are the same. And any other example of neurotic conflict would show like incompatibility of conflicting drives and their unconscious and compulsive nature, leading always to the impossibility of deciding between the contradictory issues involved. Allowing for an indistinct line of demarcation, the difference, then, between normal and neurotic conflicts is possessed fundamentally in the fact that the disparity between the conflicting issues is much less great for the normal person than for the neurotic. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

The choices the former has to make are between two modes of action, either of which is feasible within the frame of a fairly integrated personality. Graphically speaking, the conflicting directions diverge only 90 degrees or less, as against the possible 180 degrees confronting the neurotic. In awareness, too, the differences is one of degree. Real life is far too multifarious to be portrayed by merely exhibiting such abstract contrast as that between a despair which is completely unconscious, and one which is completely conscious. We can say this much, however: a normal conflict can be entirely conscious; a neurotic conflict in all its essential elements is always unconscious. Even though a normal person may be unaware of one’s conflict, one can recognize it with comparatively little help, while the essential tendencies producing a neurotic conflict are deeply repressed and can be unearthed only against great resistance. The normal conflict is concerned with an actual choice between two possibilities, both of which the person finds really desirable, or between convictions, both of which one really values. It is therefore possible for one to arrive at a feasible decision even though it may be hard on one and require a renunciation of some kind. The neurotic person engulfed in a conflict is not free to choose. One is driven by equally compelling forces in opposite directions, neither of which one wants to follow. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

One is driven by equally compelling forces in opposite directions, neither of which one wants to follow. Hence a decision in the usual sense in impossible. One is stranded, with no way out. The conflict can only be resolved by working at the neurotic trends involved, and by so changing one’s relations with others and with oneself that one can dispense with the trends altogether. These characteristics account for the poignancy of neurotic conflicts. Not only are they difficult to recognize, not only to they render a person helpless, but they have as well a disruptive force of which one has good reason to be afraid. Unless we know these characteristics and keep them in mind, we shall not understand the desperate attempts at solution which the neurotic enters upon, and which constitute the major part of a neurosis. Murder rarely fits the stereotype of an unsuspecting, helpless, passive victim stalked by a cold, calculating killer. Most homicides are preceded by angry quarrels in which the victim plays an active part in bringing about one’s own death. Can innocence, once it becomes involved in action, escape murder? This troublesome question confronts us with renewed sharpness after the events of the past years, especially after the Orlando nightclub shooting 12 June 2016. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

However, it is a question that has troubled beings ever since the dawn of consciousness and the forming, in our forefathers’ minds, of the legend of the Garden of Eden. When we take an endeavor to resolve the knotty question, we wonder does the victim, for example, have anything to do with making oneself the victim? The question takes us into the very heart of the meaning of innocence. Does the virgin herself, beyond flirting, constitute the challenge to the man to end her virginity? Is not innocence curiously bound up with murder in the ritual of sacrifice in practically all cultures? What is the meaning of the phenomenon to be found in the dim beginnings of human history and coming down to this very hour of sacrificing virgins and youths to the Cretan Minotaur or the Moloch of modern walfare? When we push the question of innocence and murder to the furthest reaches of human consciousness, we may find it to be one of those perdurable problems that we cannot answer satisfactorily via intellect alone but must live the questions now. Perhaps you will then live along some distant day into the answer. However, in our endeavor to think it through, we can expect new light to be thrown on the mainsprings of violence. Most important of all, an analysis of the problem of innocence and murder foreshadows the emergence of new ethics for the coming age. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

Innocence is generosity, especially in children, who can still believe and trust since they have yet to experience that betrayal which leads to cynicism. Innocence has to do with the heart in that it is a feeling state, a way of perceiving life rather than a calculation. It is “virgin” in that it is before the awakening to the vast possibilities in life for sensuality, tenderness, exploitation, and betrayal. The lack of experience in pleasures of the flesh has historically been taken for the symbol of innocence, although it should be remembered that it is a symbol and not the content. Innocence is, in addition, a condition of powerlessness. One of our problems, as we discuss innocence, will be to establish the extent to which this powerlessness is capitalized on by the innocent person. The question is: How far is innocence used as a strategy of living? When we reflect on the shooting at Kent State in 1970, we immediately see a demonstration of part of our thesis. This is possessed in the fact that two of the four students killed were not involved in the protest at all. One was dressed in his Reserve Officer raining Corps (ROTC) uniform and was going across that campus to take a test in war tactics, and another was on her way to music class. The moral of this is clear: there are no bystanders anymore. This implies something about the solidarity of human beings—the fact that we are all part of the tragic event. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

Without a surrender of one’s own consciousness, no one today can draw one’s own moral skirts about him and claim an immunity from these events. Television, social media, and mass communication are only symptoms of a basic participation in the events of importance to the human race. To breathe is to judge. We can be confident that we shall find that this awareness of our own involvement is not at all the excuse for masochistic breast-beating or quietist withdrawal from the struggles. It can lead us rather to a new sharpening of our own ethical sensitivity and a discovery, though it be only partial, of the basis on which a lasting and effective struggle for racial integration or a relief from the compulsive hold of warfare may be founded. As a representative of these four students and their innocence, I shall choose one of them, Allison Krause, who was reported to have dropped a flower the day before the shooting into the barrel of one of the guardsmen’s rifles saying: “Flowers are better than bullets.” She is pictured in a poem by Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, which, despite its tendency toward sentimentality, reveals some important points: Nineteen-year-old Allison Krause, you were killed because you loved flowers. Bullets, pushing out the flower…let all the apple trees of the World, not in white—but in mourning be clothed. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

So far we see only the event as it occurred that day: four victims of murder, the whole event summed up in the ironic and cruel trajectory of stray bullets. However, Yevtushenko knows that this simple innocence has only touched the surface. In the succeeding lines we see the complexity of innocence and of evil: “But a Vietnam girl—the same age as Allison—taking in her hand a gun, is an armed flower, the wrath of the people.” I take both the phrase “armed flower” and “thorny flower of protest,” a phrase that appears later on in the poem, as referring to the dimension of experience added to the original purity of innocence. We now have wrath as the basic motivation. Yevtushenko is now talking about a different kind of innocence—an armed flower, no longer the product of a childlike powerlessness but the power of wrath. The Vietnamese girl knows the flower grows on a thorny bush and has to be handled with care. She has an innocence that does not avoid evil and that there is, in the depth of the human soul as well as in human history, no such thing as pure evil or pure good. Yevtushenko’s juxtaposition of flower and armed reminds us of the phrase used by Jesus in the Gospel according to Saint Mark with which He adjured His disciples as He sent them out into the World: “Be ye wise as serpents but harmless as doves.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

This is, again, a curious juxtaposition of innocence and experience, which, it was hoped, would become the foundation for effective social action in the work of the disciples. Now, when I speak of trusting our religious demands, just what do I mean by “trusting”? Is the word to carry with it license to define in detail an invisible World, and to anathematize and excommunicate those whose trust is different? Certainly not! Our faculties of belief were not primarily given us to make orthodoxies and heresies withal; they were given us to live by. And to trust our religious demands means first of all to live in the light of them, and to act as if the invisible World which they suggest were real. It is a fact of human nature, that beings can live and die by the help of a sort of faith that does without a single strict and rigid doctrine or definition. The bare assurance that this natural order is not ultimate but a mere sign or vison, the external staging of a many-storied Universe, in which spiritual forces have the last word and are eternal,–this bare assurance is to such beings enough to make life seem worth living in spite of every contrary presumption suggested by its circumstances on the natural plane. Destroy this inner assurance, however, vague as it is, and all the light and radiance of existence is extinguished for these persons at a stroke. Often enough the wild-eyed look at life—the suicidal mood—will then set in. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

In the same way the Spirit is always present, a moving power, sometimes in stormy ecstasies of individuals and groups, but mostly quiet, entering our human spirit and keeping it alive; sometimes manifest in great moments of history or a personal life, but mostly working hiddenly through the media of our daily encounters with beings and World; sometimes using its creation, the religious communities and their Spiritual means, and often making itself felt in spheres far removed from what is usually called religious. Like the wind the Spirit blows where it wills! It is not subject to rule or limited by method. Its ways with beings are not dependent on what beings are and do. You cannot force the Spirit upon yourself, upon an individual, upon a group, or even upon a Christian church. Although one who is the foundation of the church was oneself of the Spirit, and although the Spirit as it was present in one is the greatest manifestation of Spiritual Presence, the Spirit is not bound to the Christian church or any one of them. The Spirit is free to work in the spirits of beings in every human situation, and it urges beings to let Him do so; God as Spirit is always present to the spirit of beings. It is through this spirit that more specific powers can be extracted for the sake of communication and personal empowerment. “Yea, say unto them, except they repent to the Lord God will destroy them,” reports Alma 8.16. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

An Ideal Helps to Hold a Being Back from One’s Weaknesses, a Standard Gives One Indirectly a Kind of Support, as Well as, Directly, Guidance!

September 21, 2019 1:57 am

No matter how long we exist, we have our memories—points in time which itself cannot erase. Suffering may distort my backward glances, but even to suffering, some memories will yield nothing of their beauty or their splendor. Rather they remain as hard as gems. Humans portray themselves and what a form is presented in the drama of the modern age! Barrenness here, license there; the two extremes of human decay, and both untied in a single period. It is a culture itself which inflicted this wound on modern humanity. And this wound was inflicted on beings by the division of labor: Gratification is separated from labor, means from ends, effort from reward. Eternally fettered only to a single little fragment of the whole, beings fashion themselves only as a fragment. This indictment of modern society reaches it climax in the characterization of love: So jealous is the state for the sole possession of its servants that it would sooner agree (and who could blame it?) to share them with a Venus Cythera than with a Venus Urania. Theses are the two forms of the goddess of love in Plato’s Symposium and thus it identifies Venus Cytherea with venal but Urania with genuine love. What I am describing so impressively is what Hegel and Marx characterized as alienation. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

By contrasting the polypus nature of the Greek states, where each individual enjoyed an independent existence and, if necessary, could become whole, with modern society which is one of hierarchical division of labor, one can see how modern society produces a fragmentation not only of social functions but of the beings themselves who, as it were, keeps their different faculties in different pigeonholes—love, labor, leisure, culture—that are somehow held together by an externally operating mechanism that is neither comprehended nor comprehensible. Nonetheless, one may consider this analysis of the Greek state as strongly unrealistic and one may, perhaps, even see certain dangers in the glorification of Greece; nevertheless, this analysis of modern beings, points far beyond our age, remains valid and it is perhaps only today that we have become fully conscious of how true this analysis is. If someone tells you that the path is a mere figment of the imagination, they are welcome to their belief. I, who have seen many beings enter it and a few finish it, declare that the difference between the beginning and the end of the path is the difference between a slave and a master. If the quest is presented as too difficult for everyone but the superhuman, an inferiority complex is created and those who could get some help from some of its practices are frightened away. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

Love is defined as the whole, as a feeling, but not a single feeling. In it, life finds itself as a duplication of its self and as its unity. However, this love is frequently shattered by the resistance of the outside World, the social World of property, a World indeed which beings have created through their own labor and knowledge but which has become an alien, a dead World through property. Beings are alienated from themselves. Since we are here not Hegelian concept of alienation, which recognizes that the experience of alienation may be an undesirable aspect of consciousness’s existence, we may pass over the development of his concept. It is equally unnecessary for us here to develop fully Marx’s concept of alienation. For Marx it is the commodity that determines human activity, that is, the objects which are supposed to serve beings become the tyrant of the being. For according to Marx, humans are a universal being. If they recognize themselves in a World one has themselves made, then they are free. However, that does not happen. Since alienating labor alienates beings from nature, alienates one from themselves, one’s own active function, one’s life’s activity, it alienated one from one’s own species. The separation or labor from the object is thus for one a threefold one: beings are alienated from external nature, from one’s self, and from one’s fellow beings. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

