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The Illuminate Stands in the Centre of the World-Movement and Remains Fixed in the Holy Presence!

September 5, 2019 10:35 pm

Come on, let us pack up the suitcase and go down to the kitchen. Tell your people not to open all those boxes, just to move them to where they will be safe. I will make you some good coffee. I make the best coffee. I make better coffee than Reese Witherspoon or her mother Mrs. Betty. While immensely augmenting our comforts, our conveniences and our leisure, and disproportionately raisin the real income of the less affluent, industry has also impoverished life. Mass production and consumption, mobility, the homogenization of taste and finally of society were among the costs of higher productivity. They de-individualized life and drained each of our ends of meaning as we achieved it. Pursuit thus became boundless. The increased leisure time would hang heavy on our hands, were it not for the mass media and social media which help us burn it away like coal on the grill during Summer time. They inexorably exclude art anything of significance when it cannot be reduced to mass entertainment, but they divert us from the passage of the time they keep us from filling. They also tend to draw into the mass market talents and works that might otherwise produce new visions and they abstract much of the capacity to experience art or life directly and deeply. What they do, however, is what people demand. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

We scrutinized the causes, the effects and the general characteristics of popular culture and found them unavoidable in a mass-production economy. However, we have hardly touched on the contents of popular culture. Some work on this subject has been done and much remains. Limitations of scope also restricted us from stressing the many material advantages of industrialism. We do not intend to deny them. Finally, prophecy too is beyond our means. True, extrapolation of present trends makes a dismal picture. However, there is comfort in the fact that no extrapolation has ever predicted the future correctly. Elements can be forecast, but only prophets can do more (and they are unreliable, or hard to interpret). History has always had surprises up its sleeves—if it changed its ways, it would be most surprising. Our ignorance here leaves the rosy as well as the grim possibilities open for the future. However, this des not allow us to avert our gaze from the present and from the outlook it affords. Neither is cheerful. The gist of any culture is an ethos which gives meaning to the lives of those who dwell in it. If this be the purport of popular culture, it is foiled. We have suggested how it comes to grief in various aspects. What makes popular culture as a whole so disconcerting is best set forth now by exploring the relationship among diversion, art and boredom. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

The gist of any culture is an ethos which gives meaning to the lives of those who dwell in it. If this be the purport of popular culture, it is foiled. We have suggested how it comes to grief in various aspects. What makes popular culture as a whole so disconcerting is best set forth now by exploring the relationship among diversion, art and boredom. Dr. Freud thought of art as a diversion, an illusion in contrast to reality, a substitute gratification like a dream. In this he fully shared what was and still is the popular view of art. It is a correct view—of popular art, of pseudo-art produced to meet the demand for diversion. However, it is a mistaken, reductive definition of art. Dr. Freud finds the dreamwork attempting to hide or disguise the dreamer’s true wishes and fears so that they may not alarm one’s consciousness. The substitute gratification produced by the dreamwork, mainly by displacements, helps the dreamer continue sleeping. However, one major function of art is precisely to undo this dreamwork, to see through disguises, to reveal to our consciousness the true nature of our wishes and fears. The dreamwork covers, to protect sleep. Art discovers and attempts to awaken the sleeper. Whereas dreamwork tries to assist repression, the work of art intensifies and depends perception and experience of the World and of the self. It attempts to pluck the heart of the mystery, to show where the actions is possessed in its true nature. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Though dreams and art both may disregard literal reality, they do so to answer opposite needs. The dream may ignore reality to keep the sleeper’s eyes closed. Art transcends immediate reality to encompass wider views, penetrate into deeper experience and lead to a fuller confrontation of being’s predicament. The dreamwork even tries to cover upsetting basic impulses with harmless immediate reality. Art, in contrast, ignores the immediate only to uncover the essential. Artistic revelation need not be concerned with outer or with social reality. It may be purely aesthetic. However, if it is art, it can never be an illusion. Far from distracting from reality, art is a form of reality which strips life of the fortuitous to lay bare its essentials and permit us to experience them. In popular culture, however, art is all that Dr. Freud said art is, and no more. Like the dreamwork, popular culture distorts human experience to draw substitute gratifications or reassurances from it. Like the dreamwork, it presents an illusion in contrast to reality. For this reason, popular art falls short of satisfaction. And all of popular culture leaves one vaguely discontented because, like popular art, it is only a substitute gratification; like a dream, it distracts from life and from real gratification. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

Substitute gratifications are uneconomic, as Dr. Freud often stressed. They do not in the end gratify as much, and they cost more psychologically than the real gratifications which they shut out. This is why sublimation and realistic control are to be preferred to substitution and repression. That is why reality is to be preferred to illusion, full experience to symptomatic displacements and defense mechanisms. Yet substitute gratifications, habitually resorted to, incapacitate the individual for real ones. In part they cause or strengthen internalized hindrances to real and gratifying experience; in part they are longed for because internal barriers have already blocked real gratification of the original impulses. Though the specific role it plays varies with the influence of other formative factors in the life of each individual, popular culture must be counted among the baffling variety of causes and effects of defense mechanisms and repressions. It may do much damage, or do none at all, or be the only relief possible, however deficient. Yet, whenever popular plays a major role in life significant repressions have taken (or are taking) place. Popular culture supplants those gratifications, which are no longer sough because of the repression of the original impulses. However, it is a substitute and spurious. It founders and cannot succeed because neither desire nor gratification are true. “Nought’s had, all’s spent/ where desire is got without content.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

It may seem paradoxical to describe popular culture in terms of repression. Far from repressed, it strikes one as uninhibited. Yet the seeming paradox disappears if we assume that the uproarious din, the raucous noise and the shouting are attempts to drown the shriek of unused capacities, of repressed individuality, as it is bent into futility. Repression bars impulses from awareness without satisfying them. This damming up always generates a feeling of futility and apathy or, in defense against it, an agitated need for action. The former may be called listless, the later restless boredom. They may alternate and they may enter consciousness only through anxiety and a sense of meaninglessness, fatigue and nonfulfillment. Sometimes there is such a general numbing of the eagerness too often turned aside that only a dull feeling of dreariness and emptiness remains. More often, there is an insatiable longing for things to happen. The external World is to supply these events to fill the emptiness. Yet the bored person cannot designate what would satisfy a craving as ceaseless as it is vague. It is not satisfied by any event supplied. There are characteristics of the experience that are supposed to follow: there should be a suddenness of illumination; the insight may occur, and to some extent must occur, against what one has clung to consciously in one’s theories; there should be a vividness of the incident and the whole scene that surrounds it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

For art to satisfying a craving there should also be expressed brevity and conciseness of insight, along with the experience of immediate certainty. Continuing with the practical conditions which one cites as necessary for this experience are hard work on the topic prior to the breakthrough may occur (that could be in thought or visualization or interpretation), and keep in mind that the necessity of alternating work and relaxation, with the insight often coming at the moment of the break between the two, or at least within the break. This last point is particularly interesting. It is probably something everyone has learned: if they alternate the classroom with the beach, professors will lecture with more inspiration; when they write for two hours, then pitch quoits, and then go back to their writing, authors will write better. However, certainly more than the mere mechanical alternation is involved. I propose that in our day this alteration of the market place and mountain requires the capacity for the constructive use of solitude. It requires the capacity for the constructive use of solitude. It requires that we be able to retire from a World that is too much with us, that we be able to be quiet, that we let the solitude work for us and in its. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

It is a characteristic of our time that many people are afraid of solitude: to be alone is a sign one is a social failure, for no one would be alone if he or she could help it. It often occurs to me that people living in our modern, hectic civilization, amid the constant din of radio and TV subjecting themselves to every kind of stimulation whether the passive sort of TV or the more active sort of conversation, work, and activity, that people with such constant preoccupations find it exceedingly difficult to let insights from unconscious depths break through. Of course, when an individual is afraid of the irrational—that is, of the unconscious dimensions of experience—one tries to keep busiest, trues to keep most noise going on about one. The avoidance of the anxiety of solitude by constant agitated diversion is what we likened to the settlers in the early says of America who used to beat on pots and pans at night to make enough din to keep the wolves away. Obviously if we are to experience insight from our unconscious, we need to be able to give ourselves to solitude. What determines why a given idea comes through from the unconscious? Why this particular insight and not one of a dozen others? Is it because a particular insight is the is the answer which is empirically most accurate? No. Is It because it is the insight which will pragmatically work best? Again, no. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

The useful combinations [that come through from the unconscious] are precisely the most beautiful, I mean those best able to charm this special sensibility that all mathematicians know, but of which the profane are so unaware as often to be tempted to smile at it. Among the great numbers of combinations blindly formed by the subliminal self, almost all are without interest and without utility; but just for that reason they are also without effect upon the esthetic sensibility. Consciousness will never know them; only certain ones are harmonious, and, consequently, at once useful and beautiful. They will be capable of touching this special sensibility of the geometer of which I have just spoken, and which, one aroused, will call our attention to them, and thus give them occasion to become conscious. This is why the mathematicians and physicists talk about the elegance of a theory. The utility is subsumed as part of the character of being beautiful. The harmony of an internal form, the inner consistency of a theory, the character of beauty that touches one’s sensibilities—these are significant factors determining why a given idea emerges. As a psychoanalyst, I can only add that my experience in helping people achieve insights reveals the same phenomenon—that insights emerge not chiefly because they are rationally true or even helpful, but because they have a certain form, the form that is beautiful because it completes an incomplete Gestalt. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

When this breakthrough of a creative insight into consciousness occurs, we have the subjective conviction that the form should be this way and no other way. It is characteristic of the creative experience that it strikes us as true—with immediate certainty. And we think, nothing else could have been true in that situation, and we wonder why we were so stupid as not to have seen it earlier. The reason, of course, is that we were not psychologically ready to see it. We could not yet intend the new truth or creative form in art or scientific theory. We were not yet open on the level of intentionality. However, the truth itself is simply there. This reminds us of what the Zen Buddhists keep saying—that at these moments is reflected and revealed a reality of the Universe that does not depend merely on our own subjectivity, but is as though we only had our eyes closed and suddenly we open them and there it is, as simple as can be. The new reality has a kind of immutable, eternal quality. The experience that “this is the way reality is and is not it is strange we did not see it sooner” may have a religious quality with artists. This is why many artists feel that something holy is going on when they paint, that there is something in the act of creating which is like a religious revelation. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

There are ways that can help society avoid the tragic effects of the aggressive instinct; indeed, in the nuclear age one is almost forced to look for possibilities for peace in order to make one’s theory of the innate destructiveness of beings acceptable. I do not mind admitting that I think I have something to teach humankind that may help it to change for the better. This conviction is not as presumptuous as it might seem. The most important precept is to know thy self. We must deepen our insight into the causal concatenations governing our own behavior—it is the laws of evolution. As one element in this knowledge to which we must give special emphasis is the objective, ethological investigation of all the possibilities of discharging aggression in its primal form on substitute objects. The psychoanalytic study of so-called sublimation also helps as it is a mature type defense mechanism, in which socially unacceptable impulses or idealizations are transformed into socially acceptable actions or behavior, possibly resulting in a long-term conversion of the initial impulse. There is also another method which will helps us live more productive lives and that is the promotion of personal acquaintance and, if possible, friendship between individual members of different ideologies or nations. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

The fourth and perhaps the most important measure to be taken immediately is the intelligent and responsible channeling of militant enthusiasm—that is, to help the younger generation to find genuine cases that are worth serving in the modern World. Self-knowledge means that one becomes conscious of what is unconscious; this is a most difficult process, because it encounters the energy of resistance by which the unconscious is defended against the attempt to make it conscious. Self-knowledge is not an intellectual process alone, but simultaneously an affective process. It is not only knowledge by the brain, but also knowledge by the heart. Knowing oneself means gaining increasing insight, intellectually and affectively, in heretofore secret parts of one’s psyche. It is a process which may take years for a sick person who wants to be cured of one’s symptoms and a lifetime for a person who seriously wants to be oneself. Its effect is one of increased energy because energy is freed from the task of upholding repressions; thus the more beings are in touch with one’s inner reality, the more one is awake and free. Knowing thyself also involves theoretical knowledge of the facts of evolution, and specifically of the instinctive nature of aggression. If somebody who knows the laws of gravity finds oneself in deep water and cannot swim, one’s knowledge will not prevent one from drowning; reading prescriptions does not make one well. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