The relationships of beings to one another are reified: personal relations appear as objective relations between things (commodities). Jesus said that the way to eternal life is straight and narrow. He could have added that it is also long and difficult. Yet the beginner should not let these things discourage one. There is help within and without. If the standards are set too high, love for it may not be strong enough to assist this attainment. If the ideal is too rigorous, its would-be followers will be too few. The achievement may seem too hard but it is not impossible. The best guarantee of that is the ever-presence within one of the divine soul itself. We must take care not to fall into the depressing belief that this is too be attained by masters only and that we cannot attain it. Beings, (not only the workers, since the process of alienation affects society as a whole) is thus a mutilated being. However, these theories of alienation are not adequate. While the principles developed by Hegel and Marx must be given up, these theories need supplementation and deepening. Their inadequacy consists in this, that they oppose universal or nearly universal beings to the mutilated beings of the modern World. However, there is no historical form of society in which beings have ever existed as universal beings; for slavery is not compatible with universality. If I distinguish three strata of alienation, my meaning may become clearer. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

In alienation, the stratum of psychology; that of society; and that of politics are the three strata. Only if we start with a clean separation of the three strata and concepts, in order to bring them together again, we can get at the problem of alienation, and this of anxiety in politics. Neither alienation nor anxiety is to be found only in modern society and only in modern beings, although the different structures of society and the state modify the forms of expression which alienation and anxiety take. The modifications are hard to determine, and I shall not attempt here to undertake a systematic analysis. However, I shall try to point up the problem and to make the theory somewhat more concrete by means of (more or less arbitrary) examples. Dr. Freud’s thesis in his Civilization and its Discontents is this: “The foal toward which the pleasure-principle impels us—of becoming happy—is not attainable”; because for Dr. Freud suffering springs from three sources: external nature, which we can never dominate completely, the susceptibility to illness and the mortality of the body, and social institutions. However, the statement that society prevents happiness, and consequently that every sociopolitical institution is repressive, does not lead to hostility toward civilization. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

For the limitation, which is imposed upon the libidinal as well as the destructive instincts, creates conflicts, inescapable conflicts, which are the very motors of progress in history. However, conflicts deepen with the progress of civilization, for Dr. Freud states that increasing technical progress, which in itself ought to make possible a greater measure of instinct gratification fails to do so. There arises here a psychological lag that grows ever wider—a formulation that I should like to borrow from the cultural lag of American sociology. Thus, every society is built upon the renunciation of instinctual gratifications. Dr. Freud fins that it is “not easy to understand how it can become possible to withhold satisfaction from an instinct. Nor is it by any means without risk to do so; if the deprivation is not made good economically.” To be sure, according to Dr. Freud it is conceivable “that a civilized community could consist of pairs of individuals (who love each other) libidinally satisfied in each other, and linked to all the others by work and common interests. If this were so, culture would not need to levy energy from sexuality.” However, the opposite is true and always has been true. For at bottom Dr. Freud does not believe in this conceivable ideal.” The differences between the different forms of society—which are decisive for us—do not play a decisive role for one. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

The renunciation of instinctual gratification and the cultural tendency toward the limitation of love operate at all levels of society. It is these renunciation and limitations which we characterize as psychological alienation of beings, or perhaps even better as alienation of the ego from the dynamics of instinct. It is unhelpful to put this goal on some Everest-like peak far beyond human climbing. If many are called but few are chosen, it is their own weakness which defers the time of being chosen. In the end, and with much patience, they too will find the way beyond the struggle into peace. It is not enough to find an ideal to help one’s course in life: it should also be based on truth, not fancy. The aspiration must not only be a desirable one, it must also be attainable. There is always a valid reason for disparity between the sought-for objective and the actual performance. Those who begin hopefully and enthusiastically but find themselves disappointed and without results, ought to look first to their understanding of the Quest and correct it, to their picture of the Goal and redraw it. If you want to find out why so many fail to reach the Quest’s objective and so few succeed in doing so, first find out what the Quest really is. Then you will understand that the failures are not failures at all; that so large a project to change human nature and human consciousness cannot be finished in a little time. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

It is only of limited help to the modern being, living under very different conditions as one is, to offer one the saint as a type of imitate or to quote the pastor as an example to follow. One will not waste time in seeking the unattainable or striving for the impossible. For truth, not self-deception, is one’s goal; humility, not arrogance, is one’s guide. That the Overself not only is, but is attainable, is the premise and promise of true philosophy. If the goal is really unattainable, then the Quest is futile. If it is no more than approachable then surely the Quest is well worthwhile. However, in fact the foal is both attainable and approachable. Every being may awaken to the presence of Christ-consciousness within one’s self and thus step out of the merely animal and nominally human existence. It will then be a divinely human one. Immediately after the hanging of Billy Budd, in the cinema version of Melville’s novella, the sailors on this British man-of-war suddenly see a French warship coming around the promontory several miles to port. They all cheer. Why the cheer? These men know that they are going into battle, into the grime and cruelty and death that war represents, yet they cheer. True, a minor part of the cause can be seen as an outlet for the pent-up emotions that have been engendered silently and oppressively as the sailors experienced the hanging of their favorite comrade. However, there is more basic a reason. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

We turn, then, to another area, the most difficult of all with which to come to terms, that of the violence in war. On the rational level practically everyone rejects and abhors war. When I was in college before World War II, I recall how take aback I was when a professor of English literature remarked that he was fairly sure there would be more wars. If ever such existed, this professor was a soften-spoken, sensitive, unwarlike type; but I silently looked at him as though he were a pariah. How could a man entertain such a thought? Was not it clear that we must refrain from thinking of or believing in war—and certainly from predicting it—if we were to ever attain peace? Several other hundred thousand fellow collegians and I, who were pacifists, were under the illusion that if we only believed in peace strongly enough, we could that much more insure international peace. We have no idea of how close our attitude came to superstition—do not think of the devil or her will already be in your midst. We are so engrossed in blotting war out of everybody’s mind that we completely ignored the points in William James’s provocative essay “The Moral Equivalent of War.” Written because of his detestation of our “squalid war with Spain,” William James delivered this as a lecture in 1907. It still presents the central problem penetratingly, even if its answers are no longer cogent. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

“In my remarks, pacifist though I am,” says James, “I will refuse to speak of the bestial side of the war-regime (already done justice by many writers).” He cautions then against the belief that describing the horrors of war will act as a deterrent: “Showing war’s irrationality and horror is of no effect. The horrors make the fascination. When [it is a] question of getting the extremest and supremist out of human nature, talk of expense sounds ignominious. Pacifists ought to enter more deeply into the aesthetical and ethical point of view of their opponents.” Now for all our opposition to war, we cannot escape the obvious fact that we have been notoriously unsuccessful in our efforts to curtail it. I believe our lack of success is due, at least in part, to our having ignored the central phenomenon: “the horrors make the fascination.” In this century—which began arrogantly as a “century of peace”—we have seen the steady change from a state of relative tranquility to that of revolutions and violence. At this moment we find half a dozen wars going on around the globe, including that war in Afghanistan. Nonetheless, the American army has changed from a draft to a volunteer army. Why have we, who are opposed to war, been so ineffectual? It is not time to inquire whether there is something wrong in our approach to this ultimate form of aggression and violence? I propose that we ask directly: What is the allure, the fascination, the attraction of war? #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

Many veterans who are honest with themselves will admit, I believe, that the experience of communal effort in battle even under the altered conditions of modern war, has been a high point in their lives which they would not want to have missed. For anyone who has not experienced it one’s self, the feeling is hard to comprehend, and for the participant, hard to explain to anyone else. Millions of men and some times children (who change their age to participate) in or day—like millions before us—have learned to live in war’s strange element and have discovered in it a powerful fascination. The Emotional environment of war has always been compelling; it has drawn most beings under its spell. Reflection and calm reasoning are alien to it. When the signs of peace were visible, the purgative force of danger which makes beings coarser but perhaps more human will soon be lost and the first months of peace will make some of us yearn for the old days of conflict. What are the sources of war’s allure? One is the attraction of the extreme situation—that is, the risking all in battle. This is the same element that catches people beyond desires. A second is the strengthening effect of being part of a tremendous organization, which relieves a person of individual responsibility and guilt. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

The declaration of war is thus important as a moral statement, as a moral justification, and enables the soldier to give over one’s moral responsibility to one’s outfit. This point is generally cited in criticism of the war machine; and no one can have the slightest doubt that war does erode individua responsibility and the autonomy of conscience. The My Lai massacre and the Lt. William Calley case prove this in a horrible way. However, what is generally overlooked is that a being has a desire to avoid freedom as well as to seek it; that freedom and choice are also a burden—as Dostoevsky and countless others have known throughout history; and that to give one’s conscious over to the group, as one does in war time, is also a source of great comfort. This is why the great determinism of history—such as Calvinism and Marxism—have also demonstrated great power not only to form people into ranks but to inspire in the degree of active devotion that other movements may not find available. Closely related to this is the feeling of comradeship in the feeling of comradeship in the ranks—that I am accepted not because of any individual merit on my part, but because I am a fellow in the ranks. I can trust my fellow soldier to cover my retreat or my attack because of the role given to me. My merit is the role, and the limits the role places on me give me a species of freedom. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

The breaking down of this capacity to feel as if one were part of the larger whole is the explanation of how soldiers overcome fear. Indeed, physical courage in whatever scene—judging from my experience in psychotherapy–seems to hinge on whether the individual can feel one is fighting for others as well as one’s self, assuming a bond with one’s fellow, which means one will come to their assistance as they will to one’s. The source of this physical courage appears to be possessed originally in the relationship between the infant and its mother, specifically one’s trust in one’s solidarity with her and, consequently, with the World. Physical cowardice, on the other hand, even in avoiding physical fights as a child, seems to come from an early rejection, and early feeling that the mother will not support her child and may even turn against one in one’s fights; so that henceforth every effort the youngest makes, one makes on one’s own. Such a person finds it inconceivable that others would support one and that one is also fighting for them, and it takes a conscious decision for one to take up their part. This latter type of person may have great moral courage, which one has developed as a loner; but what one lacks is physical courage or courage in the group. There is in ecstasy of violence, furthermore, the lust for destruction. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

Remember there was a man named Mark, recall his comment: “All my life I’ve wanted to smash a BMW.” There seems to be a delight in destruction in beings, the atavistic urge to break things and to kill. This is increased in neurotics and others in despair; but it is an increase of a trait that is there anyway, and centuries of the veneer of civilization cannot hide it. It could also be that soldiers know that in their death, they could be saving the lives of others. Anyone who has watched people on the battlefield at work with artillery, or looked into the eyes of the veteran killers fresh from slaughter, or studied the descriptions of bombardiers’ feelings while smashing their targets, find it hard to escape the conclusion that there is a delight in destruction. This evil appears to surpass mere human evil, and to demand explanation in cosmological and religions terms. In this sense, human beings can be devilish in a way animals can never be. In this lust for destruction, the soldier’s ego temporarily deserts one, and one is absurd in what one experiences. It is a deprivation of self for a union with objects that were hitherto foreign. This is technical language for what is referred to in the mystic experience of ecstasy: the ego is dissolved, and the mystic experiences a union with the “Whole,” be it called light or truth or God. Through violence we overcome self-centeredness. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

All of these are elements in the ecstasy of violence. There is a joy in violence that takes the individual out of one’s self and pushes one toward something deeper and more powerful than one has previously experiences. The individual “I” passes insensibly into a “we”; “my” becomes “our.” I give myself to it, let myself go; as I feel my old self slipping away, lo and behold, a new consciousness, a higher degree of awareness, becomes present, a new self, more extensive than the first. Now when we consider contemporary beings—insignificant, lonely, more isolated as mass communication becomes vaster, one’s ears and sensitivities dulled by ever-present transistor radios and by thousands of word hurled at one by TV and newspapers, aware of one’s identity only to the extent that one has lot it, yearning for community but feeling awkward and helpless as one finds it—when we consider this modern being, who will be surprised that one yearns for ecstasy even of the kind that violence and war may bring? We must also face the fact that, to most people, violence is fun. We watch it on television and in the movies regularly. The barroom fight in a western movie is almost always a matter of comedy or semicomedy. Football players are armored and padded like medieval knights so that they can provide violence with the least damage to themselves. Wrestling, the acting out of violence, commands a wide audience. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

The rollerderbies attract fanatic follwers who look on, not to watch expert rollerskating, but to exult in the fights and near-fights, the elbowing and the falls. Ice hockey is a game in which we simply conceded that fights are a part of the sport. Conflict is a problem that faces not only psychologist, but ever human being everywhere. It is one thing to proclaim, as some psychologist do, that violence is not instinctive in human nature. It is another to demonstrate ways in which aggression can be controlled and eliminated and replaced by cooperation. Consider this being in society—living year after year in the anonymous anxiety that something might happen; aware of enemy countries that one can destroy in one’s imagination, a fantasy to which one resorts when one is fed up with one’s day-to-day life; existing with a dread that one feels somehow ought to be translated into action but hanging in abeyance, lured on by secret promises of ecstasy and violence, feeling that continuing the vague dread is worse than giving in to the allure, fascination, and attraction of action—is it any wonder that this being goes along with a declaration of war in apparent sheeplike fashion? For the first time in my life I can now, for example, understand the American Legon. That organization has always been, for me, a negative conscience—whatever it was for, I was against, and whatever I was for, it was against. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

When I did not have time to figure out on which side justice was, this worked quite well as a pro tempore device. However, I never could understand the motives of the legionnaries or other veterans’ organizations in their saberrattling and their stretching the hunting-under-every-bed-for-Communists to absurd lengths. Now, however, I see that these groups had originally been, by large, young men and women who had held insignificant jobs pouring gasoline into Buicks, Fords, and Chevrolets when they were called to war. In France they became heroes, the pride of the women; flowers were strewn in their paths, every honor thrust upon them. They were significant, possibly for the first time in their lives. Returning to this country, some could find only the same jobs pouring gasoline into Buicks, Chevrolets, and Fords, and those who found better jobs may have experienced a similar despair in the empty life of peacetime. No wonder they hand together, out of their ennui, to recreate the closest experience to that of the war, such as the “search and destroy” anti-communist mission. They hark back in their yearning to find something that will give their lives a significance it intrinsically lacks. That wonderful time when one can look straight into one’s self, through ego to Overself, awaits one’s endeavours. The goal is far-off, it is true; but nevertheless it is reachable by those who will make the requisite effort to overcome self. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

Despite all setbacks, the outcome of this endeavour can be only the fulfilment of hope. For that is God’s will. Even if the goal seems too far off, the attainment too high up for their limited capacities, even if it seems that one would have to be far better than ordinary to have any chance at all, that does not mean they should not embark on this quest. For even if they are able to travel only a modest part of the way the efforts involved are still well worthwhile. “And may the Lord bless your soul, and receive you at the last day into his kingdom, to sit down in peace,” reports Alma 38.15. The history of the Universe is a history of cycles: of birth, development, disintegration, death, and rest endlessly repeated on higher and higher levels. The energy impulses which rise from the Void and accumulate as electrons, only to disperse later, reproduce the same cycles through which the entire Universe itself passes. Do as or as little as you can to advance. If you lack the strength to go all the way then go some of the way. Your spiritual longings and labors will influence your afterlife. Nothing will be lost. If you deserve them, higher capacities and more favorable circumstances will then be yours. Every virtue deliberately cultivated leads to a pleasanter rebirth. Every weakness remedied leads to the cancellation of an unpleasant one. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

The Great Mystery Remains Where it Always Has Been—Untouched by Being’s Feelings and Undefined by One’s Thoughts!

September 19, 2019 2:12 am

And once again, I saw a clear image of the boy lying on a stone floor. And I heard the boy’s prayers: “Deliver me.” And I saw the Face of Christ in gleaming egg tempera. I saw the jewels set into the halo. I saw the egg and pigment mixing. “Deliver me.” “Can’t you understand me?” I asked. “I told you what I wanted. I want that boy, the one who won’t do wat you try to force him to do.” Heaven had cast down upon this stone floor an abandoned angel, of auburn curls and perfectly formed limbs, of fair and mysterious face. I reached down to take him by the arms and I lifted him, and I looked into his half-opened eyes. His soft reddish hair was loose and tangled. His flesh was pale and the bones of his face only faintly sharpened by his Slavic blood. “Amadeo,” I said, the name springing to my lips as though the angels willed it, the very angels whom he resembled in his purity and in his seeming innocence, starved as he was. It is perhaps an irony of history that one of the very first and most influential tracts of modern revolutionaries, a tract that gave the antistatists their clarion call to end the abuses of expropriation and inequality, itself rests on the personal, psychological reasons for the very first step in the origin of inequality. Social imbalances occur because of differences in personal merit and the recognition of that merit by others. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

Social inequality was relatively absent on primitive levels because property was comparatively absent. In the most egalitarian primitive societies, those whose economy is based on hunting and gathering, there is no distinction of rank, little or no authority of one individual over another. Possessions are simple and there is no real difference in wealth; property is distributed equally. Yet even on this level individual differences are recognized and already make for real social differentiation. If there is little or no authority to coerce others, there is much room for influence, and influence always stems from personal qualities: extra skill in hunting and warfare, in dealing with spirits in the invisible World, or simply physical strength and endurance. Being a senior citizen can often have an influence. If a person has outlived others, especially when so many die prematurely, one is often thought to have special powers. Skilled hunters and warriors could actually display these special powers in the form of trophies and ornamental badges of merit. The scalps of the slain enemies and teeth, feathers, and other ornaments were often loaded with magical power and served as protection. If a being wore a large number of trophies and badges showing how much power one had and how great were one’s exploits, one became a great mana figure who literally struck terror into the heats of one’s enemies. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

Today, many people use the media and their political authority to strike terror into the hearts of their enemies, or the general public. The conspiratorial theory is particularly appealing to individuals who have feelings of powerlessness and normlessness because it accounts for the absence of power and the lowering of values in a simple and easily understood fashion. The individual who projects sees one’s self as powerless because sinister forces have successfully conspired to destroy the traditional political rules in such a way that one is excluded from exercising one’s rights. This kind of thinking frequently occurs when political and social antagonisms are sharp. Certain audiences are especially susceptible to it—particularly, those who have obtained a low level of education, whose access to information is poor, and who are so completely shut out from access to the centers of power that they feel deprived of self-defense and subjected to unlimited manipulation by those who wield power. In primitive culture, the elaborate decorations of the warrior and hunter were not aimed to make one beautiful, but to show off one’s skill and courage and so inspired fear and respect. This gave one automatic social distinction; by wearing the tokens of one’s achievements, the visible memories of one’s bravery and excellence, one could flaunt one’s superiority in the eyes of everyone who could not make similar displays. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

The Sioux could announce by certain decorations on one’s moccasins how many horses one had captured, enemies killed, whether the warrior oneself had been wounded, and so forth; similar things were conveyed by the feathers one wore and the color they were dyed. Among other tribes, war exploits entitled the warrior to mark oneself with certain scarifications and tattoos. Each warrior was literally a walking record of one’s military campaigns: the “fruit salad” on the chest of today’s military beings is a direct descendant of those public announcement of “see who I am because of where I have been and what I have done; look how accomplished I am as a death dealer and death defier.” It is of course less concrete and living than actual facial and shoulder scars or the carrying of scalps which included the forehead and eyes. However, it gives the right to the same kind of proud strutting and social honor and the typical question that the primitive warrior asks: “Who are you that you should talk? Where are your tattoo marks? Whom have you killed that you should speak to me?” These people, then, are honored and respected or feared, and this is what gives them influence and power. Not only that, it also gives them actual benefits and privileges. Remember that as children we not only deferred to the outstanding boy in the neighborhood but also gave him large chunks of our candy. Primitives who distinguished themselves by personal exploits got the thing that grown men want most—wives. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

They got these wives more easily than did others, and often, especially if they were skilled hunters, they took more than one wife. In some cases, too, a noted hunter would claim as his special hunting preserve a piece of land that was common property of the tribe. And so on. I do not intend to even try to sum up the theoretical details from the vast literature on the growth of hereditary privilege and private accumulation. Besides, there is little agreement on how exactly class society came into existence. There is general agreement on what preclass society was, but the process of transformation is shrouded in mystery. Many different factors contributed, and it is impossible to pull them apart and give them their proper weight. Also, the process would not have been uniform or unilinear—the same for all societies in all areas. If we add psychological factors to materialist ones, we must also now add ecological and demographic factors such as population density and scarcity of resources. I do not want to pop my head into the argument among authorities lest it get neatly sliced off. So I would like to sidestep the argument while still remaining focused on what is essential, which, I think must be possessed in human nature and motives. Another mechanism for deal with feelings of political alienation is identification with a charismatic leader. This is the attempt of an individual to feel powerful by incorporating within one’s self the attitudes, beliefs, and actions held by a leader whom one perceives as powerful. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

Charismatic refers to an extraordinary quality of a person regardless of whether this quality is actual, alleged, or presumed. In taking over the attributes of a charismatic leader, the individual may enter into activity one would otherwise abhor. German bourgeoisie who identified with Hitler approved of and too part in behavior their consciences would otherwise not allow them to do. Rational activism is behavior based on logical reasoning and an undistorted perception of political realities. Withdrawal may be a rational response in some situations and an irrational, affective response in other circumstances. The mechanisms of projection resulting in conspiratorial thinking and identification with a charismatic leader are irrational, affective responses. They are also regressive, in that they are more characteristic of a child’s than of an adult’s handline of a problem. When feelings of political alienation are widespread, individuals will adopt one or more of the mechanisms we have described to handle the frustration and anxiety associated with them. The political behavior or each individual will be affected by the particular mechanism or mechanisms one selects. The most sensitive students of the past 200 years would agree that rank and stratified societies came into being without anyone really noticing; it just happened, gradually and ineluctably. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

The vital question, then, it seems to me, is not exactly how it happened but why it was allowed to happen, what there was in human nature that went along so willingly with the process. The answers to this question seems to me remarkably straightforward. I have said that primitive beings recognized differences in talent and merit and already deferred to them somewhat granted them special privileges. Why? Because obviously these qualities helped to secure life, to assure the perpetuation of the tribe. Exploits in the danger of hunting and war were especially crucial. Why? Because in these activities certain individuals could single themselves out as adept at defying death; the tokens and trophies that they displayed were indications of immortality power or durability power, which is the same thing. If you identified with these persons and followed them, then you got the same immunities they had. This is the basic role and function of the hero in history: one is the one who gambles with one’s very life and successfully defies death, and beings follow one and eventually worship one’s memory because one embodies the triumph over what they fear most, extinction and death. One becomes the focus of the peculiarly human passion play of the victory over death. We can now see how fanciful the idea is that in the state of nature humans are free and only becomes unfree later on. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