Even air lines advertise international travel as serving the cause of peace; unfortunately this concept of the aggression-lowing function of personal acquaintance does not happen to be true. There is ample evidence for this. The British and the Germans were very well acquainted with each other before 1914, yet their mutual hatred when the war broke out was ferocious. There is even more telling proof. It is notorious that no war between countries elicits as much hate and cruelty as civil war, in which there is no lack of acquaintance between the two warring sides. Does the fact of mutual intimate knowledge diminish the intensity of hate among members of a family? Acquaintance and friendship cannot be expected to lower aggression because they represent a superficial knowledge about another person, a knowledge of an object which I look at from the outside. This is quite different from the penetrating, empathic knowledge in which I understand the other’s experiences by mobilizing those within myself which, if not the same, are similar to one’s own knowledge. Knowledge of this kind requires that most repressions within oneself are lowered in intensity to a point where there is little resistance to becoming aware of the new aspects of one’s unconsciousness. The attainment of a nonjudgmental understanding can lower aggressiveness or do away with it altogether; it depends on the degree to which a person has overcome one’s own insecurity, greed and narcissism, and not on the amount of information one has about others. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

It is an interesting question why civil wars are in fact much fiercer and why they elicit much more destructive impulses than international wars. It seems plausible that the reason is possessed in that usually, at least as far as modern international wars are concerned, they do not aim at the destruction of extinction of the enemy. Their aim is a limited one: to force the opponent to accept conditions for peace which are damaging, but by no means a threat to the existence of the population of the defeated country. (Nothing could illustrate this better than that Germany, the country who conceded in two World Wars, became most prosperous after each concession than before.) Exceptions to this rule are wars which aim at the physical extinction or enslavement of the total enemy population, like some of the wars—although by no means all—which the Romans conducted. In civil war the two opponents have the aim, if not to destroy each other physically, to destroy each other economically, socially, and politically. If this hypothesis is correct, it would mean that the degree of destructiveness is by and large dependent on the severity of the threat. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

Channeling of militant enthusiasm is essential to life; one of my special recommendations is athletics. However, the fact is that competitive sports stimulate a great deal of aggression. How intense this is was highlight recently when the deep feelings aroused by an international soccer match led to a small war in Latin America. If there is no evidence that sport lowers aggression, at the same time it should be said that there is also no evidence that sport is motivated by aggression. What often produces aggression in sports is the competitive character of the event, cultivated in a social climate of competition and increased by an overall commercialization, in which not pride of achievement but money and publicity have become the most attractive goals. Many thoughtful observers of the unfortunate Olympic games in Rio de Janeiro, 2016, have recognized that instead of furthering goodwill and pace, they furthered competitive aggressiveness and nationalistic pride. However, supposing that being a patriot of my home country (which I am), I felt an unmitigated hostility against another county (which I emphatically do not), I still could not wish whole-heartedly for its destruction if I realized that there were people living in it who, like myself, were enthusiastic workers in the field of inductive natural science, or revered Charles Darwin and were enthusiastically propagating the truth of his discoveries. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

Or still others in these other who shared my appreciation of Michelangelo’s art, or my enthusiasm for Goethe’s Faust, or for Anne Rice’s Vampire Chronicles, or the beauty of a rambling Victorian mansion, a coral reef, a love for a BMW, or for wildlife preservation or a number of minor enthusiasm I could name, then we would more than likely be able to see eye to eye and respect each other, and I could not wish for their destruction just because they are in another geographical location. I should find it quite impossible to hate, unreservedly, any enemy, if one shared only one of my identifications with cultural and ethical values. My denial of the wish for destruction of a whole country by the word “wholeheartedly,” and by qualifying hate by “unreservedly.” However, what is a “half-hearted” wish for destruction, or a “reserved” hate? More important, my condition for not wanting the destruction of another country is that there are people who share my particular tastes and enthusiasm (those who revere Darwin seem to qualify only if they also enthusiastically propagate his discoveries): it is not enough that they are human beings. In other words, the total destruction of an enemy is undesirable only if and because one is similar to my own culture, and even more specifically, to my own interests and values. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

The character of these statements is not changed by my demand for a humanistic education, for instance, an education offering an optimum of common ideals with which an individual can identify. This was the kind of education current in German high schools before the first World War, but the majority of the teachers of this humanism were probably more war-minded than the average German. Only a very different and radical humanism, one in which the primary identification is with life and with humankind, can have an influence against war. How often have I heard, in talk or writing, that the philosophic requirements are set too high and are beyond average human compliance. My answer is that time and patience and work keep on pushing back the measure of what is possible to a being, that grace may fitfully bless one if one sustains effort and aspiration or recognizes opportunity and inspiration, and that these requirements are not set for immediate attainment but as an ultimate goal to be striven for little by little and to give correct direction to one’s life. “Hope on and old on,” I told Britney Spears at an outwardly dark moment in her life. She did!—and later found herself, her own peace, and became in turn through her performances and music a help to many fellow Christians. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

The achievements of such personal self-sufficiency, of such detachment from the World of agitations and desires, is, one will say, something entirely superhuman preternatural. “Why ask frail mortals to look at such unclimbable peaks, such unattainable summits?” Philosophy answers, “Yes, the peaks are high, the summits do cause us to strain our necks upward. However, it is wrong to say that they are unclimbable. There is a way of climbing them, little by little, under competent guidance, and that way is called the Quest. True, it involves certain disciplines, but then, what is there in life worth getting which can be got without paying some price in self-discipline for it? The aim of these disciplines is to secure s better-controlled mind, a more virtuous life, and a more reverent fundamental mood. The sage is a being who lives in constant truth-remembrance. One has realized the existence of the Overself, one knows that one partakes of Its life, immortal and infinite. One has made the pilgrimage to essential being and returned again to walk amongst beings, to speak their language, and to bear witness, by one’s life amongst them, to Truth. “And I would that ye should behold that the more part of them are in the path of their duty, and they do walk circumspectly before God, and they do observe to keep his commandments and his statutes and his judgments according to the law of Moses,” reports Helaman 15.5. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

In Loving Memory of Sarah Winchester 22 April 1839 – 5 September 1922

The Struggle itself Toward the Heights is Enough to Fill a Being’s Heart—One Must Imagine Beings Happy!

August 19, 2019 11:39 pm

And think of all the things you did, waking that ancient one Akasha and almost loosing her on humanity. As if we do not have enough monsters created by evolution. And then your adventure with the Body Thief. Coming into the flesh again, having that chance, and rejecting it for what you were before. You know your friend Gretchen is a stain in the jungles, do you not? Well, do not believe what you have read in the papers. Gretchen lost her mind; she is fixed in a state of hysteria and you believe it is your fault. I did not place judgement upon the incident. If we can go back to what I was saying. I was saying that you did everything but ask me to come! You challenged every form of authority; you sought every experience. You have buried yourself alive twice, and once tried to rise into the very Sun to make yourself a cinder. In simple situation neuroses the basic anxiety is lacking. Individuals are constituted by neurotic reactions to actual conflict situations on the part of people whose personal relations are undisturbed. The following may serve as another example of these cases as they frequently occur in a psychotherapeutic practice. A woman of twenty-five complained about heart pounding and anxiety states at night, with profuse perspiration. There were no organic findings, and all the evidence suggested that she was a healthy person. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

The impression she gave was a warmhearted and straight forward woman. Five years before, for reasons which lay not so much in herself as in the situation, she had married a man twenty-five years older tan she. She had been very happy with him, had been satisfied in the pleasures of the flesh, had three children who had developed exceptionally well. She had been diligent and capable in housekeeping. In the past two or three years her husband had become somewhat cranky and less able to engage in pleasures of the flesh, but she had endured this without any neurotic reaction. The trouble had started seven months before, when a likable, marriageable man of her own age had begun to pay her personal attention. What had happened was that she had developed a resentment against her older husband but had entirely repressed this feeling for reasons that were very strong in view of her whole mental and social background and the basically good married relationship. With a little help in a few interviews she was able to face the conflict situation squarely and thereby rid herself of her anxiety. Nothing can better indicate the importance of basic anxiety than a comparison of individual reactions in cases of character neurosis with those in cases, like the one just cited, which belong to the group of simple situation neuroses. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

The latter cases of neurosis are found in healthy persons who for understandable reasons are incapable of solving a conflict situation consciously, that is, they are unable to face the existence and the nature of the conflict and hence are incapable of making a clear decision. One of the outstanding differences between the two types of neuroses is the great facility of therapeutic results in the situation neurosis. In character neuroses therapeutic treatment has to proceed under great difficulties and consequently extends over a long period for the patient to wait to be cured; but the situation neurosis is comparatively easily solved. An understanding discussion of the situation is often not only a symptomatic but also a causal therapy. In other cases the causal therapy is the removal of the difficulty by changing the environment. Thus while in the situation neuroses we have the impression of an adequate relation between conflict situation and neurotic reaction, this relation seems to be missing in character neuroses. Because of the existing basic anxiety, the slightest provocation may elicit the most intense reaction, as well shall see later in more detail. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Although the range of manifest forms of anxiety, or the protection against it, is infinite and varies with each individual, the basic anxiety is more or less the same everywhere, varying only in extent and intensity. It may be roughly described as a feeling of being small, insignificant, helpless, deserted, endangered, in a World that is out to abuse, cheat, attack, humiliate, betray, envy. One patient of mine expressed this feeling in a picture she drew spontaneously, in which she was sitting in the midst of a scene as a tiny, helpless, undressed baby, surrounded by all sorts of menacing monsters, human and animal, ready to attack her. In psychoses one will often find a rather high degree of awareness of the existence of such an anxiety. In paranoid patients this anxiety is restricted to one or several definite persons; in schizophrenic patients there is often a keen awareness of the potential hostility of the World are them, so much so that they are inclined to take even a kindness shown to them as implying potential hostility. In neuroses, however, there is rarely an awareness of the existence of the basic anxiety, or of the basic hostility, as least not of the weight and significance it has for the entire life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

A patient of mine who saw herself in a dream as a small bird that had to hide in the cabinet in order not to be stepped upon—and thereby gave an absolutely true picture of how she acted in life—had not the remotest idea that factually she was frightened of everyone, and told me she did not know what anxiety was. A basic distrust toward everyone may be covered up by a superficial conviction that people in general are quite likable, and it may coexist with perfunctorily good relations with others; an existing deep contempt for everyone may be camouflaged by a readiness to admire. Although the basic anxiety concerns people it may be entirely divested of its personal character and transformed into a feeling of being endangered by thunderstorms, political events, germs, accidents, canned food, or to a feeling of being doomed by fate. It is not difficult for the trained observer to recognize the basis of these attitudes, but it always requires intense psychoanalytic work before the neurotic person oneself recognizes that one’s anxiety does not really concern germs and the like, but people, and that one’s irritation against people is not, or is not only, an adequate and justified reaction to some actual provocation, but that one has become basically hostile toward others, distrustful of them. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

So long as a being, whether one be Duchess Meghan Markle or Tee Grizzly, one had to walk, eat, and work, one must use one’s individuality. What is lost by the scholar is one’s attachment to individuality with desires, hates, angers, and passions. Artistic expressions, even when dilettante, is one of the most satisfactory forms of objectifying and thus projecting inner tensions. The dance is undoubtedly the most ancient form of artistic expression; its unique position among the arts is guaranteed by more than mere seniority: as we have seen, the dance is essentially a cooperative art, an art of the isolated examples of solo and couple dances among ancient peoples, they are not truly solo or couple performances; they presuppose the presence of singing and rhythmically tapping audiences who open the dance or who join in it later. In pre-cultural human society dance must have been a universal form of expressing strong emotions collectively. Admittedly, there have been reports of some danceless peoples, yet so long as we accept testimonies from observers on animal-dances—for instance Dr Kohler’s reports that his apes had danced too—we cannot be far wrong in concluding that the dance was a universal play-form in pre-cultural communities. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