Humans never were free and cannot be free from one’s own nature. One carries within one the bondage that one needs in order to continue to live. Some do not understand human nature in the round, they are not able to see that every human being is also equally unfree, that is, we are born in need of authority and we even create out of freedom, a prison. This insight is the fruit of the outcome of modern psychoanalysis. It penetrates to the heart of the human condition and to the principal dynamic of the emergence of historical inequality. We have to say that primitive religion starts the first class distinction. That is, the individual gives over the aegis of one’s own life and death to the spirit World; one is already a second-class citizen. The first class distinction, then, was between mortal and immortal, between feeble human powers and special superhuman beings. Once things started off on this footing, it was only natural that class distinction should continue to develop from this first impetus: those individuals who embodied supernatural powers, or could somehow plug into them or otherwise use them when the occasion demanded, came to have the same ability to dominate others that was associated with the spirits themselves. The anthropologist Robert Lowie was a specialist on those most egalitarian of all primitives peoples, the Plains Indian tribes. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

Even these fiercely independent Indians, he tells us, gave up their equalitarian attitudes of everyday life on raiding parties. A Crow Indian would organize a raid only when prompted by one’s supernatural guardian spirit, and so all those who followed one deferred to one and to one’s spirit. Again, the overlordship of the invisible World as embodied in certain human personages made temporary slaves of their fellows. I suggest that the awe which surrounded the protégé of supernatural powers formed the psychological basis for more complex political developments. The very same beings who flout the pretensions of a fellow-brave grovel before a darling of the gods, render him implicit and obedience and respect. We have described the forms of political alienation and the mechanisms by which they may be expressed. When political alienation is widespread, it may be a major factor in determining the outcome of an election. The astute politician is aware of this; consequently one’s strategy takes these factors into account. The election we have analyzed took place in a community where feelings of political alienation, frustration, and disillusionment with the political process are widespread. When this situation exists, the voting behavior of the electorate is less predictable than otherwise, since a decision is likely to arise from negative rather than from beneficial convictions and may change on the basis of minor issues, fleeting incidents, or gut reactions. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

The analysis of the statements of the individuals we interviewed shows that they hold an image of the political structure which is similar to that developed by modern political science. They perceive the hierarchical arrangements of power and influence, and they relate various power groupings to each other. They are aware of the uses and abuses of political office; and they know that their role is not one that the grammar-school version of democratic theory taught them. They have, however, greatly exaggerated their lack of power and, perhaps, the extent of corruption. The election, after all, resulted in the downfall of the group associated with one candidate and the elevation to power of another group which probably did not believe it had a serious chance of winning. All the money that was given to the group which lost the election and all the promises that may have been made to the contributors have been to no avail, for the personnel now in power are different. The antagonisms built up during the campaign may mean that the outs are really out of City Hall in the near future. The election upset was to a large extent a response to feelings of political alienation. Senator Powers followed the time-honored rules of campaigning. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

One spent large amounts of money on advertising which portrayed one as a devoted public servant and friend of the people, shook as many hands as possible, attended numerous house parties, recounted one’s experience, contributed to charities of all faiths, was photographed with prominent religious leaders, attacked one’s opponent, and emphasized the support of the municipal, state, and national politicians; but although one may have 54 percent more votes the primary, an individual can still fail to win. This has shaken politicians’ faith in the traditional vote-getting techniques. Although there can be many more reasons why some lost elections, it is clear that one of the most important was the fact that one presented one’s self as a powerful professional politician—a serious mistake in a community where a considerable amount of political alienation exists. The alienated are not absolutely disposed toward those whom they identify as powerful. Under these circumstances, the candidate must reevaluate antiquated methods, reformulate one’s strategy, and experiment with new techniques. A number of countervailing strategies are available to one. The candidate may create a strong sense of identity with the electorate by presenting one’s self as the underrepresented in a struggle against a power elite. Whether one does this or not, one certainly should not emphasize a background of power to the massive support of other political figures who may also be associated with the powerful. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

Since an elaborate campaign is viewed as collusion with the powerful, the candidate must avoid the appearance of an opulent campaign. Of course, a candidate may appeal to regressive mechanisms of projection and identification with a charismatic leader. For instance, President Trump successfully appealed to those who tend to think in conspiratorial terms (a form of projection) via his slogan, “Stop power politics, elect a hands-free president, Make American Great Again,” and such techniques as his essay contest on a definition of “power politics.” The electorate, however, did not view Trump as a charismatic leader. He came off more like a saucy demon and holds for like a dictator with a mannish voice, which makes people fear and respect him. As a result the nation feels safe that they are being lead by someone who is not soft nor afraid to hold his ground and the economy is booming. The professional politicians may court popular esteem by throwing the support of the organization behind a clean amateur; that is, some well-know citizen who has not had contact with the politicians and therefore does not share their stigma. The stigma which is attached to the politician by the alienated is not likely to rub off on such an individual, at least during the beginning of the campaign. The difficulty with procedure, from the point of view of the organization, is that such a candidate may be unreliable. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

Therefore, it is important to grow slowly into the discovery and realization of what one really is deep, deep, inside. Coming to know it is hard enough but impregnating the moment-to-moment daily life with this knowledge is harder still. The aspirant of today may be the adept of tomorrow, but the course is interminably long, the goal reached only through innumerable experiences and efforts. After the optimists have had their say and the Advaitins have preached, the hard fact will be echoed back by experience: the goal is set so far, one’s powers so limited, that one has to call on the quality of patience and make it one’s own. So far as history tells us, full enlightenment cannot be got in the span of a single lifetimes, except among the notable few. Yet history has too many undiscovered secrets, and enlightenment is too subtle a matter to correct judgment upon. The attainment of realization of the Overself is extremely rare, and the aspirant should not expect to do so in one limited lifetime. However, since its Grace is unpredictable, no one can say that it is impossible in a particular case. If the recent scientific computation of the Earth’s age as four thousand million years be correct, we get some idea how long it take to make a human. How much longer then to make a superhuman? That which is cheaply bought is often lightly esteemed. We shall rate Truth more highly when we pay a high price for it. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

Even a lifetime is not too long a period to devote toward gaining such a great objective. What we give must be commensurate with what we want to receive. Moreover the effort required, being worthy in itself and necessary to attain the full development of adulthood, is its own reward whether there is any other or nor. Why then should anyone relax one’s efforts or fall into despair because one has been able to make only little or limited progress toward the goal? The illumination is possible for all beings because they are incarnate in human and not animal forms. However, all beings are not willing to pay its price in mental control and emotional subjugation. If the reader finds such a task too fatiguing one should remember that the reward is nothing less than enlightenment. How few are those who have realized their aspiration to merge into the higher self. How rare an event is. It is obvious from the rarity of its historic realization that this ideal was always too ice-mantled a peak of perfection to be climbable by most beings. Nevertheless we gain nothing by ignoring it, and it is at least well to know towards what goal humankind is so slowly and so unconsciously moving. This truth may seem unsympathetic to natural human feelings, far too impersonal. It is not for the multitude who demand from religions satisfaction of desires, consolation and comfort, answer to prayers. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

Thee adepts seems so immeasurably aloof from us, their attainments so superhuman, that we may well ask of what use to most beings is the offering of such a quest. One feels intuitively that there is, or ought to be, some elusive element, principle, purpose, or Deity behind all life and all Nature—but is it possible for a human being to become acquainted with IT? Such a goal may be unappealing to many, held by their attachments as they are; but it is fascinating and alluring to a few old souls, much experiences after a long series of Earthly lives, whose values have been altered, whose glamours and illusions have been eliminated. They feel like wanderers returning home. The goal set up by this teaching may seem too foolish and perhaps even too fatuous for persons who pride themselves on their reasonability and practicality. This judgement may be the result of a slight acquaintance with the subject; it could not be the result of a full and satisfactory knowledge of it. The outside observer will not be able to see what is happening to one, and to that extent will not be able to share in it. However, if the latter is associated with one in some way and is at all sensitive, one will be able secretly to affect the subconscious mind of the observer. The name “Rishee” was bestowed in ancient, as well as modern, Indian on the being who had reached the peak of spiritual knowledge; literally it means “seer.” What is it that one sees? One is a see-er of reality, and though illusion. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

People form quaint and queer notions of what constitutes an illuminate. They would divest one of all human attributes, makes one a being who never even sneezes or yawns! In one the high power manifests itself and through one it follows for the inspiring of others. If people tell that the path is a mere figment of the imagination, they are welcome to their belief. I, who have seen many beings enter it and a few finish it, declare that the difference between the beginning and the end of the path is the difference between a slave and a master. If the quest is presented as too difficult for everyone but the superhuman, an inferiority complex is created and those who could get some help from some of its practices are frightened away. Jesus said that they way to eternal life is straight and narrow. One could have added that it is also long and difficult. Yet the beginner should not let these things discourage one. There is help within and without. If the standard is set too high, love for it may not be strong enough to assist its attainment. If the ideal is too rigorous, its would-be followers will be too few. The achievement may seem too hard but it is not impossible. The best guarantee of that is the ever-presence within one of the divine soul itself. “And the people began to repent of their iniquity; and inasmuch as they did the Lord did have mercy on them,” reports Ether 11.8. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

Cresleigh Homes

PSA 📢 #RocklinTrails will now be open by appointment only. Contact us via email to learn more and book an appointment. | rocklintrails@cresleigh.com

https://cresleigh.com/new-homes-in-rocklin-california-rocklin-trails/

No Event Could Be Outside the Knowledge of God, No Entity Could be Beyond the Power of God!

September 17, 2019 2:10 am

Finally I had a houseful of healthy and noisy activity. There were cooks in the kitchen, and musicians teaching my boys to sing and play the lute. There were dancing instructors and there were fencing matches over the marble floors of the great salons. Taking to my bedroom study, I began a journal of my thoughts, the first I had ever kept since the nights in old Rome. I wrote of the comforts I enjoyed. And I chastised myself with more clarity than I did in my mind. While analyzing this post-election survey, it has shown that a large proportion of the electorate feels politically powerless because it believes that the community is controlled by a small group of powerful and selfish individuals who use public office for personal gain. Many voters assume that this power elite is irresponsible and unaffected by the outcome of elections. Those who embrace this view feel that voting I meaningless because they see the candidates as undesirable and the electoral process as a sham. We suggest the term “political alienation” to refer to these attitudes. Since sufficient information is available from other American cities to indicate that feelings of political alienation are widespread, we feel justified in theorizing about the forms of political alienation, the mechanisms by which it is handled, and its implications for democratic politics. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

The term alienation was first used by Hegel to denote being’s detachment from nature and one’s self arising out of being’s self-consciousness. Other observers have seen alienation within beings, between beings and their institutions, and between beings and beings. They have attributed the origin of feelings of alienation to machinery, mass communications, the size of modern communities, the transition from gemeinschaft to gesellschaft, original sin, mass society, lack of religion, and capitalist commodity production. Some view alienation as unique to modern society while others see it as a permanent condition. Feelings of alienation are labeled “good” or “bad” according to whether they arise from causes or lead to results which the critic approves or disapproves. The essential characteristic of the alienated being is one’s belief that one is not able to fulfill what one believes is one’s rightful role in society. The alienated being is acutely aware of the discrepancy between who one is and what one believes one should be. Alienation must be distinguished from two related but not identical concepts: anomie and personal disorganization. Alienation refers to a psychological state of an individual characterized by feelings of estrangement, while anomie refers to a relative normlessness of social system. Personal disorganization refers to disordered behavior arising from internal conflict within the individual. These states may correlate with one another but they are not identical. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

Here we shall examine political alienation as typified in the Sacramento, California USA election of 2016. From controversy and its outcome we shall delineate a few types of political alienation, examine the causes for them, and specify several mechanisms for the handling of feelings of political alienation. The state collected in this post-election survey indicate that voting was based on distrust and negativism rather than on beneficial conviction. Darrell Steinberg, who was once as United States of America Senator, was considered the lesser of two evils. “He is not much better than Kevin Johnson.” “Neither candidate appealed to me.” “Felt neither one would make a good mayor, but wanted to get scandalous Johnson out of office as soon as possible.” “Felt that voting would do any good because both were no good.” “I don’t like the caliber of the candidates.” “I think they’re all the same.” “It doesn’t not matter who you vote for.” “Felt they were both no good.” These negative feelings reflect a widespread belief that politicians are somewhat dishonest. “It seems they’re all a little crooked.” “A typical Sacramento politician is a crook.” “They tie-up with racketeers—All of them do it.” “I don’t think he will have too many crooks around.” “He probably would not steal as much.” “I don’t believe he has too much integrity.” “I knew they were crooks, but I don’t like to see it right on TV.” “He gave a lot of double talk.” “Talks too much, does very little.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

The view that the candidates were primarily interested in furthering their selfish ends rather than the general welfare was expressed by several voters. “He is an opportunist—out for himself with the interest of Sacramento secondary.” “He was against everything that might have helped Sacramento, was all for himself.” “Steinberg is for Steinberg.” Some respondents believe that the candidates were obligated to and dominated by a small group of self-interested contributors. “Steinberg was being sponsored by too many business interests. I mean those people not concerned with the social welfare of the voting public.” “To much of a politician, commitments to groups.” “I thought he might be looking out for those racketeers.” “Tied up with racketeers.” “His affiliation with other big politicians and use of the machine.” “Too many prior commitments—too many political entanglements.” “You can’t tell me Steinberg didn’t have one thousand people on his back.” Steinberg is a political appointee…he must have tie-ins like everybody.” The candidates and their backers were seen as a power elite which controls the city in its own interest. “He is tied up with professionals—types with cigars, part of the Midtown Sacramento Crowd and the Sacramento King’s who have the city in their pocket, and take care of themselves.” “I don’t like the idea that since all the big guys are for him, the little people, like us, should be for him too.” “He has too many prior commitments although I don’t think he is a racketeer.” “Too many apron strings, hard to hold office without doing favors.” “His connection with big business. He wasn’t doing his own talking.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

Campaign contributors are stereotyped as buyers purchasing future political favors. The extravagance of the campaign is interpreted by many as a measure of the degree to which the candidate is under obligation to pay back a profitable return. “He spent too much money campaigning. I thought of where all those funds cam from.” “Steinberg was spending so much money what everybody was expecting to gain from his election.” “I felt he made deals with backers of the campaign.” “In the Sacramento paper there was so much about Steinberg I got sick of him. Everyone was supporting him, it seems as though there was a fear of him.” “His high-pressure tactics—too much money—too powerful.” Many voters complained that the candidates did not present a serious and meaningful discussion of issues. “He didn’t have any program at all and I didn’t know what t make of him other than he’s done good job to bring hid family up.” “He seemed to be more against Johnson as an individual rather than on the issues.” “In his campaign all he did was attack Johnson and hardly ever talked about the issues. “Steinberg didn’t have much confidence in the intelligence of the public.” “No concrete platform; too evasive.” “He didn’t say anything and I heard him speak for 45 minutes.” “Both men were talking in circles about Sacramento’s needs and how to meet them.” “He had a lot of phony talk.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

These feelings of the electorate go beyond resentment toward the particular candidate in this election; they indicate a widespread disgust and disillusionment with the political process and politicians in general: “Voting would not do any good—both no good.” This negativism fosters a belief that reform is impossible and highly unlikely, and that it makes little difference which candidate wins the elections. Of those who voted for Steinberg 43 percent thought he would be no better when in office than Johnson, while 57 percent of those who vote for Steinberg thought he would be no better than his opponent. Under these conditions, politics, as it is characterized in American political folklore, tends to lose its meaning. The average voter believes that he or she is not part of the political structure and that one has no influence upon it. The attitudes described above are not universally held in Sacramento. There are voters who believe that their candidate is honest, has integrity, and will fight for the best interest of the community. Some individuals who voted for Johnson saw him as “courageous,” “honest,” “a crusader,” and “sincere”; others who voted for Steinberg pictured him as “intelligent,” “experienced,” and “honest.” However, these views are not shared by a large segment of the electorate who disliked the candidates, distrusted politicians in general, and believed that voting makes no difference. It is this group which feels alienated. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

Since feelings of political alienation were so significant in determining the outcome of this election, an analysis of the forms of political alienation is indicated. We believe that this election is sufficiently typical of American municipal elections to warrant putting these conclusions in general terms. Political alienation is the feeling of an individual that one is not part of the political process. The politically alienated believe that their vote makes no difference. This belief arises from the feeling that political decisions are made by a group of political insiders who are not responsive to the average citizen—the political outsiders. Political alienation may be expressed in feelings of political powerlessness, meaninglessness, estrangement from political activity, and normlessness. Political powerlessness is the feeling of an individual that one’s political action has no influence in determining the course of political events. Those who feel politically powerless do not believe that their vote, or for that matter any action they might perform, can determine the broader outcome they desire. This feeling of powerlessness arises from and contribute to the belief that the community is not controlled by the voters, but rather by a small number of powerful and influential persons who remain in control regardless of the outcome of elections. This theory of social conflict between the powerful and powerless is not identical to the Marxian theory of social conflict between capitalists and proletarians. The powerful are not necessarily capitalists, they may be professional politicians, labor leaders, underworld figures, or business people. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

Many voters believe that the powerful, who are most often identified as politicians, business men and women, and the underworld, continuously exploit the public. The politician needs campaign contributions, the business person needs licenses, tax abatements, and city contracts, and the underworld needs police immunity. This provides the setting for the mutually satisfactory relationships among the powerful, from which the average voter is excluded. The feelings of powerlessness among the electorate are sharpened by the view that regardless of the outcome of the election, the powerful remain in control by realigning themselves with the newly elected. These voters view the political process as a secret conspiracy, the object of which is to plunder them. Political alienation may also be experiences in the form f meaninglessness. An individual may experience feelings of meaninglessness in two ways. One may believe that the election is without meaning because there are no real differences between the candidates, or one may feel that an intelligent and rational decision is impossible because the information upon which, one thinks, such a decision must be made is lacking. The degree of meaninglessness will vary with the disparity between the amount of information considered necessary and that available. If the candidates and platforms are very similar or identical, it will be difficult to find meaningful information on which to base a voting decision. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

The achievement of beings is to remember there is a divine existence, but the way of realization calls for efforts so superhuman that few people would ever have turned to it unless there is a literary picture that has more faithfully drawn them in. To improve and purify the ordinary self, to reach and realize the higher self, are clearly the most difficult tasks. To govern passions, quieten feelings, control thoughts and develop intuitions, to direct tendencies, to remove complexes, and to remain steadfast in sticking to the chosen path—is not all this a Herculean task? Sometimes the attitude toward dependence changes within the same person. After having gone through one or several painful experiences, such as voter alienation, one may struggle blindly against everything that bears even a faint resemblance to dependence. For example, a girl who had gone through several love affairs, all of which ended with her being desperately dependent on the particular man concerned, developed a detached attitude toward all men, wanting only to have then under her power without having her feelings involved. These processes are evident also in a patient’s attitude during analysis. It is to one’s own interest to use the hour to gain understanding, but one will often ignore one’s own interest by trying to please the analyst and win one’s interest or approval. Even though there may be good reasons why one should want to get in quickly—because one suffers or makes sacrifices for the sake of the analysis, or because one has limited time for it—these factors at times seem to become totally irrelevant. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

The patient will spend hours in long-winded tales only to get an approving response from the analyst, or one will try to make each hour interesting for the analyst, be entertaining, show admiration for one. This may go so far that the patient’s associations or even one’s dreams will be determined by one’s wish to interest the analyst. Or one may become infatuated with the analyst’s love and trying to impress the latter with the genuineness of one’s feeling. The factor of indiscriminateness is evident here too, unless one assumes every analyst to be a paragon of human values, or to be perfectly fitted for the personal expectations of every individual patient. Of course the analyst might possibly be a person whom the patient would love in any case, but even that would not account for the degree of emotional importance which the analyst acquired for the patient. It is this phenomenon of which people usually think when they speak of “transference.” Yet the term is not quite correct, because transference should refer to the sum total of all the patient’s irrational reactions toward the analyst, not only the emotional dependence. The problem here is not so much why this dependence takes place in analysis, because persons in need of such protection will cling to any physician, social worker, friend, member of the family, but why it is particularly strong and why it occurs with such frequency. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

The answer is comparatively simple: analyzing means, among other things, tackling defenses built up against anxiety, and thereby stirring up the anxiety lurking behind the protecting walls. It is this increase of anxiety that causes the patient to cling to the analyst in one way or another. Here we find again a difference from the child’s need for affection: the child needs more affection or help than the adult, because it is more helpless, but there are no compulsive factors involved in its attitude. Only a child who is already apprehensive will cling to its mother’s apron string. A second characteristic of the neurotic need for affection, also entirely different from the need of the child, is its insatiability. A child, it is true, may nag, demand excessive attention and endless proofs of being loved, but in that case it is a neurotic child. A healthy child, growing up in an atmosphere of warmth and reliability, feels sure that it is wanted, does not require constant proof of that fact, and is contented when it receives the help it needs for the time being. The instability of the neurotic may appear in greediness as a general character trait, shown in eating, buying, window-shopping, impatience. The greediness may be repressed most of the time, and break out suddenly, as for instance when a person who is usually modest about buying clothes, in an anxiety state buys four new coats. It may appear in the more amiable form of sponging, or in the more aggressive form of an octopus like behavior. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

When we think about violence in TV westerns and in paperback mystery-thrillers, we must focus on the function of violence in the classics, the literature that, through the ages, has been the guide to being’s psychological and spiritual development. First, let us consider an aspect of Melville’s Billy Budd, Forestopman. When Billy is brought before Captain Vere and Master-at-Arms Claggart to answer the accusation by the latter that he plans a mutiny, he is so dumbfounded by the injustice of the charges that he cannot speak. Seized by sudden rage in his verbal impotence, Billy stares at Claggart for a taut, silent moment. Then all of his rage goes into his right arm, and he strikes the master-at-arms, who falls dead. When this act of sheer violence occurs on the stage or screen, a sigh of relief goes through the audience. We feel that the violence fits the situation. It is aesthetically called for; nothing less would have sufficed. Violence makes complete the otherwise incomplete aesthetic Gestalt. At that point there is for the audience the experience of the ecstasy of violence in aesthetic terms. However, if violence is evil, why is it so essential to tis novella as well as to many other classics of literature? There must be something about some violence that meets a need in human beings, something that cannot be wholly bad. This something must be in Grimm’s Fairy–Tales, in Shakespeare’s plays, and in the dramas by Aeschylus and Sophocles. It must be a reality in life which, on the level of unconscious experience, demands its own recognition. What is it? #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

Death is a violent act for all of us; we are forcibly separated from this life. This fact is not in the slightest gainsaid by modern drugs and whether or not a being dies in a hospital bed, doped into a zombie state with morphine. Death is always present to us as a possibility. It is this possibility which gives meaning to lie and to love. No matter how much we may fondly hope that we can set our own manner and time of death, the dread of the horror of death is present in our imaginations. For it is not the fact itself, but the meaning of it that is important. Death is not the only violence—or violation—we must all suffer. Life is full of other violent acts. Our very birth, the necessary struggles between parent and child, the heart-rending separation from someone we love—all these are experiences in which physical and psychological violence inevitably occurs. No life is free from violent episodes as it runs it course. The aesthetic ecstasy of the violence in great literature brings beings face to face with their own mortality. This is one of its services to us. After seeing a tragedy on the stage or reading one, we often find ourselves wanting to talk by ourselves and think about it. We experience what Aristotle called the catharsis of pity and terror, and we long to savor it. It not only beings us closer to our own center but also makes us more appreciative, paradoxically, of our fellow beings. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