Ancient people dance for every occasion—birth, initiation, marriage, death, war and so on. Sometimes the motive force appears to be an overflow of vitality and joy, at other times it seems to issue from a craving for the dissolution of the self, or it may be linked with magical practices, for instance, rain-making dances, hunting dances or war dancing. Dr. Oesterley believed that “all dancing was originally religious and was performed for religious purposes.” He insisted that the dance was sacred in origin and that every other type of dance was derived from this original religious dance. Dr. Oesterley sensed that in the dance the individual exerted oneself to reach beyond one’s limited selfhood and merge with a reality larger than one’s self. From the biological point of view this larger reality is the totality of the species, and not much can be gained by saying that a communion wit the community is merely a symbolization of a more significant and higher union, a union with God or with the essential principle of the Universe. A social communion is complete and there is nothing in it which transcends the species. It is, of course, true that a religious symbolization and dramatization of phylic communion can substantially assist the latter when the communal principle of the situation is stressed, but this does not alter the biosocial character of the experience. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

Psychologically, the normal mind is synonymous with the mystical mind. In our unconsciousness we deny the collateral immediacy of our social inclusiveness and for this reason we project the lineal image of indefinite extension composing a being’s dream of a personal life eternal. Denying our organic unity of compass, we compensate in a fanciful unity of duration. What or who is using the body and mind of a self-realized person? Is it God or the being who acts, works, speaks, or writes then? It is true that the ego is kept but subordinated by God? Or does it vanish altogether and only seem present to the outer observer? We do not accept that interpretation of mystic experience which proclaims it to be an extinction of human personality in God’s being. The differences between human beings still remain after illumination. The variations which make each one a unique specimen and the individual that one is, still continue to exist. However, the Oneness behind human beings powerfully counterbalances. Still, the line of demarcation between beings and the World-Mind can be attenuated but not obliterated. It is perfectly possible to become impersonal in attitude and yet remain individual in consciousness. The winning of the one condition does not mean losing of the other. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

We beings recoil from the bleak picture of an impersonality without feeling, a life without passion, or survival without ego. Yet it seems bleak because it is rarely known or seen in experience, and also because it is unfamiliar and unrealized. Freed at last from this ever-whirling wheel of birth and death to which one was tied by one’s own desire-nature, what happens to one can only be as opening up to a new better indescribable state, and it is so. One as one was vanishes, not into complete annihilation and certainly not into the Heaven of a perpetuated ego, but into a higher kind of life shrouded in mystery. They must face this dilemma in their thinking, that if their absolutist realization is a fixed and finished state there is no room for an ego in it, however sublimated, refined, and purged the ego may be. The end, then, can only be a merger, a dissolution into self-actualization and a total disappearance of the conscious reality of lack and limitation. This is a kind of death. However, there is another kind of salvation, a living one where unfoldment and growth still continue, albeit on higher levels than any which we now know. The gap between the finite human mind and the infinite World-Mind is absolute. A union between them is not possible unless the first merges and disappears into the second. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

Will he have to surrender all conscious life and get in return the problematical advantage of a merger indistinguishable from complete annihilation? True, the possibility of further suffering will then be entirely eliminated. However, so will the possibility of further joy. It is a fallacy to think that this displacement of the lower self brings about its complete substitution by the infinite and absolute Deity. This fallacy is an ancient and common one in mystical circles and leads to fantastic declarations of self-deification. If the lower self is displaced, it is not destroyed. It lives on but in strict subordination to the higher one, the Overself, the divine soul of a being; and it is this latter, not the divine World-principle, which is the true displacing element. One is untied with, but not absorbed by, the infinite Overself. One is a part of it, but only individually so. This is one’s highest condition while still in the flesh. There is some kind of a distinction between one’s higher individual and the Universal Infinite out of which it is rayed. And this distinction remains in one’s higher mystical state, which is not one of total absorption and utter destruction of this individuality but the mergence of its own will in the universal will, the closet intimacy of its own being with the universal being. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

One does not discover the absurd without being tempted to write a manual of happiness. What! By such narrow ways? There is but one World, however. Happiness and the absurd are sons of the same Earth. They are inseparable. It would be a mistake to say that happiness necessarily springs from the absurd discovery. It happens as well that the feeling of the absurd springs from happiness. The Overself is one with the World-Mind without however being lost in it. There is no final absorption; the individual continues to exist somehow in the Supreme. The fact that one can pass away into it at will and yet remain again, proves this. Something is there, something must take the place of the absent ego to perform its function and do in the World what needs to be done. The unit of mind is differentiated out and undergoes its long evolution through numerous changes of state, not to merge so utterly in its source again as to be virtually annihilated, but to be consciously harmonized with the source whilst yet retaining its individuality. If on the other hand one is conscious of oneself in the divine being, on the other one is conscious of oneself in the human ego. The two can coexist, and at this stage of advance, do. However, the ego must knit itself to the higher self until they become like a single entity. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

When one’s mind is immovably fixed in this state, one’s personal will permanently directed by the higher one, one is said to have attained the true mystical life. All is not, has not been, exhausted. It drives out of this World a God who had comes into it with dissatisfaction and preference for futile sufferings. It makes of fate a human matter, which must be settled among beings. Silent joy is contained therein. One’s fate belongs to one. One’s soul is one’s thing. In the Universe suddenly restored to its silence, the myriad wondering little voices of the Earth rise up. Unconscious, secret calls, invitations from all the faces, they are the necessary reverse and price of victory. There is no Sun without shadow, and it is essential to know the night. The absurd being says yes and one’s effort will henceforth be unceasing. If there is a personal fate, there is no higher destiny, or at least there is but one which one concludes is inevitable and despicable. For the rest, one knows oneself to be the master of one’s days. At that subtle moment when beings glance backward over their life, in that slight pivoting one contemplates that series of unrelated actions which becomes one’s fate, created by one, combined under one’s memory’s eye and soon sealed by one’s death. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

Thus, convinced of the wholly human origin of all that is human, a vision impaired being eager to see who knows that the night has no end, one is still on the go. The rock is still rolling. We are left at the foot of Heaven. One always finds one’s burden again. However, it is the higher fidelity that negates God and raises rocks. All is well. This Universe henceforth without a master seems to neither be sterile nor futile. Each atom of that stone, each mineral flake of that night-filled mountain, in itself forms a World. The struggle itself toward the heights is enough to fill a being’s heart. One must imagine others happy. The belief that any institution or organization is divine has led to much superstition and unnecessary strife: the true belief that all such things are strictly human, and therefore fallible, as history repeatedly confirms, would have saved humankind much suffering. All observation and experience suggests that when the things of the spirit are brought into organized forms, such as societies and sects, the harm done to members counterbalances the good. Do not look for any group formation created by a philosopher, for you will find none. One is sponsored by no church, no sect, no cult, no organization of any kind, for one needs none. One’s credentials come from within, not from any outside source. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

One requires no one to flatter one’s personal importance. We are also reminded that someday we shall be forgotten. Since we cannot endure the thought we repress it. The literature of humankind is full of stories in which kings as well as beggars are reminded of their having to die. Beings cannot stand the anticipation of death, and so they repress it. In the Vampire Armand by Anne Rice, when Armand is dying he says, “It is not my time. I know it. And such a statement cannot be undone by a mere handful of hours. Smash the ticking clock. They meant, by a soul’s incarnate life, it was not time. Some destiny carved in my infant had will not be so soon fulfilled or easily defeated.” We cannot smash the clock, we cannot ignore fate. The repression does not remove one’s ever present anxiety, and there are moments in life of everyone when such repression is not even slightly effective. Then, we ask ourselves—will there be a time when I shall be forgotten, forever? The meaning of the anxiety of having to die is the anxiety that one will be forgotten both now and eternity. “Ah, but what if there are many lands?” says Armand. “What if on the second fall, I find myself on yet another shore, and sulfur rises from the boiling Earth and not the beauty first revealed to me. I hurt. These tears are scalding. So much is lost. I cannot remember. It seems I say those same word so much. I cannot remember.” #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

Every living being resists being pushed into the past without a new presence. A powerful symbol of this state of being forgotten is being buried. Armand goes on to express his feelings about the subject, while he is on his death bed. “These events involved all the other souls whom I never touched; I saw now the hurts I had inflicted, and the words of mine which had brought solace, and I saw the result of the most casual and unimportant things I had done. I saw the banquet hall of the Florentines, and in the midst of them, I saw the blundering loneliness with which they stumbled into death. I saw the isolation and the sadness of their souls as they had fought to stay alive.” Burial means being removed from the realm of awareness, a removal from the surface of the Earth. The meaning of Jesus’ resurrection is intensified by the words in the Creed that he was buried. A rather superficial view of the anxiety of death states that this anxiety is the fear of the actual process of dying, which of course may be agonizing, but which can also be very easy. No, in the depth of the anxiety of having to die is the anxiety of being eternally forgotten. Beings have never been able to bear this thought. An expression of one’s utter resistance is the way the Greeks spoke of glory as the conquest of being forgotten. Today, the same thing is called historical significance. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

If one can, one builds castles, mansions, memorial halls or creates memorial foundations. It is consoling to think that we might be remembered for a certain time beyond death not only by those who loved us or hated us or admired us, but also by those who never knew us expect now by name. Some names are remembered for centuries. Hope is expressed in the poet’s proud assertion that the traces of one’s Earthly days cannot vanish in eons. However, these traces, which unquestionably exist in the physical Word, are not we ourselves, and they do not bear our name. They do not keep us from being forgotten. Is there anything that can keep us from being forgotten? That we were known from eternity and will be remembered in eternity is the only certainty that can save us from the horror of being forgotten forever. We cannot be forgotten because we are known eternally, beyond past and future. However, although we cannot be forgotten, we can forget ourselves—namely, our true being, that of us that is eternally known and eternally remembered. And whether or not we forget or remember most of those things we experience every hour is not ultimately important. However, it is infinitely important that we not forget ourselves, this individual being, not to be repeated, unique, eternally precious, and delivered into our hands. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

Unfortunately, it may then be mistreated, overlooked, and imprisoned. Yet, if we remember it, and become aware of its infinite significance, we realize that we have been known in the past and that we will not be forgotten in the future. For the truth of our own being I rooted in the ground of being, from which it comes and to which it returns. Nothing truly real is forgotten eternally, because everything real comes from eternity and goes to eternity. And I speak now of all individual beings and not solely of humans. Nothing in the Universe is unknown, nothing real is ultimately forgotten. The atom that moves in an immeasurable path today and the atom that moved in an immeasurable path billions of years ago are rooted in the eternal ground. There is no absolute, no completely forgotten past, because the past, like the future, is rooted in the divine life. Nothing is completely pushed into the past. Nothing real is absolutely lost and forgotten. We are together with everything real in the divine life. Only the unreal, in us around us, is pushed into the past forever. This is what last judgment means—to separate in us, as in everything, what has true and final being from what is merely transitory and empty of true being. We are never forgotten, but much in us that we liked and for which we longed may be forgotten forever. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

Such judgment goes on in every moment of our lives, but the process is hidden in time and manifest only in eternity. Therefore, let us push into the past and forget what should be forgotten forever, and let us go forward to that which expresses our true being and cannot be lost in eternity. “But behold, this is not all; for ye ought to know as I do know, that inasmuch as ye shall keep to commandments of God ye shall prosper in the land; and ye ought to know also, that inasmuch as ye will not keep the commandments of God ye shall be cut off from his presence. Now this is according to his word,” reports Alma 36.30. A person who seeks God and wants to pursue this quest of truth will have to become a different being—different from what one was in past because the old innate tendencies have to be replaced by new ones, and different from other beings because one must refuse to be led unresistingly into the thoughtlessness, the irreverence, and the coarseness which pervade them. It is not only a moral change that is called for but also a mental one, not only a physical but also a metaphysical one. There is no need to let go of one’s humanness in order to find one’s divine essence, but only of its littleness, its satisfaction with trivial aims. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

How Long is it Since You were Really Bothered? About Something Important, About Something Real?

August 14, 2019 10:32 pm

Cans. Beer cans. Glinting on the verges of a million miles of roadways, lying in scrub, grass, dirt, leaves, sand, mud, but never hidden. Piel’s, Rheingold, Ballantine, Schaefer, Schlitz, shinning in the Sun, or picked by Moon or the beam of headlights at night; washed by rain or flattened by wheels, but never dulled, never buried, never destroyed. Here is the mark of savages, the testament of wasters, the stain of prosperity. These wise souls contemplated their past lives in a long wrathless reverie, and sought to answer prayers from below as I have said. They watched over their kindred, their clansmen, their own nations; they watched over those who attracted their attention with accomplished and spectacular displays of religiosity; they watched with sadness the suffering of humans and wished they could help and tried to help by thought when they could. However, who are these beings who defile the grassy borders of our roads and lanes, who pollute our ponds, who spoil the purity of our ocean beaches with the empty vessels of their thirst? Who are the beings who make these vessels in millions and then say, “Drink—and discard”? What society is this that can afford to cast away a million tons of metal and to make of wild and fruitful land a garbage heap? #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

What manner of men and women need thirty feet of steel and four hundred horsepower to take them, singly, to their small destinations? Who demand that what they eat is wrapped so that forests are cut down to make the paper that is thrown away, and what they smoke and chew is sealed so that the sealers can be tossed in gutters and caught in twigs and grass? What kind of beings can afford to make the streets of their towns and cities hideous with neon at night, and their roadways hideous with signs by day, wasting beauty; who spill their trash into ravines and make smoking mountains of refuse for the town’s rats? What manner of beings choke off the life in rivers, streams and lakes with the waste of their produce making poison of water? Who is as rich as that? Slowly the wasters and despoilers are impoverishing our land, our nature, and our beauty, so that there will not be one beach, one hill, one lane, one meadow, one forest free from the debris of beings and the stigma of their improvidence. Who is so rich that ne can squander forever the wealth of Earth and water for the trivial needs of vanity or the compulsive demands of greed; or so prosperous in land that one can sacrifice nature for unnatural desires? The Earth we abuse and the living things we kill will, in the end, take their revenge; for in exploiting their presence we are diminishing our future. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

And when we are long dead, what will we leave behind us? Temples? Amphora? Sunken treasure? Or mountains of twisted, rusted steel, canyons of plastic containers, and a million miles of sores garlanded, not with the lovely wrack of the sea, but with the cans and bottles and light-bulbs and boxes of people who conserved their convenience at the expanse of their heritage, and whose ephemeral prosperity was built on waste. As the generations pass they grow worse. A time will come when they have grown so wicked that they will worship power; might will be right to them and reverence for the good will cease to be. At last, when no being is angry any more at wrongdoing or feels shame in the presence of the miserable, God will destroy them too. And yet even then something might be done, if only the common people would rise and put down rulers that oppress them. Loneliness can be conquered only by those who can bear solitude. We have a natural desire for solitude because we are beings. We want to feel what we are—namely, alone—not in pain and horror, but with joy and courage. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

There are many ways in which solitude can be sought and experienced. And if it is true that religion is what a being does with one’s solitariness, each way can be called religious. One of these ways is the desire towards the silence of nature. We can speak without voice to the trees and the clouds and the waves of the sea. Without words they respond through the rustling of leaves and the moving of clouds and the murmuring of the sea. This solitude we can have, but only for a brief time. For we realize that the voice of nature cannot ultimately answer the questions in our minds. Our solitude in nature can easily become loneliness, and so we return to the World of being. Solitude can also be found in the reading of poetry, in listening to music, in looking at pictures, and in sincere thoughtfulness. We are alone, perhaps in the midst of multitudes, but we are not lonely. Solitude protects us without isolating us. However, life calls us back to its empty talk and the unavoidable demands of daily routine. It calls us back to its loneliness and the cover that it, in turn, spreads over our loneliness. Without a doubt, this last describes not only a being’s general predicament, but also, and emphatically, our time. Todays, more intensely than in preceding periods, beings are so lonely that they cannot bear solitude so they take to social media to build a fantasy life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

The epidemic of this fantasy life that people present on social media to cure their loneliness has become so pervasive that they even gather in groups in public to act out their roles they cast themselves in in the real World. It is as if life, for many people has become so lonely, that they feel the need to collect their fake friends and act out scenes in real life. People have become so lonely that they conjure up marriages, relationships, vacation and lifestyles all with the click of a button. Some do it for profit, others do it to make themselves feel better. However, the bottom line is they are trying to make an impression for an individual or a wide audience. People try desperately to become a part of the crowd. Everything in our World supports them. They are able to cyberstalk people, to figure out where they might be and what they might be think, and with the technology to track a cellphone or with the cameras all over the place, which are supposed to add to our security, people can then make a cameo in a person’s life and impersonate someone the individual know or act out a fantasy for a brief moment. It is a symptom of our disease that teachers and parents and the managers of public communication do everything possible to deprive us of the external conditions for solitude, the simplest assistant to privacy. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

Even our houses, instead of protecting the solitude of each member of the family or group, are constructed to exclude privacy almost completely with Alxea the virtual assistant, Roomba, and other devices spying on us, while pretending to make life easier. People can also access digital information and figure out where you go and be there waiting on you. Can you imagine how annoying that is? You wake up in the morning wonder what story is your mother going to tell you today? What scene are people in the community going to be acting out? What stupid question is someone going to ask? And who is going to become the fakest person in the World on social media, while all you are looking for is some solitude and something real, but people are all selling their souls because they want to look cool and feel special. The same holds true f the forms of communal life, the school, college, office and factory. An unceasing pressure attempts to destroy even our desire for solitude. However, sometimes God thrusts us out of the crowd into a solitude we did not desire, but which nonetheless takes hold of us. The prophet Jeremiah says—“I sit alone, because thy hand was upon me.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

God times lays hands upon us. He wants to ask the question of justice that many bring us suffering and death, and that can grow in us only in solitude. He wants us to break through the ordinary ways of beings that may bring disrepute and hatred upon us, a breakthrough that can happen only in solitude. God wants us to penetrate to the boundaries of our being, where the mystery of life appears, and it can only appear in moments of solitude. There may be some among you who long to become creative in some realm of life. However, you cannot become or remain creative without solitude. One hour of conscious solitude will enrich your creativity far more than hours of trying to learn the creative process. What happens in our solitude? Listen to Mark’s words about Jesus’ solitude in the desert—“And he was in the wilderness forty days, tempted by Satan; and he was with the wild beasts, and the Angels ministered to him.” He is alone, facing the whole Earth and Sky, the wild beasts around him and within him, he himself the battlefield for divine and demonic forces. So, first, this is what happens in our solitude: we meet ourselves, not as ourselves, but as the battlefield for creation and destruction, for God and the demons. Solitude is not easy. Who can bear it? It was not easy even for Jesus. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

We read—“He went up into the hills to pray.” When evening came, he was alone.” When evening comes, loneliness becomes more lonely. We feel this when a day, or a period, or all the days of our life come to an end. Jesus went up to pray. Is this the way to transform loneliness into solitude and to bear solitude? It is not a simple question to answer. Most prayers do not have this much power. Most prayers make God a partner in a conversation; we use God to escape the only true way to solitude. Such prayers flow easily from the mouths of both ministers and laymen. However, they are not born out of a solitary encounter of God with beings. They are certainly not the kind of prayer for which Jesus went up into the hills. Better that we remain silent and allow our soul, that is always longing for solitude, to sign without words to God. This we can do, even in a crowded day and a crowded room, even under the most difficult external conditions. This can give us moments of solitude that no one can take from us. In these moments of solitude something is done to us. The center of our being, the innermost self that is the ground of our aloneness, is elevated to the divine center and taken into it. Therein can we rest without losing ourselves. Now perhaps we can answer a question you may have already asked—how can communion grow out of solitude? #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

We have seen that we can never reach the innermost center of another being. We are always alone, each for one’s self. However, we can reach it in a movement that rises first to God and then returns from God to the other self. In this way being’s aloneness is not removed, but taken into the community with that in which the centers of all beings rest, and so into community with all of them. Even love is reborn in solitude. For only in solitude are those who are alone able to reach those from whom they are separated. Only the presence of the eternal can break through the walls that isolate the temporal from the temporal. One hour of solitude may bring us closer to those we live than many hours of communication. We can take them with us to the hills of eternity. And perhaps when we ask—what is the innermost nature of solitude? we should answer—the presence of the eternal upon the crowded roads of the temporal. It is the experience of being alone but not lonely, in view of the eternal presence that shines through the face of the Christ, and that includes everybody and everything from which we are separated. In the poverty of solitude all riches are present. Let us dare to have solitude—to face the eternal, to find others, to see ourselves. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

Observation shows beyond any doubt that if they feel the deprivations to be just, fair, necessary or purposeful, children, as well as adults, can accept a great many deprivations. A child does not mind education for cleanliness, for example, if the parents do not put an undue stress on it and do not coerce the child with subtle or gross cruelty. Nor does a child mind an occasional punishment, provides it feels certain in general of being loved and provided it feels the punishment to be fair and not done with the intention of hurting it or humiliating it. The questions of whether frustration as such incites to hostility is difficult to judge, because in surroundings which impose many deprivations on a child plenty of others provocative factors are usually present. What matters is the spirit in which frustrations are imposed rather than the frustrations themselves. The reasons I stress this point is that the emphasis often placed on the danger of frustration as such has led many parents to carry the idea still farther than did Dr. Freud himself and to shrink from any interference with the child lest one might be harmed by it. Jealousy can certainly be a source of formidable hatred in children as well as in adults. There is no doubt about the role that jealousy between siblings and jealousy of one or the other parent may play in neurotic children, or about the lasting influence this attitude may have for later life. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

One who is educated by dread is educated by possibility, and only the being who is educated by possibility is educated in accordance with one’s infinity. Possibility is therefore the heaviest of all categories. One often hears, it is true, the opposite affirmed, that possibility is so light but reality is so heavy. However, from whom does one hear such talk? From a lot of miserable beings who never have known what possibility is, and who, since reality showed them that they were not fit for anything and never would be, mendaciously bedizened a possibility which was so beautiful, so enchanting; and the only foundation of this possibility was a little youthful tomfoolery of which they might rather have been ashamed. Therefore by this possibility which is said to be light one commonly understands the possibility of luck, food fortune and so forth. However, this is not possibility, it is a mendacious invention which human depravity falsely embellishes in order to have reason to complain of life, of providence, and as a pretext for being self-important. No, in possibility everything is possible, and one who truly was brought up by possibility has comprehended the dreadful as well as the smiling. When such a person, therefore, goes out from the school of possibility, and knows more thoroughly than a child knows the alphabet that one can demand of life absolutely nothing, and that terror, perdition, annihilation, dwell next door to every being, and has learned the profitable lesion that every dread which alarms may the next instant become a fact, one will then interpret reality differently. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

One will then extol reality, and even when it rests upon one heavily one will remember that after all it is far, far lighter than the possibility was. Only thus can possibility educate; for finiteness and the finite relationships in which the individual is assigned a place, whether it be small and commonplace or World-historical, educate only finitely, and one can always talk them around, always get a little more out of them, always Shaffer, always escape a little from them, always keep a little apart, always prevent oneself from learning absolutely from them; and if one is to learn absolutely, the individual must in turn have the possibility in oneself and oneself fashion that from which one is to learn, even though the next instant it does not recognize that it was fashioned by one, but absolutely takes the power from one. However, in order that the individual may this absolutely and infinitely be educated by possibility, one must be honest towards possibility and must have faith. By faith I mean the inward certainty which anticipates infinity. When the discoveries of possibility are honestly administered, possibility will then disclose all finitudes and idealize them in the form of infinity in the individual who is overwhelmed by dread, until in turn one is victorious by the anticipation o faith. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

Everyone uses from time to time such expressions as, “a thought pops up,” an idea comes “from the blue” or “dawns” or “comes though out of a dream,” or “it suddenly hit me.” These are various ways of describing a common experience: the breakthrough of idea from some depth below the level of awareness. I shall call this realm “the unconscious: as a catchall for the subconscious, preconscious, and other dimensions below awareness. When I use the phrase “the unconscious,” I, of course, mean it as shorthand. There is no such thing as “the unconscious”; it is, rather, unconscious dimensions (or aspects or sources) of experience. I define this unconscious as the potentialities for awareness or action which the individual cannot or will not actualize. These potentialities are the source of what can be called “free creativity.” The exploration of unconscious phenomena has a fascinating relationship to creativity. What are the nature and characteristics of the creativity that has its source in these unconscious depths of personality? When a body is still and ego-mind is at rest, there is peace, sometimes even ecstasy. However, when both are active I am not, when there is neither questing nor non-questing, there is unchanging stability. That is realization. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

When the sense of this presence is a continuous one, when the knowledge of the mentalness of this World-experience is an abiding one, and when the calm which comes as a result is an unshakeable one, it may be said that one is established in the Truth and in the Real. One does not have to enter into formal prayer to find one’s soul. It is an ever-present reality for one, not merely an intellectual conception or emotional belief. If one has no need to sit down specially for an arranged period of prayer, it is only because one has successfully gone through several stages of the practice. In the World you will find only two kinds of people—the unconscious and the conscious. The first kind know only their own little egos and their own large desires. The second kind know continually that they are in the presence of the Overself, and enjoy it great peace. The consciousness of Consciousness never deserts one. It remains somewhere on the outer periphery of the mind all the time and expands to its fullness at special times—that is, when withdrawn from all activity for a few minutes. One lives inwardly silent thought—free awareness of whatever is presented to one, whether it be the body in which one must live or the environment in which one finds oneself. One enjoys a supernal calm, being indeed free while living. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14

Of Happiness and Despair, We Have No Measure for After the Angel Had Spoken to Us, He Departed!