Violence helps us to see that we, ephemeral creature all, are born and struggle and live for a season and then, like the grass, wither away; and our raging against the passing of the light will then have, if not more practical an effect, at least more meaning. This is why a deeper level of experience is called forth in tragedy—say in Shakespeare or Eugene O’Neill—than in comedy. The Greeks solved this problem by having the violence—of which there was plenty in the tragedies of Oedipus, Medea, and others—take place off stage. In Shakespeare and Melville, on the other hand, the violence occurs on stage; but there it is demanded by the aesthetic meaning of the drama. This is the difference between drama and melodrama (as in contemporaneous TV programs, which capitalize on the violence as such). The question we must ask is: Is the violence in a movie or drama inserted for shock value, horror, and titillation, or is it an integral part of the tragedy? In Macbeth, Hamlet, and Antigone, the violence is required for the aesthetic wholeness of the drama. In tragedy we not only experience our own mortality but we also transcend it; the values that matter stand out more clearly. We do not experience the sheer wanton destructiveness which occurs when we see East Pakistanis bayoneted to death on TV, which is only a gruesome evil which we would have given anything to have been able to prevent. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

Although death always wins empirically in literature as in life, beings win spiritually by virtue of one’s acts of forming experience into aspects of culture like art, science, and religion. The illuminate is the conscious embodiment of the Overself, whereas the ordinary being is ignorant of that which one’s heart enshrines. Hence, the Chinese say that the illuminate is the “Complete Being.” One is the rare flower of an age. The sage is only a being, not a God. One is limited in power, being, knowledge. However, behind one, even in one—yet not of one—there is unlimited power, being, knowledge. Therefore we revere and worship not the being oneself, but what one represents. For practical purposes one is an emissary of the Lord, even though in theoretical truth no one is sent out because everyone has one’s roots in God already. One’s utterances should be closely studied, one’s behavior minutely analysed. The disillusionments brought by protracted experience have compelled me to distinguish between adepts by name, who are amusing, and adepts by nature, who are amazing. “According to what they have done, so will he repay wrath to his enemies and retributin to his foes; he will repay the islands their due. From the west, beings will dear the name of the Lord, and from the rising of the Sun, they will revere his glory. For he will come like a pent-up flood that the breath of the LORD drives along,” reports Isaiah 59.18-19. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

All Along What We Wanted Was this Experience of Ecstasy, this Sense of Our Own Significance!

September 11, 2019 1:17 am

In the nights that followed I could not resist visiting Rome, though Avicus and Mael both advised me not to do it. They feared that I did not know how long I had slept, but I knew. Almost a hundred years had passed. I found the grand buildings of Imperial glory fallen to ruin, overrun with animals, and being used as quarries for those who came to take the stone. Huge statues had been toppled over and lay in the weeds. My old street was unrecognizable. And the population had dwindled to no more than a few thousand. At the heat of our violence, in act or in feeling, lies the wish to show ourselves beings with a will. However, the complexity of society makes the being lose heart. Nothing one does any longer seems a skill to be proud of in a World where someone else always hits the headlines. This is a plausible picture, in despair of which beings cheerfully join any private army which will offer them the ambivalent identity of a uniform: the right to salute and be saluted. One of the reasons we have made so little progress in our mitigating of violence is that we have determinedly overlooked the elements in it that are attractive, alluring, and fascinating. Our minds tend to castrate the topic in the very act of understanding it. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

When a congress member delivers a tirade against violence, one seems to forget entirely that as a child he or she ran after fire engines, he or she was fascinated by pictures of bullfights, enjoyed Westerns, and one also shared the strange combination of allure and horror which leads people to crowd around accidents. We deny with our minds the secret love of violence, which is present in all of us in some form, at the same time as we perform violent acts with our bodies. By repressing the awareness of the fact of violence, we can thus secretly give ourselves over to the enjoyment of it. If we were to admit the reality of this secret love, this seems to be a necessary human defense against the deeper emotional implications we would have to face. At the outset of every war, for example, we hastily transform our enemy into the image of the diamonic; and then, since it is the devil we are fighting, we can shift onto a war footing without asking ourselves all the troublesome psychological and spiritual questions that war arouses. We no longer have to face the realization that those we are killing are persons like ourselves. I shall lump these alluring and fascinating elements together under the term “ecstasy.” The word may seem strange, partly because in common parlance it is pegged at a high level of intensity: we go into ecstasy over a new Cresleigh home, a new BMW 4 series, or we become ecstatic upon winning a million dollars in the lottery. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

However, the historical meaning of the word ecstasy leaves the question of intensity of emotion entirely open. Coming from the Greek ekotaois, ecstasy means etymologically to stand out of one’s self. The experience that takes one beyond one’s self, beyond conventional ego boundaries, and gives one a new and enlarged awareness of the self—such as Hindu or Buddhist meditation—is legitimately called ecstatic, although its intensity may not be quantitatively great. Aesthetic experiences or moments in love are commonly spoken as ecstatic. The experience of being worth, of knowing that other people change because of your influence, also gives you the feeling of being beyond yourself—in other words, a kind of ecstasy of low intensity. Hence I have used, for these experiences of lesser intensity, the phrase “sense of significance.” That violence is often associated wit ecstatic experiences is seen in our using the same phrases for both. We say a person is beside one’s self with rage; one is possessed by power. There also occurs a self-transcendence in violence which is like the self-transcendence in ecstatic experiences. The total absorption, furthermore, that is present in violence is also present in ecstasy. In our day of anti-intellectualism, when there is a reaction against all things sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought, the absorption of the self in violence is especially attractive. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

In what ways does violence yield for us this experience of ecstasy, this sense of significance? When a lightrail train was stopped in Sacramento, police tried to arrest those who had jumped on [the train]. As they moved to grab people, suspects split in all directions—only three or four were caught. They ran, yipping and whooping, away from the tracks and through the streets, like a bunch of crazy expletives. They considered themselves victorious warriors. They were ecstatic. They had stopped the lightrail train. They stopped the war machine dead in its tracks. Whatever one’s impression, this is surely an experience of the ecstasy of violence. A less dramatic example, but one containing some of the ingredients of ecstasy in their embryonic form, comes from my own experience in graduate school. Several young African Americans in California had been accused of sexual assault and had been lynched by a mod without a semblance of a trial. A clergyman in New York had, in a sermon, commended the lynching. As a result a group of us decided to picket the church the following Sunday morning. The incident would not be worth relating expect for the fact of the excitement, even joy, that went hand in hand with our anxiety on this occasion. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

Painting the signs the night before, organizing the march, feeling the solidarity with the others—comrades who would walk beside me in this cause, the rightness of which we had no doubt—all of these activities has an element of ecstasy. I recall walking home late at night after these preparations and finding, when I was alone, that questions and doubts came into my mind as to the effectiveness of our proposes course. However, no! My comrades and I had decided, and I must not let them down. We expected some opposition in the form of mounted police (which actually occurred); we hoped it would not be too violent but great enough to make an impression on the news media. We also secretly hoped for opposition because that would give an added cohesion to our group and would even add to our ecstasy. An extreme emphasis on individual responsibility can become an egocentric manipulation of others, a compulsion that defeats genuine mortality and yields only a counterfeit sense of significance. Most Americans are oppressed by the sense of individual responsibility, not only for general humanitarian reasons but for reasons specific to our own nation. An American receives very little assistance from one’s culture in carrying this responsibility. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

Americans have no sacraments like penance, no rituals like confession (except in psychoanalysis for the few) to help free them from the burden of the past. The whole weight rests on the shoulders of the individual, and we have already seen that one feels powerless. Perhaps this accounts for the moralistic and picayune forms that responsibility tends to take: in the past it centered on not smoking and not drinking, and now it centers on not stepping on insects and not throwing away anything made of plastic. In any case a person cannot carry the burden of responsibility for one’s own moral salvation without a corresponding depth of culture to give one structure. Otherwise one will end up feeling isolated, lonely, and separated from others. This emerging sense of ecstasy in a successful rebellion accounts for some importance changes in the character of the rebellion itself. The typical rebellion normally begins with highly moral aims—the students at Berkeley, for example, proclaimed their opposition to the unhuman facelessness of the modern factory-university. However, with the state of ecstasy which accompanies the initial success, the psychological character and meaning of the rebellion change. A new elan is added. For many, the goal of the rebellion now becomes the ecstasy itself rather then the original conditions. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

The rebellion has become the high point in the lives of many of the rebels, and they seem dimly aware that they will never have that much sense of significance again. This often leads to an elaboration and multiplying of the original conditions that the administration, be it of a university or a prison, is asked to meet. The rebels are saying, in this action, that the conditions originally set are no longer the main reason for rebellion. Hence, at Brandeis, the university president remained in his office during the week of the African American sit-in to negotiate with the rebels, and each day the African Americans sent over a different bargaining committee with different conditions. It is as though they were saying by this action: “Can you not see that this rebellion means much more to us than the specific conditions?” This also accounts for the curious presentation of the condition of amnesty, which obviously cannot be granted without complete capitulation on the part of the administration. I interpret this as saying: “All along what we wanted was this experience of ecstasy, this sense of our own significance.” The ecstasy may reach such a pitch that it approaches Malcolm X’s concept of “revolutionary suicide.” #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

The value of the group contrasted with the individual must also be mentioned. The group is constituted around issues that are, to the participant, of life-and-death importance. The question about any group is: What is its psychic center—to what is it devoted? The deep need of a being not to feel lost and lonely in the World has, of course, been previously satisfied by the concept of a God who has created this World and is concerned with each and every creature. When the theory of evolution destroyed the picture of God as the supreme Creator, confidence in God as the all-powerful Father of humans feel wit it, although many were able to combine a belief in God with the acceptance of the Darwinian theory. However, for many of those whom God was dethroned, the need for a godlike figure did not disappear. Some proclaimed a new God, Evolution, and worshipped Darwin as one’s profit. For many, Darwin had revealed the ultimate truth regarding the origin of all beings; all human phenomena which might be approached and explained by economic, religious, ethical, or political consideration were to be understood from the point of view of evolution. This quasi-religious attitude toward Darwinism becomes apparent when the term “the great constructors,” is used referring to selection and mutation. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

The methods and aims of the great constructors are used very much in the way a Christian might speak of God’s acts. When the singular for of the great constructor is used, one is coming even closer to the analogy with God. We know that in the evolution of vertebrates, the bond of personal love and friendship was the epoch-making invention created by the great constructors when it became necessary for two or more individuals of an aggressive species to live peacefully together and to work for a common end. We know that human society is built on the foundation of this bound, but we have to recognize the fact that the bond has become too limited to encompass all that it should: it prevents aggression only between those who know each other and are friends, while obviously it is all active hostility between all beings of all nations or ideologies that must be stopped. The obvious conclusion is that love and friendship should embrace all humanity, that we should love all our human brothers and sister and cousins indiscriminately. This commandment is not new. Our reason is quite able to understand its necessity as our feeling is able to appreciate its beauty, but nevertheless, made as we are, we are unable to obey it. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