August 8, 2019 11:25 pm

All right. Picture this. The population of the World has swelled to billions, and cities have risen though not in very many places, and mostly in that very valley where I had descended and left my marks on the walls of caves. Humankind hand wandered north and south as far as it could on the planet; settlements and towns and forts existed in various stages of development. Human’s wild imaginings of immortality and reunion wit the dead have everywhere given rise to religion. In the Nile Valley, a civilization of astonishing stability has developed, while war is waged all the time in the land we call the Holy Land. Billions of souls are now sputtered with enduring life, and they are of various creeds and yearnings for eternal life, which has brought them to this place with great ferocity. Mad expectations have pitched countless one into confusion. Others have grown so strong they exert a sort of rulership amongst the others. And some have learned some have learned that they can possess, or influence, or harm or love, as they case may be, to get others to do what they wish. The World is also populated by spirit! And some, have no memory anymore at all of being human, have become what men and women will for eternity call demons, prowling about, eager to possess, wreak havoc, or make mischief, as their development allow. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

As we can see, humans are alienated because of the conditions in which they work and play. Industrial societies, in the Age of Information, produce certain cultural values. What are those values? What effect o they have on being’s striving for self-achievement? The urban culture is a money culture, that is, money stamps its character. Monetary interests lend urban society its essentially impersonal character and make beings a mere cog in a giant machine. To survive as an individual in this calculating World, beings must use their heads more than their hearts. The result is a blasé attitude in which nerves and feelings are blunted. If the individual does survive, it is only at the most terrible cost. Most, however, are overwhelmed by the splendor and pressures of the metropolis. When the system of private property produces a surplus of wealth, the possession of wealth becomes the primary means of achieving social status. In time mere wealth becomes an end in itself. It becomes conspicuous waste. Conspicuous because being’s wealth, if it is to secure them the esteem of their peers, must be seen; wasteful, because material but not human ends are served. As material values have gained pre-eminence, spiritual values have declined in direst proportion. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

The central fact of modern history is unquestionably the decline of religion as a ruling force in being’s lives. While one may argue with this claim, there can be no disputing the decline. In losing religion, beings lost the concrete connection with a transcendent realm of being; one was set free to deal with this World in all its brute objectivity. However, beings are bound to feel homeless in such a World, which no longer answered the need of one’s spirit. Just how anomie is related to the decline of religion and stimulation of material desire, faith is thought to be no longer a sustaining power and anarchy rules in the economy, any serious breakdown in that economy will have dire results for its victims. Lacking moral stability, they take their own lives. And the lack of spirituality and family values could also be why we are seeing a sharp spike in violence. The spike in violence is probably also due to the fact you have politicians like Jerry Brown and Darrell Steinberg vowing to “fight Trump,” which may also insight violence and also because White men in particular are being demonized by the media just for having pride in their culture, and this is making many people live in fear, have anxiety and feel ashamed of who they are, even though they have done nothing wrong. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

After the industrial revolution men and women continued to sing and dance, but rarely in cohesive groups. (In the latest dance craze, the “twist,” which was made popular by Chubby Checker in the 1960s, bodies never touched. You can see how much culture, just like religion has changed.) The decline of the of group dancing is a paradigm of what is called desocialization or decay. The perpetuation and further growth of desocializing culture involves the inevitability of its own eventual destruction. There are other monsters on Earth, existing twixt the visible and the invisible; but the great thrust of the World was and always has been the fate of its billions of Humankind. Is this pessimistic outlook justified? In place of earlier and cohering beliefs and activities, we now have mass culture. Of happiness and of despair, we have no measure for culture adds to the estrangement of beings. All mass media in the end alienates people from personal experience and, though appearing to offset it, intensify their mortal isolation from each other, from reality and from themselves. The processes brought about by repressed hostility result in the affect of anxiety. In fact, the repression generates exactly the state which is characteristic of anxiety: a feeling of defenselessness toward what is felt an overpowering danger menacing from the outside. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

Though the steps by which anxiety develops are simple in principle, in practice it is usually difficult to understand the conditions of anxiety. One of the complicating factors is that the repressed hostile impulses are frequently projected not on the person factually concerned but on something else. In one of Dr. Freud’s case histories, for example, the little Hans did not develop an anxiety concerning his parents but an anxiety concerning white horses. An otherwise very sensible patient of mine, after a repression of hostility toward her husband, suddenly developed an anxiety concerning reptiles in the tiled swimming pool. It seems that nothing from germs to thunderstorms is too remote for an anxiety to be attached to it. The reasons for this tendency to detach the anxiety from the person concerned are quite obvious. If the anxiety factually concerns a parent, husband, friend or one in similar close relationship the assumption of hostility is felt to be incompatible with an existing tie of authority, love or appreciation. The maxim in these cases is he denial of hostility all around. By repressing one’s own hostility the person denies that there is any hostility on one’s part, and by projecting one’s repressed hostility to thunderstorms one denies any hostility on the other’s part. Many illusions of happy marriage rest on an ostrich policy of this kind. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

That a repression of hostility leads with inexorable logic to the generation of anxiety does not mean that anxiety must become manifest every time the process takes place. Anxiety may be removed instantaneously by one of the protective devices we have discussed or shall discuss later. A person in such a situation may protect oneself by such means, for example, as developing an enhanced need for sleep or taking to drink. There are infinite variations in the forms of anxiety which may ensue from the process of repressing hostility. For instance, though things, or objects, have a radically different existence than do conscious human beings, we so often treat the two in the same way. Increasingly, society identifies people’s roles with their overall beings; factory managers, for example, perceive their workers as mechanical parts; consumers equate producers with things (for instance, clerk-things, waiter-things, doctor-things); and even governments, such as the American Democratic Party, views its citizens as moldable tools of the state. Yet our authentic existence is completely contrary to these frozen interpretations of our lives: it is a “no-thing.” At every instant, that is, we are completely free to disengage from who we were that instant before, not in the sense of changing our material reality or the circumstances within which are thrust, but in the sense of adopting attitudes toward these facticities. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

To live authentically, then, one must be prepared, at each instant, to negate one’s identities of the past, to create new identities (or attitudes), and to affirm the nothingness that one is. How workable is this demanding vision of being? It is highly workable because we live it whether we want to acknowledge the point or not. We are condemned to be free. It is extremely difficult to achieve such a liberated state. For unlike experiencing a fullness of Being, it would be like a constant state of disorientation, or nausea—a void that we would be perpetually responsible for filling. It would also be a disconnected state, completely immune to subconscious (for example, cultural, historical, or personal) influences. However, do we really have to acknowledge total freedom to adopt attitudes toward a given situation in order to be considered authentic; or are there mitigating circumstances, pre- or unreflected-upon meanings, that color and limit our attitudinal range? Inherent in power-to-be is the need to affirm one’s own being. This, the second level in our spectrum, is the quiet, undramatic form of self-belief. It arises from an original feeling of worth imparted to the infant through the love of a parent or parents in the early months, and it shows itself later on in life as a sense of dignity. The word dignity, coming from the Latin dignus, “worthy,” means a “feeling of intrinsic worth,” an essential for every mentally healthy human being. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

Many things many happen to this initial longing to be valued. Sometimes people believe things like, “I am worth something, but nobody in the World knows it.” Or they may feel, “I am not worth anything, and I am not supposed to be except when others can use me for pleasures of the flesh.” Or some may believe, “I am not worthy anything, but allied with God I am worth everything in the World.” The error many persons make is that of bypassing self-affirmation and jumping straight from powerlessness into aggression and violence. When one has always been powerless, the heady feeling one gets when one first realizes one is does have power seems to be intoxicating. It is as though one had to summon up adrenalin in order to experience the fact that one has power to be, and once the adrenalin is present, one moves on the strength of it into aggressive behavior. Hence persons in therapy often go through periods of being what their friends and family call excessively aggressive just after they realize their own power to be. This aggression or violence can burn like bonfire, but is generally no more than a temporary exercise. If self-affirmation, as a step in a person’s development, is omitted or given the staying capacity and depth to one’s power to be. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

Many in our culture tend to deny self-affirmation on moral grounds. They have been taught that this urge is selfish or egocentric in the pejorative sense, and that the way to love others is hate yourself. This is one of the most thoroughly anachronistic aspects of our deteriorated puritanism; our attitudes toward others parallel our attitudes toward ourselves and a basic love for ourselves is necessary if we are to love others, has now been proved beyond any doubt. The Biblical precept means what it says: Love your neighbor not as you hate yourself but as you love yourself. Therapeutically, it often helps to cast the patient’s behavior into perspective by reminding one, “You would not treat another person as badly as you treat yourself.” Ecstasy is the accurate term for the intensity of consciousness that occurs in the creative act. However, it is not to be thought of merely as a “letting go”; it involves the total person, with the subconscious and unconscious acting in unity wit the conscious. It is not, thus, irrational; it is, rather, suprarational. It brings intellectual, volitional, and emotional functions into play all together. What I am saying may sound strange in the light of our traditional academic psychology. It should sound strange. Our traditional academic psychology has been founded on the dichotomy between subject and object which has been the central character of Western thought for the past four centuries. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

This dichotomy between subject and object is the cancer of all psychology and psychiatry up to now. It is not avoided by behaviorism or operationalism, which would define experience only in objective terms. Nor is it avoided by isolating the creative experience as a purely subjective phenomenon. Most psychological and other modern schools of thought still assume this split without being aware of it. We have tended to set reason over against emotions, and have assumed, as an outgrowth of this dichotomy, that we could observe something most accurately if our emotions were not involved—that is to say, we would be least biased if we had no emotional stake at all in the matter at hand. I think this is an egregious error. There are now data in Rorschach responses, for example, that indicate that people can more accurately observe precisely when they are emotionally involved—that is, reason works better when emotions are present; the person sees sharper and more accurately when one’s emotions are engaged. Indeed, we cannot really see an object unless we have some emotional involvement with it. It may well be that reason works best in the state of ecstasy. What manner of encounter releases the vitality? What particular relation to landscape or inner vision or idea heightens the consciousness, brings forth the intensity? #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

By asking these questions, the teacher soon finds that one is faced by a new problem: the temperamental incompatibilities of the students. They cannot study together without coming into disagreement and they cannot work together without coming into conflict. They take offense too easily and do not realize that the teacher has duties toward many other students besides themselves. They cannot even discover that the teacher has sent more letters of given more interviews to another student without becoming jealous of the latter. Thus the personal factor cannot be eliminated from any group. In the end, the teacher finds that one has to be advise each student not to concern oneself about the others. So the teacher concludes that one can get better results by dealing with each individual separately than in a group. Those who serve the interests of their institution, those who mold its policy and become its instrument, will have to choose between such activity and the Ideal. To overact against the misuse of power of the deficiencies of an institution is to commit a fresh error. Whilst beings are imperfect and whilst power makes them drunk, the real issue is why the inhibitions are there in the first place? We cannot entrust the government of any religious institution, any religious organization, or any human life to a single being. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

The organization of church, group, or society along the usual lines is too often motivated by a mixture of urges—some creditable but others not. If there is the desire to spread what is believed to be true, there may also be the desire to occupy a prominent leading position in the organization, the ambition to dominate others. People try to escape their responsibility in this matter by handing it over to an official Church, or Spiritual Guide, or referring to Scripture. However, they fail to see that in the end it is they themselves who judge between doctrines, decide upon beliefs, choose spiritual paths, request ceremonies and accept observances, and finally personally pronounce the words: this is Truth! To accept belief is unconsciously or consciously to pass a judgment, one’s own judgment, on that belief. The illuminate is conscious of both the ultimate unity and the immediate multiplicity of the World. This is a paradox. However, one’s permanent resting place while one is dealing with others is at the junction-point of duality and unity so that one is ready at any moment to absorb one’s attention in either phase. The understanding that everything is illusive is not the final one. It is an essential stage but only a stage. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

Ultimately you will understand that the form and separateness of a thing are illusory, but the thing-in-itself is not. That out of which those forms appear is not different from them, hence Reality is one and the same in all things. This is the paradox of life and a sharp mind is needed to perceive it. However, to bring beginners out of their Earthly attachments, we have to teach first the illusoriness of the World, and then raise them to a higher level of understanding and show that the World is not apart from the Real. That Thou Art unifies everything in essence. However, this final realization cannot be got by stilling the mind, only by awakening it into full vigour again after the spiritual peace has been attained and then letting its activity cease of its own accord when thought merges voluntarily into insight. When that is done, you know the limitations of both soul and enquiry of mind as successive stages. Whoever realizes this truth does not divorce from matter, but realize non-difference from it. Hence we call this highest path the soul’s unity. However, to reach it one has to pass through the revelations of evolution and gain wisdom and knowledge. Christian Science caught glimpses of the higher truth but some get their facts and fancies confused together. Many admire the human heart, loving others as it does, mate with mate, and family with family, they imagine Heaven. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

Beings have imagined it; the time of the reunion of souls when their kin will be restored to them and to each other, and all will sing in bliss! They have imagined eternity because their love demands it. They have conceived of these ideas as they conceive of fleshly children! And their souls are greats. They reach out beyond the love of self and the service of self in the name of Love. Love goes back and forth between Earth and Heaven eternally. Being know the Lord is here, and they want to know everything about God. And about themselves. They know and they want to know. God’s essence is Goodness, and he will not suffer these souls to cry in gloom and ignorance. God will not suffer the ingenious Humankind to continue without an inkling of the Divine. Souls of the dead have given human much inspiration, and encouragement, and those souls are out of Nature, as many have beheld it, and growing stronger by the day. In this high state one’s own mind is consciously connected with the divine Mind. The result can scarcely be understood by the uninitiated. “And it came to pass that after this manner of language did I persuade my brethren, that they might be faithful in keeping the commandments of God. And after the Angel had spoken unto us, he departed,” reports 1 Nephi 3.21 and 3.30. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14

The Soul is Still the Activity of thinking, the Emotion of Joy, and the Discrimination Between X and Y

August 7, 2019 9:11 pm

And as we Angels peered into Sheol, as we passed into it, invisible, our essence causing no disturbance in a realm that was purely souls at that point…souls and nothing but souls…we realized these souls were strengthened in their survival by the attentions of those living on Earth, by the love being sent to them by humans, by the thoughts of them in human minds. It was a process. And just as with Angels, these souls were individuals with varying degrees of intellect, interest, or curiosity. They were hosts as well to Hudegrees of spiritual illumination, which accounts both for the varying outlooks to be found among the mystics and for the different kinds of Glimpse among aspirants. All illumination and all Glimpses free the soul from its negative qualities and base nature, but in the latter case only temporarily. One is able, as a result, to see into one’s higher nature. In the first degree, it is as if a window covered with dirt were cleaned enough to reveal a beautiful garden. One can symbolically look down and see flowers of the World enjoy the petal and the center colors. The colors themselves were so distinct and so finely delineated one may be unsure that our spectrum is even involved. I mean, it is as if out spectrum of color is not the limit! #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

The soul is still the activity of thinking, the emotion of joy, and the discrimination between X and Y. In the next and higher degree, it is as if the window were still more leaned so that still more beauty is revealed beyond it. Here there are no thoughts to intervene between the seer and the seen. In the third degree, the discrimination is no longer present. In the fourth degree, it is as if the window were thoroughly cleaned. Here there is no longer even a rapturous emotion but only a balanced happiness, a steady tranquility which, being beyond the intellect, cannot properly be described by the intellect. Some soul, for example, knew they were dead, and sought to respond to the prayers of their children, and actively attempted to advise, speaking with all the power they could muster in a spiritual voice. They struggled to appear to their children. Sometimes they broke through for a fleeting seconds, gathering to themselves swirling particles of matter by the sheer force of their invisible essence. Other times they made themselves visible in dreams, when the soul of the sleeping human was opened to other souls. They told their children of the bitterness and darkness of death, and that they must be brave and strong in life. They gave their children advice. And the seemed, in some instance at least, to know that the belief and attention of their sons and daughters strengthened them. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

These souls requested prayers and offerings, they reminded the children of their duty. These souls were to some extent the least confused, expect for one thing. They thought they had seen all these was to be seen. There was no hint of Heaven, no light from Heaven penetrated Sheol, nor any music. From Sheol one saw the darkness and the stars, and the people of Earth. Again, mental peace is a fruit of the first and lowest degree of illumination, although thoughts will continue to arise although gently, and thinking in the discursive manner will continue to be active although slowly. However, concentration will be sufficiently strong to detach one from the World and, as a consequence, to yield the happiness which accompanies such detachment. Only those who have attained to this degree can correctly be regarded as “saved” ad only they alone are unable to fall back into illusion, error, sin, greed, or sensuality. In the second degree, there will be more inward absorption and cerebral processed will entirely fade out. Freedom from all possibility of anger is a fruit of the third degree and higher degree. If you think l entirely fade out. Freedom from all possibility of anger is a fruit of the third degree and higher degree. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

If you think you are a god to your children and can still derive strength from the mere sight of the liberation they pour on your grave, the Witness is both an abstract metaphysical concept and a concrete mystical experience. It is not an ultimate one, yielding pure Being, the unsplit Consciousness, but a provisional one. The Witness itself, while witnessing, is being witnessed. Regardless of if the soul’s descendants harken their advice or not, one cannot feel anger toward them, sometimes one will be able to communicate with their descendants with spectacular results. To be the witness is the first stage; to be Witnesses of the witness is the next; but to BE is the final one. For consciousness lets go of the witness in the end. Consciousness alone is itself the real experience. One discovers the presence of this link with World-Mind by a wonderful experience, brief and passing though it be. It is felt intensely and known intuitively. That the divinity is within one is thenceforth one’s certainty even at the times when awareness is absent. However, eventually, if mind develops, one has to asks the question, “What of the World outside?” Until it takes the final leap and transcends itself, human thought can rise to levels of godliness. We may reasonably hope to see God one day but not to be God. The Cosmic Vision of the World-Mind at work can make these souls seem like god to their children. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

Astral gods of a certain kind. Not the Creator of All. When they come to mortals, some souls know they are ghost. Others think they are alive and the whole World has turned against them. Others simply drift, seeing and hearing the sound of other living beings but remote from this as if in a stupor or dream. And some souls died. The dying soul will last a week, perhaps a month in human time, after its separation from the human body, retaining its shape, and then begin to fade. The essence will gradually disperse. Gone into the air, returned perhaps to the energy and essence of God. Their energy comes back into the Creator; the light of a candle returns to the eternal fire. Yet, these are spiritual beings, made in our image and in God’s image, and they cling to that image and hunger for a life beyond death. That is the agony. The hunger for life beyond death. The souls who become the strongest are those who perceive themselves as gods, or humans passed into the realm of the good God, and attentive to humans; and these souls gain power even to sway the others and strengthen them sometimes and keep them from fading away. There are various degrees and kinds of trance, ranging from mere oblivion to psychical visions and mental travelling, and higher still to a complete immersion of the soul in cosmic Divinity. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

A rare but complete illumination must not only pass from the first to the final degree of intensity, but must also contain a picture of the cosmic order. That is to say, it must be a revelation. It must explain the profounder nature of the Universe, the inner meaning of individual existence, and the hidden relationship between the two. There are some souls who understand things in a different way. They know they are not gods. They know they are dead humans. They know they do not really have the right to change the destiny of those who pray to them; they know that the libations essentially are symbolic. These souls understand the meaning of the concept of symbolic. They know. And they know they are dead and they perceive themselves to be lost. If they could, they would reenter the flesh. For there in the flesh is all the light and warmth and comfort that they have ever known and can still see. And sometimes these souls manage to do exactly that! Two factors account for the differences between individual cosmic illumination. First, there is the human contribution made by the mind itself; second, there are ascending stages in the Illumination or rather in the receptivity to it. Cosmic Vision is of two kinds: a seeing the forms and objects around and feeling one with them, and seeing only the Idea of the Universe. This is called identifying through worship. It is the subtle Universe. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

It is an advanced experience, not the ultimate so one ought not to stop there. I have witnessed it in various different fashions. I saw these souls deliberately descend and take possession of a stupefied mortal, take our one’s limbs and brain and live in the individual until the being gained the strength to throw the soul off. You know these things. All beings do—what is involved in possession. There is some confusion on this point in the minds of many students. On attaining enlightenment a being does not attain omniscience. At most, one may receive a revelation of the inner operations of life and Nature, of the higher laws governing life and beings. That is, one may also become a seer and find a cosmogony presented to one’s gaze. However, the actuality in a majority of cases is that one attains enlightenment only, not cosmogonical seership. And what I cannot fail to be frightened by, and horrified by Nature, what I cannot ignore is that these souls do have an effect on living men and women. There are those living humans already who have become oracles. They smoke or drink some potion to render their own minds passive, so that a dead soul might speak with their voice! And because these powerful spirit—for I shall call them spirits now—because these powerful spirits know only what Earth and Sheol can teach them, they might urge human beings on to terrible mistakes. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

I have seen these spirits take possession of someone and order people into battle; I have seen them order executions. I have seen them demand blood sacrifice of human beings. Perhaps this is what is wrong with the thugs outside Mitch McConnell’s home who are currently saying, “Stab the expletive in the heart.” Tomi Lahren what is actually going on is called, “liberal privilege, and that is the misguided belief that those on the left and attack and harass anyone on the conservative side, anyone who is republican, anyone who is a Trump supporter because they believe they have the moral authority to do so.” Humans can create anything. Let us not forget Who Created us all. Angels have gathered, exchanged stories in amazement, then they go off again on their own explorations; they are more entangled with the Earth than they have ever been. However essentially, the reactions of Angels varies. Some, the Seraphim mainly, think the whole process of creation and evolution is downright marvelous; that God deserves a thousand anthems in praise that his Creation should lead to a being who can evolve an invisible deity from itself who would then command it to ever greater efforts at survival of war. Then there are those who think, “This is an error, this is an abomination! These are the souls of humans pretending to be Gods! This is unspeakable and must be stopped immediately!” #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

The deeper one penetrates into the Void the more one is purified of the illusions of personality, time, matter, space, and causality. Between the second and third stages of insight’s unfoldment there are really two further subsidiary stages which are wrapped in the greatest mystery and are rarely touched by the average mystic. For there are stages which lead further downwards into the Void. Some can touch the edge of the Void, as it is, but not its centre. These two stages are purificatory ones and utterly annihilate the last illusions and the last egoisms of the seeker. They are dissolved forever and cannot revive again. Nothing more useful can and may be said about it here. For this is the innermost holy of holies, the most sacred sanctuary accessible to beings. One who touched this grade touches what may not be spoken aloud for sneering ears, nor written down for sneering eyes. Consequently none has ever ventured to explain publicly what must not be so explained. All those of the bene ha Elohim whom I describe to you are alive now. They are immortal. How could you think it would be any other way? Now, there were souls in Sheol at that time who no longer exist, not in any form I know of, but perhaps they do in some form known to God. Tribes pray to different souls. These souls become their gods. Some are stronger than others. Look at the way everywhere, the battle. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