We can feel the full, warm emotion of friendship and love for individuals, and the utmost exertion of willpower cannot alter this fact. However, the great constructors can, and I believe they will. I believe in the power of human reason, as I believe in the power of natural selection. I believe that reason can and will exert a selection pressure in the right direction. I believe that this, in the not too distant future, will endow our descendants with the faculty of fulfilling the greatest and most beautiful of all commandments. The great constructors will win out, where God and beings have failed. The commandment of brotherly love has to remain ineffective, but the great constructors will give it life. This ends in a true confession of faith: I believe, I believe, I believe…reason is one of the strengths human beings have which alone will save them from confusion and decay. Genuinely the need for self-knowledge, by uncovering one’s unconscious strivings, is necessary. We can overcome the loss of God by turning to reason—and feel painfully weak. However, we must not turn to new idols. Many people who worship Satan speak of how the Devil is their Ruler and how through serving him, they serve Christ. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

Why have these assertions, that were so central at the time the gospel was first preached, lost their significance in our own periods? The reason, I believe is possessed in the words “healing” and “casting out demons,” that have been misunderstood as miracle-healing, based on magic power and magic self-suggestions. There is no doubt that such phenomena occur. They happen here, and everywhere else in the World. They happen and are used in the midst of Christianity. However, the church was right when it felt that this was not the task of the church and its ministers. It is an abuse of the name of the Christ to use it as a magic formula. Nevertheless, the words of our test remain valid. They belong to the message of the Christ, and they tell us about something that belongs to the Christ as the Christ—the power to conquer the demonic forces that control our lives, mind and body. And I believe that, of all the different ways to communicate the message of Christ to others, this way will prove to be the most adequate for the people of our time. It is something they can understand. For in every country of the World, including our own, there is an awareness of the power of evil as has not existed for centuries. If we look at our period as a whole, we will realize that not only special groups fall under the judgment of Jesus’ ironic words—“Those who are well have no need of a physician, but those who are sick.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

In spite of the many who resist this insight, we know that we are sick, that we are not whole. The central message for our contemporaries, including ourselves, the message awaited by many both within and outside our congregations is the good news of the healing power that is in the World and whose expression is the Christ. The task of healing demands of you insight into the nature of life and the human situation. People often ask, in passionate despair, if sickness is one of the things to be healed by divine order, why the divine order of things includes sickness? This very natural question, which, for many of us, is the stumbling block of our faith, points to the riddle of evil in the World of God. You will have to deal with this question more often than with any other. And you must not avoid the question by retiring being the term “mystery.” Of course, there is mystery—divine mystery—and, in contrast to it, the mystery of evil. However, it belongs to the insights demanded of you that you put the mystery in its right pace, and explain what can and must be explained. Evil in the divine order is not only mystery; it is also revelation. It reveals the greatness and danger of life. One who can become sick is greater than one who cannot, than that which is bound to remain what it is, unable to be split in itself. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

Memory is desperate to leave us. Memory knows that we cannot endure its company. Memory would reduce us to fools. Ah, listen to old mortals when they have nothing but memories of childhood. How they go on mistaking those persons around them for persons long dead, and no one listens. How often I have wondered at their long uninterrupted conversations with ghost in empty rooms. I think it is very important thing to understand about Christianity. It was from the beginnings, it seems, a religion of great quarrels and wars, and it wooed the power of temporal authorities, and made them part of itself in the hope of resolving through sheer force. Christianity, at one time, was considered a great mystery, a little cult, which had begun in Jerusalem of all place, and grew to such tremendous size. However, when some first heard Christians preaching, they thought there was no chance that this religion could gain ground because it placed far too much responsibility upon the new members to avoid all contact with the revered gods of Greece and Rome, and many thought the sect would soon die out. However, no such thing happened, and Rome in the three hundreds was thronged with Christians. For their apparently magical ceremonies, they met in the catacombs and also in private homes. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

One who alone is fee is able to surrender to the demonic forces that turn one’s freedom into bondage. The gift of freedom implies the danger of servitude; and the abundance of life implies the danger of sickness. Human’s life is abundant life, infinitely complex, inexhaustivle in its possibilities, even in the vitally poorest human beings. Being’s life is most open to disease. For in being’s life more than in any other being, there are divergent trends that must continuously be kept in unity. Health is not the lack of divergent trends in our bodily or mental or spiritual life, but the power to keep them united. And healing is the act of reuniting them after the disruption of their unity. “Heal the sick” means—help them to regain their lost unity without depriving them of their abundance, without throwing them into a poverty of life perhaps by their own consent. For there is a sick desire to escape sickness by cutting off what can produce sickness. I have known people who are sick only because of their fear of sickness. Sometimes it may be necessary to reduce the richness of life, and to establish a poorer life on a smaller basis. However, this in itself is not health. It is the most widespread mental disease. It can be transformed into health only if what is lost on a lower level is regained on a higher level, perhaps on the highest level—that of our infinite concern, our life with God. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

Many are satisfied if they can attain just a glimpse of the Overself. However, a few are not. They seek permanent abidance in the Overself, and that in the greatest possible degree. However, the main object of the quest is, after all, not these secondary betterments in bodily health, nerve, character, self-control—welcome as they are—but the discovery of truth and the living within the presence of the divine. There is no such thing as an ever-receding goal on the Ultimate Path because there are not ten or twenty ultimate truths. There is only a single, final truth. This is the objective on this path and once one knows it one has attained the goal. We must reflect in the mind and act the true being of beings. If one thinks the goal of all tis endeavour is merely to become frozen into passivity which never expresses itself and a contentment which never sees the miseries, the disasters, or the tragedies of life, they are mistaken. One seeks to fulfil a steady purpose which remains and is not an emotional froth which abates and later vanishes. There is a wide confusion in religio-mystic circles as to what a sage is really like, what a spiritually enlightened master really experiences, what both say and do when living in the World of ordinary people, how they behave and appear. On these points truth is inextricably bound up with superstition, fact with exaggeration, and wisdom with sentimentality. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

There is also a wide confusion of the Real with its attributes and aspects, that is to say, with human reactions, interpretations, and experiences of IT. The conventional picture of what a being attuned to God is like needs to be revised. It is not the invisible imprimatur of any pontifical canonization that really makes a being one of God’s saints but the invisible imprimatur of one’s Overself. There is no higher point in human existence. Without direct experience of the inner nature of things, without personal revelation from the Overself, the only kind of knowledge beings can possess is obtained by the use of logical thinking assisted by memory. The cosmogony of a sage is truly scientific, for it is exactly descriptive of what really exists whereas the other kind of knowledge is merely argumentative. Philosophy uses the attained being not as a god for groveling worship and blind obedience, but as an ideal for effectual admiration and reverent analysis. To worship one as a god, to put him beyond all possible criticism, will only confuse our thought about him and obstruct our understanding of one. “And now it came to pass that Alma, having seen the afflictions of the humble followers of God, and the persecutions which were heaped upon them by the remainder of one’s people, and seeing all their inequality, began to be very sorrowful; nevertheless the Spirit of the Lord did not fail him,” reports Alma 4.15. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

One Seeks to Fulfill a Steady Purpose which Remains and is Not an Emotional Froth which Abates and Later Vanishes

September 10, 2019 2:09 am

Ah, what a spectacle! Amid dozens of little candle stubs and Earthen lamps full of burning fat, there stood a propped some twenty or more ikons, some very old and darkened in their gold frames, and some radiant, as though only yesterday they had come alive through the power of God. We now consider some dilemmas which arise from the relation of the unconscious to techniques and machines. No discussion of creativity and the unconscious in our society can possible avoid these difficult and important problems. We live in a World that has become mechanized to an amazingly high degree. Irrational unconscious phenomena are always a threat to this mechanization. Poets may be delightful creatures in the meadow or the garret, but they are menaces on the assembly line. Mechanization requires uniformity, predictability, and orderliness; and the very fact that unconscious phenomena are original and irrational is already an inevitable threat to the bourgeois order and uniformity. This is one reason people in our modern Western civilization have been afraid of unconscious and irrational experience. For the potentialities that surge up in them from deeper mental wells simply do not fit the technology which has become so essential for our World. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

What people today do out of fear of irrational elements in themselves as well as in other people is to put tools and mechanics between themselves and the unconscious World. This protects them from being grasped by the frightening and threatening aspects of irrational experience. I am saying nothing whatever, I am sure it will be understood, against technology or techniques or mechanics in themselves. What I am saying is that the danger always exists that our technology will serve as a buffer between us and nature, a block between us and the deeper dimensions of our own experience. Tools and techniques ought to be an extension of consciousness, but they can just as easily be a protection from consciousness. Then tools become a defense mechanisms—specifically against the wider and more complex dimensions of consciousness that we call the unconscious. Our mechanisms and technology then make us uncertain in the impulses of the spirit. Western civilization since the Renaissance has centrally emphasized techniques and mechanics. Thus it is understandable that the creative impulses of ourselves and our forefathers, again since the Renaissance, should have been channeled into the making of technical things—creativity directed toward the advance and application of science. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

Such channeling of creativity into technical pursuits is appropriate on one level but serves as a psychological defense on a deeper level. This means that technology will be clung to, believed in, and depended on far beyond its legitimate sphere, since it also serves as a defense against our fears of irrational phenomena. Thus the very success of technological creativity—and that its success is magnificent does not need to be heralded by me—is a threat to its own existence. For if we are not open to the unconscious, irrational, and transrational aspects of creativity, then our science and technology have helped to block us off from what I shall call creativity of the spirit. By this I mean creativity that has noting to do with technical use; I mean creativity in art, poetry, music, and other areas that exist for our delight and the deepening and enlarging of meaning in our lives rather than for making money or for increasing technical power. To the extent that we lose this free, original creativity of the spirit as it is exemplified in poetry and music and art, we shall also lose our scientific creativity. Scientists themselves, particularly the physicists, have told us that the creativity of science is bound up with the freedom of human beings to create in the free, pure sense. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

In modern physics it is very clear that the discoveries that later become utilized for our technological gains are generally made in the first place because a physicist lets his imagination go and discovers something simply for the joy of discovery. However, this always runs the risk of radically upsetting our previously nicely worked-out theories, as it did when Einstein introduced his theory of relativity, and Heisenberg introduced his principle of indeterminacy. My point here is more than the conventional distinction between pure and applied science. The creativity of the spirit does and must threaten the structure and presuppositions of our rational, orderly society and way of life. Unconscious, irrational urges are bound by their very nature to be a threat to our rationality, and the anxiety we experience thereupon is inescapable. I am proposing that the creativity coming from the preconscious and unconscious is not only important for art and poetry and music; but is essential in the long run also for our science. To shrink from the anxiety this entails, and block off the threatening new insights and forms this engenders, is not only to render our society banal and progressively more empty, but also to cut off as well the headwaters in the rough and rocky mountains of the stream that later becomes the river of creativity in our science. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

The new physicists and mathematicians, for fairly obvious reasons, have been furthest ahead in realizing this interrelation between unconscious, irrational illumination and scientific discovery. Let me now give an illustration of the problem we face. In the several times I have been on television, I have been struck by two different feelings. One was wonder at the fact that my words, spoken in the studio, could be delivered instantaneously into the living rooms of two million people. The other was that whenever I got an original idea, whenever in these programs I began to struggle with some unformed, new concept, whenever I had an original thought that might cross some frontier of the discussion, at that point I was cut off. I have no resentment against emcees who do this; they know their business, and they realize that if what goes on in the program does not fit in the World of listeners all the way from Georgia to Wyoming, the viewers will get up, go to the kitchen, get a can of beer, come back, and switch on a Western. When you have the potentialities for tremendous mass communication, you inevitably tend to communicate on the level of the two-million people who are listening. What you say must have some place in their World, must at least be partly known to them. Inevitably, then, originality, the breaking of frontiers, the radical newness of ideas and images are at best dubious and at worst totally unacceptable. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