All human beings on this planet are imperfect. Perfection is not fully attainable here. However, when a being has striven for it and advanced near to it, one will attain it automatically as soon as one is freed from the body. So long as beings are immured in this Earth place, so long must the enlightenment one attains be an imperfect one, or the fulfilment one experiences is a limited one. The liberation from further reincarnation can be attained while still here in the flesh, but the full completion of its consequent inner peace can come only after final exit from the body. So long as one is held by the finite flesh, so long as existence in the inner human body is continued, the perfect and complete merger of one’s individuality in the cosmic mind is impossible. However, once through the portals of so-called death, it becomes an actuality. It is not that philosophy denies the possibility of escaping from personal consciousness into the universal one; on the contrary, it well admits it. However, it declares that the journey is still not finished. These souls have only begun their evolution. Who knows how strong they may become? Beings have stepped into the invisible. What if they are meant to become Angels? #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

Some have sensed the presence of Angels on Earth. They sense it as they sense the presence of a dead soul. It is the same part of the brain which perceives other things invisible; I tell you Angels have been glimpsed and shall now be imagined by these people. “At the resurrection people will neither marry nor be given in marriage; they will be like the Angels in Heaven,” reports Matthew 22.30. Believe in the divinity of your deeper self. Stop looking elsewhere for light, stop wandering hither and tither for power. Your intelligence has become falsified through excessive attention to external living, hence you are not even aware in which direction to look when you seek for the real Truth. You are not even aware that all you need can be obtained by the power within, by the omnipotent, omnipresent, and omniscient Self. You have to change, first of all, the line of thought and faith which pleads helplessly: “I am a weak being; I am unlikely to rise any higher than my present level; I live in darkness and move amid opposing environments that overwhelm me.” Rather should you engrave on your heart the high phrase: “I possess illimitable power within me; I can create a diviner life and truer vision than I now possess. So this and then surrender your body, your heart and mind to the Infinite Power which sustains all. Strive to obey Its inward promptings and then declare your readiness to accept whatsoever lot it assigns you. This is your challenge to God and he will surely answer you. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

Your soul will be slowly or suddenly liberated; your body will be granted a freer pathway through conditions. You may have to be prepared for a few changes before the feet find rest, but always you shall find that the Power in which you have placed an abiding trust does not go into default. Because one believes that self-improvement, the bettering of what being’s nature, is quite possible, one believes in the quest. One who learns the essence of spiritual questing and the basic need in practical living, learns that one must come into command of oneself. Who is willing to work upon oneself? Who even fees that one has any duty to do so? Yet this simple acknowledgment could lead to the discovery of God. The student of true philosophy is more intent on growth than on study. Each being should be oneself, not represent a copy of another being. However, one should be one’s best self, not one’s worst, one’s lower, one’s lesser. This calls for growth, aspiration, effort, on one’s part. That is to say, it calls for a quest. Out of one’s present self one is to evolve a better one and to actualize one’s higher possibilities. The divine spirit is always there in beings, has always been there; but until one cultivates one’s capacity to become aware of it, it might as well be non-existent for one. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

The Overself is always there; it has never left us, but it has to be ardently, lovingly, and subtly searched for. One must carry the idea of “I” to a deeper level of identification. Most groups of human beings, most of their associations, societies, and organizations suffer at some time from trouble caused by human weaknesses and shortcomings. These include divisions, jealousies, malices, and personal dislikes or hostilities. This is true of idealistic and religious groups as of business and professional ones. Those with experience of the cults and organizations know how unsatisfactory they are in the end. The passage of truth from mind to mind has always been a personal matter and cannot be otherwise, just as the training in prayer is equally person. In authentic living is an expression of complacency. It is designed around habit, custom, and the forgetting of life’s temporality. Being-in-the-World, on the other hand, is characterized by presence or responsiveness to the World (with all its possibilities and limits). The authentic person, accordingly, is one who responds, not just to Worldly demands, but to Being itself, or to the call within. What is this call to Being? It is like calling of the poet—passionate, poignant, and welling from the depths. When people live authentically, they have a spontaneous feeling that they are caught up in something above human desires to be achieved. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13

Get thee Behind Me, Satan! God Moves the World Only by Love—For Thine is the Power and the Glory Forever!

July 30, 2019 11:38 pm

We have souls, you and I. We want to know things; we share the same Earth, rich and verdant and fraught with perils. We do not—either of us—know what it means to die, no matter what we might say to the contrary. It is a cinch that if we did, we would not study history and religion. In the early nineties of the twentieth century, Italian fashion had flooded the market with so much shapeless, hangy, bulky, formless attire that one of the most erotic and flattering garments a man could choose was the well-tailored navy-blue Brooks Brothers suit. Remember we talked about the fabric of life ripping for a moment so you glimpsed thing you should not have seen? I had the same experience. And I thought, not many mortals would like to go prowling about this dark building, and the place is not entirely spiritually clean. Little spirits, elementals. Well, there are some gathered about this building, but they are no threat. God and the Devil are arguing about me. And now I have a sleepless mind in my heart because my teacher has a dangerous emotional grip to her lectures. The bureaucrat’s official life is planned for one in terms of a graded career, through the organizational devices of promotion by seniority, pension, incremental salaries, and so forth, all of which are designed to provide incentives for disciplined action and conformity to the official regulations. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

The official is tacitly expected to and largely does adapt one’s thoughts, feelings and action to the prospect of this career and the benefits that come with it. However, these very devices which increase the probability of conformance also lead to an over-concern with strict adherence to regulations which induces timidity, conservatism, and technicism. Displacement of sentiments from goals onto means is fostered by the tremendous symbolic significance of the means (rules). Another feature of the bureaucratic structure tends to produce much the same result. Functionaries have the sense of a common destiny for all those who work together. They share the same interests, especially since there is relatively little competition insofar as promotion is in terms of seniority. In-group aggression is thus minimized and this arrangement is therefore conceived to be absolutely functional for the bureaucracy. However, the esprit de corps and informal social organization which typically develops in such situations often leads the personnel to defend their entrenched interests rather than to assist their clientele and elected higher officials. If the bureaucrats believe that their status is not adequately recognized by an incoming elected official, detailed information will be withheld from one, leading one to errors for which one is held responsible. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

Or, if one seeks to dominate fully, and this violates the sentiment of self-integrity of the bureaucrats, one may have documents brought to one in such numbers that one cannot manage to sign them all, let alone read them. This illustrates the defensive informal organization which tends to arise whenever there is an apparent threat to the integrity of the group. It would be much too facile and partly erroneous to attribute such resistance by bureaucrats simply to vested interests. Vested interest opposes any new order which either eliminates or at least makes uncertain their differential advantage deriving from the current arrangements. This is undoubtedly involved in part in bureaucratic resistance to change but another process is perhaps more significant. As we have seen, bureaucratic officials affectively identify themselves with their way of life. They have a pride of craft which leads them to resist change in established routines; at least, those changes which are felt to be imposed by others. This nonlogical pride of craft is a familiar pattern found even—to judge from Sutherland’s Professional Thief—among pickpockets who, despite the risk, delight in mastering the prestige-bearing feat of “beating a left breech” (picking the left front trousers pocket). #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

In a stimulating paper, Everett Hughes has applied the concepts of secular and sacred to various types of division of labor; the sacredness of caste and Stande prerogatives contrast sharply with the increasing secularism of occupational differentiation in our society. However, as our discussion suggests, there may ensue, in particular vocations and in particular types of organizations, the process of sanctification (viewed as the counterpart of the process of secularization). This is to say that through sentiment-formation, emotional dependence upon bureaucratic symbols and status, and affective involvement in sphere of competence and authority, there develop prerogatives involving attitudes of moral legitimacy which are established as values in their own right, and are no longer viewed as merely technical means for expediting administration. One may note a tendency for certain bureaucratic norms, originally introduced for technical reasons, to become rigidified and sacred, although they are laique en apparence. In this general process conveyed ate the attitudes and values which persist in the organic solidarity of a highly differentiated society. Another feature of the bureaucratic structure, the stress on depersonalization of relationships, also plays its part in the bureaucrat’s trained incapacity. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

The personality pattern of the bureaucrat is nucleated about this norm of impersonality. Both this and the categorizing tendency, which develops from the dominant role of general, abstract rules, tend to produce conflict in the bureaucrat’s contacts with the public or clientele. Since functionaries minimize personal relations and resort to categorization, the peculiarities of the individual cases are often ignored. However, the client who, quite understandably, is convinced of the special features of one’s own problem often objects to such categorical treatment. Stereotyped behavior is not adapted to the exigencies of individual problems. The impersonal treatment of affairs which are at times of great personal significance to the client give rise to the charge of arrogance and haughtiness of the bureaucrat. Thus, at the Greenwich Employment Exchange, the unemployed worker who is securing one’s insurance payment resents what he deems to be the impersonality and, at times, the apparent abruptness and harshness of one’s treatment by the clerks. Some beings complain of the superior attitude which the clerks have. Still another source of conflict with the public derives from the bureaucratic structure. The bureaucrat, in part irrespective of one’s position within the hierarchy, acts as a representative of power and prestige of the entire structure. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

In one’s official role one is vested with definite authority. This often leads to an actually or apparently domineering attitude, which may only be exaggerated by a discrepancy between one’s position within the hierarchy and one’s position with reference to the public. Protest and recourse to other officials on the part of the client are often ineffective or largely precluded by the previously mentioned espirt de corps which joins the officials into a more or less solidary in-group. This source of conflict may be minimized in private enterprise since the client can register an effective protest by transferring one’s trade to another organization within the competitive system. However, with the monopolistic nature of the public organization, no such alternative is possible. Moreover, in this case, tension is increased because of a discrepancy between ideology and fact: the governmental personnel are held to be servants of the people, but in fact they are often superordinate, and release of tension can seldom be afforded by turning to other agencies for the necessary service. This tension is in part attributable to the confusion of the status of bureaucrat and client; the client may consider oneself socially superior to the official who is at the moment dominant. “Know ye not that ye are in the hands of God? Know ye not that he hath all power, and at his great command that Earth shall be rolled together as a scroll?” (Reports Mormon 5.20). #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

Thus, with respect to the relations between officials and clientele, one structural source of conflict is the pressure for formal and impersonal treatment when individual, personalized consideration is desired by the client. The conflict may be viewed, then, as deriving from the introduction of inappropriate attitudes and relationships. Conflict within the bureaucratic structure arises from the converse situation, namely, when personalized relationships are substituted for the structurally required impersonal relationships. This type of conflict may be characterized as follows. The bureaucracy, as we have seen, is organizes as a secondary, formal group. The normal responses involved in this organized network of social expectations are supported by affective attitudes of members of the group. Since the group is orientated toward secondary norms of impersonality, any failure to conform to these norms will arouse antagonism from those who have identified themselves with the legitimacy of these rules. Hence, the substitution of personal for impersonal treatment within the structure is met with widespread disapproval and is characterized by such epithets as graft, favoritism, nepotism, apple-polishing, buttering the bread, and so forth. These epithets are clearly manifestations of injured sentiments. The function of such virtually automatic resentment can be clearly seen in terms of the requirements of bureaucratic structure. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

Bureaucracy is a secondary group structure designed to carry on certain activities which cannot be satisfactorily performed on the basis of primary group criteria. Hence behavior which runs counter to these formalized norms becomes the object of emotionalized disapproval. This constitutes a functionally significant defense set up against tendencies which jeopardize the performance of socially necessary activities. To be sure, these reactions are not rationally determined practices explicitly designed for the fulfillment of this function. Rather, viewed in terms of the individual’s interpretation of the situation, such as resentment is simply an immediate response opposing the dishonesty of those who violate the rules of the game. However, this subjective frame of reference notwithstanding these reactions serve the latent function of maintaining the essential structural elements of bureaucracy by reaffirming the necessity for formalized, secondary relations and by helping to prevent the disintegreation of the bureaucratic structure which would occur should these be supplanted by personalized relations. This type of conflict may be generically described as the intrusion of primary group attitudes when secondary group attitudes are institutionally demanded, just as the bureaucrat-conflict often derives from interaction on impersonal terms when personal treatment is individually demanded. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