Mass communication—wonder as it may be technologically and something to be appreciated and valued—presents us with a serious danger, the danger of conformism, due to the fact that we all view the same things at the same time in al the cities of the country. This very fact throws considerable weight on the side of regularity and uniformity and against originality and freer creativity. By the middle of the 19^th century: individualism had begun to be replaced by collective forms of economic and political life; harmony of interests by inharmonious struggle of classes and organized pressures; rational discussions undermined by expert decisions on complicated issues, by recognition of the interested bias of argument by vested positions; and by the discovery of the effectiveness of irrational appeal to the citizen. Moreover, certain structural changes of modern society, which we shall presently consider, had begun to cut off the public from the power of active decision. The transformation of public into mass is of particular concern to us, for it provides an important clue to the meaning of the power elite. If that elite is truly responsible to, or even exists in connection with, a community of publics, it carries a very different meaning than if such a public is being transformed into a society of masses. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

The United States of America today is not altogether a mass society, and it has never been altogether a community of publics. These phrases are names for extreme types; they point to certain features of reality, but they are themselves constructions; social reality is always some sort of mixture of the two. Yet we cannot readily understand just how much of which is mixed into our situation if we do not first understand, in terms of explicit dimensions, the clear-cut and extreme types: If we are to grasp the differences between public and mass, at least four dimensions must be attended to. There is first, the ratio of the givers of opinion to the receivers, which is the simplest way to state the social meaning of the formal media of mass communication. More than anything else, it is the shift in this ratio which is central to the problems of the public and of public opinion in latter-day phases of democracy. At one extreme on the scale of communication, two people talk personally with each other; at the opposite extreme, one spokes person talks impersonally through a network of communications to millions of listeners and viewers. In between these extremes there are assemblages and political rallies, parliamentary sessions, law-court debates, small discussion circles dominated by one being, open discussion circles with talk moving freely back and forth among fifty people, and so on. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

The second dimension to which we must pay attention is the possibility of answering back an opinion without internal or external reprisals being taken. Technical conditions of the means of communication, in imposing a lower ratio of speakers to listeners, may obviate the possibility of freely answering back. Informal rules, resting upon conventional sanction and upon the informal structure of opinion leadership, may govern who can speak, when, and for how long. Such rules may or may not be in congruence with formal rules and with institutional sanctions which govern the process of communication. In the extreme case, we may conceive of an absolute monopoly of communication to pacified media groups whose members cannot answer back even in private. At the opposite extreme, the condition may allow and the rules may uphold the wide and symmetrical formations of opinion. We must also consider the relation of the formation of opinion to its realization in social action, the ease with which opinion is effective in the shaping of decisions of powerful consequences. This opportunity for people to act out their opinions collectively is of course limited by their positions in the structure of power. This structure may be such as to limit decisively this capacity, or it may allow or invite such action. It may confine social action to local areas or it may enlarge the area of opportunity; it may make action intermittent or more or less continuous. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

There is, finally, the degree to which institutional authority, with its sanctions and controls, penetrates the public. Here the problem is the degree to which the public has genuine autonomy from instituted authority. Atone extreme, no agent of formal authority moves among the autonomous public. At the opposite extreme, the public is terrorized into uniformity by the infiltration of information and the universalization of suspicion. One thinks of the late Nazi street-and-block system, the eighteenth-century Japanese Kumi, the Soviet cell structure. In the extreme, the formal ebb and flow of influence by discussion which is thus killed off. By combining these several points, we can construct little models or diagrams of several types of societies. Since the problem of public opinion as we know it is set by the eclipse of the classic bourgeois public, we are here concerned with only two types: public and mass. In a public, as we may understand the term, virtually as many people express opinions as receive them. Public communications are so organized that there is a chance immediately and effectively to answer back any opinion expressed in public. Opinion formed by such discussion readily finds an outlet in effective action, even against—if necessary—the prevailing system of authority. And authoritative institutions do not penetrate the public, which is thus more or less autonomous in its operations. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

When these conditions prevail, we have the working model of a community of publics, and this model fits closely the several assumptions of classical democratic theory. At the opposite extreme, in a mass, far fewer people express opinions than receive them; for the community of publics becomes an abstract collection of individuals who receive impressions from the mass media. The communications that prevail are so organized that it is difficult or impossible for the individual to answer back immediately or with any effect. The realization of opinion in action is controlled by authorities who organize and control the channels of such action. The mass has no autonomy from institutions; on the contrary, agents of authorized institutions penetrate this mass, reducing any autonomy it may have in the formation of opinion by discussion. The public and the mass maybe most readily distinguished by their dominant modes of communication: in a community of publics, discussion is the ascendant means of communication, and the mass media, if they exist, simply enlarge and animate discussion, linking one primary public with the discussion of another. In a mass society, the dominant type of communication is the formal media, and the publics become mere media markets: all those exposed to the contents of given mass media. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

When we look upon the public from almost any angle of vision that we might answer, we realize that we have moved a considerable distance along the road to the mass society. At the end of that road there is totalitarianism, as in Nazi Germany or in Communist China. We are not yet at the end. In the Untied States of America today, media markets are not entirely ascendant over primary publics. However, surely we can see that many aspects of the public life of our times are more the features of a mass society than of a community. What is happening might again be stated in terms of the historical parallel between the economic market and the public of public opinion. In brief, there is a movement from widely scattered little powers to concentrated powers and the attempt at monopoly control from powerful centers, which being partially hidden, are centers of manipulation as well as of authority. The small shop serving the neighborhood is replaced by the anonymity of the national corporation: mass advertisement replaces the personal influence of opinion between merchant and customer. The political leader hooks up one’s speech to a national network and speaks, with appropriate personal touches, to a million people he never saw and never will see. Entire brackets of professions and industries are in the opinion business, impersonally manipulating the public for hire. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

The craving for affection may be restricted to certain groups of persons, perhaps to one with which there are interests in common, such as a political or religious group; or it may be restricted to one of the genders. If the need for reassurance is restricted to the opposite gender the condition may superficially appear to be normal, and will usually be defended as normal by the person concerned. There are women, for example, who, if they do not have men around them, feel miserable and anxious; they will start an affair, break it off after short time, again feel miserable and anxious, start another affair, and so on. That this is no genuine longing for relationship with men is shown by the fact that the relationships are conflicting and unsatisfactory. Rather, these women choose indiscriminately any man; they want only to have one near them, and are not found of any of them. And as a rule they do not even find physical satisfaction. In reality, of course, the entire picture is more complicated; I am highlighting only that art which is played in it by anxiety and the need for affection. One may find similar pattern in men; they will have a compulsion to be liked by any woman and will feel uneasy in the company of other men. If the need for affection is concentrated on the same gender, this may be one of the determining factors in latent or manifest homosexuality. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

If the way to the opposite gender is barred by too much anxiety, the need for affection may be directed toward the same gender. Needless to say, this anxiety need not be manifest, but may be concealed by a feeling of disgust or disinterest concerning the opposite gender. Since getting affection is of vital importance it follows that the neurotic will pay any price for it, mostly without realizing that one is doing so. The most common ways in which the price is paid are an attitude of compliance and an emotional dependence. The complying attitude may take the form of not daring to disagree with or to criticize the other person, of showing nothing but devotion, admiration and docility. If persons of this type do allow themselves to make critical or derogatory remarks they feel anxiety, even though their remarks may be harmless. The complying attitude can go so far that the neurotic will extinguish not only aggressive impulses but all tendencies toward self-assertion, will let oneself be abused and will make any sacrifice, no matter how detrimental this may be. One’s self-abnegation may appears as, for example, a wish to have bipolar disorder because the person whose affection one desires is interested in research in bipolar disorder, implying that having this illness might perhaps win the other’s interest. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

Closely akin to the attitude of compliance, and interwoven with it, is the emotional dependence which results from the neurotic’s need to cling to someone who holds out the promise of protection. This dependence not only may cause endless suffering but may even be wholly destructive. There are relationships, for example, in which a person becomes helplessly dependent on another, even through one is fully aware that the relationship is untenable. If one does not get a kind work or smile, one feels as if the World would go to pieces, one may even have an attack of anxiety at the time one expects a telephone call, and feel utterly desolate if the other is prevented from seeing one. However, one is unable to break away. In the primary public the competition of opinions goes on between people holding views in the service of their interests and their reasoning. However, in the mass society of media markets, competition, if any, goes on between the manipulators with their mass media on the one hand, and the people receiving their propaganda on the other. Under such conditions, it is not surprising that there should arise a conception of public opinion as a mere reaction—we cannot say response—to the content of the mass media. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

In this view, the public is merely the collectivity of individuals each rather passively exposed to the mass media and rather helplessly opened up to the suggestion and manipulations that flow from these media. The fact of manipulation from centralized points of control constitutes, as it were, an expropriation of the old multitude of little opinion producers and consumers operating in a free and balanced market. Usually the structure of an emotional dependence is more complicated. In relationships in which one person becomes dependent on the other there is invariably a great deal of resentment. The dependent person resents being enslaved; one resents having to comply, but continues to do so out of fear of losing support from and individual or the masses. Not knowing that it is one’s own anxiety which creates the situation, one will easily assume that one’s subjugation has been brought about by the other’s imposing on one. Resentment growing on such a basis has to be repressed, because the affection of the other is bitterly needed, and this repression in turn generates new anxiety, with a subsequent need for reassurance and hence a reinforced impulse to cling to the other. Thus in certain neurotic persons emotional dependence produces a very realistic and even justified fear that their life is being ruined. When the fear is very great they may seek to protect themselves against this dependence by not attaching themselves to anyone. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

The thirst for perfection is certainly present within us. This thirst is a pointer to its eventual slaking. However, there is no necessary implication that this will be attained whilst we are in the flesh and on a level of existence where everything is doomed to decay and death. The perfection we seek and the immortality we hope for are more likely to be mental rather than physical achievements. For all mystics are at least agreed that there is such a level of untainted, purely spiritual being. The fundamental task of beings is first to free themselves of animalist and egotist tyrannies, and second, to evolve into awareness of one’s spiritual self. The goal is to free oneself from the meshes and fetters, to being all the forces of one’s being under mastery. The aim is to emancipate oneself from Earthly bondage, to redeem oneself from animal enslavement. One’s quest can come to an end only when the unveiled Truth is seen, not in momentary glimpses, but for the rest of one’s lifetime without a break. We have to bring this awareness of the Overself as a permanent and perpetual feature into active life. It is perpetual abidance in the divine that is to be sought. “Even so every good tree bringeth forth good fruit; but a corrupt tree bringeth forth evil fruit. Every tree that bringeth not fort good fruit is hewn down, and cast into the fire. Wherefore, by their fruits ye shall know them,” reports 3 Nephi 14.17-20. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

Randolph Harris II International Institute

Category Archives: Nightclub

Come to Me and You Will Find Rest in Your Souls–I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End!

CRESLEIGH MEADOWS AT PLUMAS RANCH

Plumas Lake, CA | from the mid $300’s

Coming Soon!

#CresleighHomes

The Challenges You Face in Your Own Life Experience Will be Trying, to Say the Least, for it Has a Glory and Naught Else Can Share it!

Cresleigh Homes

No Event Could Be Outside the Knowledge of God, No Entity Could be Beyond the Power of God!

All Along What We Wanted Was this Experience of Ecstasy, this Sense of Our Own Significance!

One Seeks to Fulfill a Steady Purpose which Remains and is Not an Emotional Froth which Abates and Later Vanishes

Post navigation