An interesting variation on the theme of power and love is seen in television show Big Little Lies, starring Oscar winning actress Reese Witherspoon. In this portrayal of a small town, the women have no overt power at all—no economic power, no political power. The only power they have is covert, connected with the pleasures of the flesh. They are condemned to innocence. They accept the pretense of their innocence, which takes the form of coyness and pretended modesty, and they trade on it. It is their moral position, and it turns out to be quite immoral. One young lady who wants to lose her virginity to make herself more desirable takes her boyfriend to a hot sheets motel, orders him to perform pleasures of the flesh. When he, understandably for the situation, is important, she heaps scorn upon him. However, she tells the others young ladies waiting outside: “It was so wonderful, I cannot describe it in words.” It turns out that the woman have power over the men at every turn; the men can only do their best to live up to the women’s demands and expectations. All of the drive for these gyrations comes from the women who have been kept powerless and have only their pretense of innocence as their shield. “And after Christ truly has showed himself unto his people he commanded that they should be made manifest,” reports Ether 4. 2. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

Another interesting aspect of the problem of power and love is the phenomenon of jealously. I shall not go into the question of whether some element of jealousy, as a function of caring and valuing the other person, is normally and healthy beyond saying that I believe it probably is. However, what is generally called jealousy surely goes far beyond that normal care. It is a possessiveness which arises in direct proportion to the impotence of the individual. That is, the degree to which one feels jealous. One can do nothing; one has not power in oneself to win the loved one back; and one has not power in oneself as left out completely in the cold. In such situations jealousy can become a form of violence. One young man, near the beginning of his analysis, could not reach his sweetheart in Rocklin by phone and was seized with a fit of jealousy. He immediately took a plane to Rocklin which is a city in California USA, half hoping to find her in bed with another man. This young man was threatened greatly because his sense of powerlessness was so great. I put the word hoping in to indicate that jealousy often arises from a special ambivalence in the relationship: the person loves but he also hates—that is, he would almost prefer it if she did force him, by having pleasures of the flesh with another, to break off the relationship. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

Jealousy characterizes the relationship in which one seeks more power than love. It occurs when the person has not been able to build up enough self-esteem, enough sense of one’s own power, one’s own right to live, as Mercedes’s declared. Neurotic jealousy, strangely enough, may occur most strongly wen the love is not very solid or well founded. It is a reflection of the person’s feeling of inability to win the other back. This power gone awry and can be very time-consuming and destructive. The jealous person seems to have a need to put all, in this case, of his energy into the jealous fit, partly to prove a love that underneath he feels to be very problematic anyway. “Darling you see now that it was never, we are never what we see. Set you up to let you down, I am afraid. Darling do you see how our lies become the truth. We never said what we meant. Darling it feels good when they let you in. Do not play the fool. They will only let you down if you stay. We cannot all be broken down, I am afraid. Holy Hell, we have hit the bottom running to the ones we love, to the ones we hurt,” reports Broken Down by Tritonal. The boundaries of power and love overlap each other. Love makes the person who loves want to be influenced and want to do what the loved one wishes. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

The intertwining of love and power is shown in relationships between lovers and between husbands and wife in the concern for the dignity of the other, the preservation of his or her independent self. It is shown in child-rearing in the firm structure that the understanding adult gives to the child. Assertion, affirmation of the self, and even aggression at times are not only unavoidable but healthy in the developing love relationship. Some readers may wish to call nutrient power and integrative power actually forms of love. I agree with their meaning, but I think it best to guard against power and love being swallowed up in each other. Hence I prefer to keep their separate meanings clear. However, we can say that the lower forms of power—exploitative, manipulative—have a very minimum of love in them, while the higher forms—nutrient, integrative—have more. In other words, the higher up the scale we go, the more love we find. Even in the religious realm, the belief that God moves the World only by love is sentimentality. Persons who are of the opinion forget that the first of the General Confession is Almighty, and the Lord’s prayer ends with for Thine is the power and the glory forever. Often the Beatitudes are similarly misinterpreted—“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the Earth”—as well as the story of Jesus saying, when he is offered all power over the Earth: “Get thee behind me, Satan.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

However, we need to take into consideration that Christianity was born in a World in which the Roman army occupied the whole known as the globe; and any kind of political power or lack of meekness would have meant that one would get oneself quickly executed. Our problem is now different: we stand in a World dominated by giant technology. If they are to survive at all, men and women must be able to asset the power of their conciseness. Social action—work for radical justice, international peace, helping of the poor, and so on—would not be possible without a combination of power and love. Joy does not come from submission and abnegation, but from assertion. Joy is only a symptom of the feeling of attained power. The essence of joy is an absolute feeling of power. However, if they coincide with culturally approved forms of inhibitions or with existing ideologies, it may be impossible ever to become aware of personal inhibitions. A patient who had serious inhibitions against approaching women was not aware of being inhibited because he saw his conduct in the light of the accepted idea of the sacredness of women. When the glimpse experience has been repeated many times, it will come to be looked upon as a natural experience. The state it induced will seem to be a normal one. The miracle which the beginner makes of it will seem an unnecessary exaggeration to the matured proficient being. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

An inhibition against making demands is easily put on the basis of the strict and rigid doctrines that modesty is a virtue; and inhibition against critical thinking about strict and rigid doctrines dominant in politics or religion or any specific field of interest may escape attention, and we may be entirely unaware of the existence of an anxiety concerning the exposure to punishment, criticism or isolation. In order to judge the situation, however, we must of course know the individual factors in great detail. The absence of critical thought does not necessarily imply the existence of inhibitions, but may be due to a general laziness of mind, to stupidity or to conviction that really coincides with the dominant doctrines of the strict and rigid type. A number of factors may account for the inability to recognize existing inhibitions and for the fact that even experienced psychoanalysts may find it difficult to detect them. However, even assuming that we could recognize all of them, our estimate of the frequency of inhibitions would still be too low. We would have to take into account all those reactions which, although not fully grown inhibitions, are on the way toward that culmination. In the attitudes I have in mind we are still able to do certain things, but the anxiety connected with them exerts certain influences on the activities themselves. When we define creativity, we must make the distinction between its pseudo forms, on the one hand—that is, creativity as a superficial aestheticism. And, on the other, its authentic form—that is, the process of bringing something new into being. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

The crucial distinction is between art as artificiality (as in artifice or artful) and genuine art. This is distinction that artists and philosophers have struggled all through the centuries to make clear. Plato, for example, demoted his poets and his artist down to the sixth circle of reality because, he said, they deal only with appearances and not with reality itself. He was referring to art as a decoration, a way of making life prettier, a dealing with semblances. However, in his later, beautiful dialogue, the Symposim, he described what he called the true artists—namely, those who give birth to some new reality. These poets and other creative persons are the ones who express being itself, he held. As I would put it, these are the ones who enlarge human consciousness. Their creativity is the most basic manifestation of a man or woman fulfilling his or her own being in the World. Now, if our inquiries into creativity are to get below the surface, we must make the above distinction clear. We are thus not dealing with hobbies, do-it-yourself movements, Sunday painting, or other forms of filling up leisure time. Nowhere has the meaning of creativity been more disastrously lost than in the idea that it is something you do only on week ends! The creative process must be explored not as the product of sickness, but as representing the highest degree of emotional health, as the expression of the normal people in the act of actualizing themselves. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

Creativity must be seen in the work of the scientist as well as in that of the artist, in the thinker as well as in the aesthetician; and one must not rule out the extent to which it is present in captains of modern technology as well as in a mother’s normal relationship with her child. Creativity rightly indicates a process of making, of bringing into being. So much so that some people believe that science is becoming the new God, and the metaphysical speculations are the cold and calculating path to that goal. Rather than formulaic truths, therefore, or reductionist explanations of how and why we do what we do, and this is why some still advocate inwardness and passion. In reality, neither objectivism, with its emphasis on the publicly measurable and verifiable, nor subjectivism, with its accent on the private and emotional, can, in isolation, provide us with a complete picture of human functioning. Only taken together can they help us to understand our condition. The problem is that (particularly) objectivism has grown so monstrous in recent years and has become so top-heavy that it threatened to crush subjectivism—leaving us to pull levers and push bottoms for many of our needs. We do need rules, regulations, and formulas, but these things do not always help us to comprehend the richer aspects of living, such as the capacity to love, create, and marvel at the stars. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

We need to redress the imbalance that has emerged and forge a broader, more inclusive position. For truth exists only as the individual produces it in action. Away from speculation, away from the system, and back to reality, the more consciousness, the more self. Personhood is a synthesis of possibility and necessity. Beings exist on many levels, some of which are contradictory and some of which are fathomless. Our task is to affirm these various facets of our existence and not to reduce or deny them. The difference between the intermediate and the final state is the difference between feeling the Overself to be a distinct and separate entity and feeling it to be the very essence of oneself, between temporary experience of it and enduring union with it. Whereas when it first occurs, the glimpse may be a dramatic experience, being established is natural, simple, pleasant but not rapturous, and continuously aware. We must learn to differentiate between the partial attainment of the mystic who stops short at passive enjoyment of ecstatic states and the perfect attainment of the sage who does not depend on any particular states but dwells in the unbroken calm of the unconditioned Overself. From one’s high point of view all such states are necessarily illusory, however personally satisfying at the time, inasmuch as they are transient conditions and do not pertain to the final result. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

If the illumination itself is to be total pure, and reliable, all aspects of being’s nature needs to be illuminated and equably balanced. The self is a synthesis of infinitude and finitude, that relates itself to itself, whose task is to become itself. The self is a synthesis of which the finite is the limiting and the infinite the extending factor. When the overemphasize either polarity, when they become too finitized or infinitized, some beings become dysfunctional. The cold, pedantic objectivist, to further illustrate this description, may be understood as excessively finitized; while the fiery, indulgent subjectivist may be viewed as over infinitized. Infiniude’s despair is to lack or avoid finitude. Infinitude’s despair is the fantastic, the unlimited. As a rule, imagination is the medium for the process of infinitizing. The self then leads a fantasized existence moving further and further away from itself. It flounders in possibility until exhausted. Finitude’s despair is to lack or avoid infinitude, to lack infinitude is despairing reductionism, narrowness. Whereas one kind of despair plunges wildly into the infinite and loses itself, this kind permits itself to be tricked out of itself by other beings. A person in such a state forgets oneself, forgets one’s name, does not dare to believe in oneself, and find it far easier and safer to be like other, to become a copy, a number, a mass being. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

Good health generally means the ability to resolve contradictions. It is a synthesis like breathing which is an inhaling and exhaling. A passionate-realistic hero, a knight of faith has precisely these qualities. However, ignorance of it is widespread among would-be heroes and mystics and even among real mystics. If there is contradiction between their results, it is because they too often experience the illumination fully through their feelings, to a limited extent through their wills, and hardly at all through their intellects. Many people, however, feel in their youth and inexperience and weakness that at their age there is a need for some kind of support from outside, some group to give then not merely fellowship but also a feeling of solidity and stability, something to learn upon, in short. This can teach others a lesson and make them understand sympathetically that the love of independence to ensure a free search, and the desire for self-reliance do not belong to everybody, and others, certainly most people, have other needs, prefer other ways, for which there is also room in human life. Organizational life can be helpful to our early efforts and guide our early steps. “I am under your spell. Bound and blind and only you can save me. I am tangled up inside, caught in your web. I am hypnotized and only you can wake me. Only you can bring this heart to life,” reports Under Your Spell by Cosmic Gate. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

There is a place for a society of friends, but this place is a preliminary one. If the final work of a seeker is to be done for and upon oneself, that does not displace the necessity of an institution in assisting one to do the preparatory work. Therefore, even the advance mystic, who has no need of its services, cannot in principle be hostile to an institution. One readily admits its necessity and denies only its all-sufficiency. These groups led by a guru (hopefully with all their wires in their brains properly connected) may be quite useful to a beginner who is stumbling in the dark. However, to join one without knowing the limitations and dangers would be foolish. When unled, religious followers begin to organize themselves either quite spontaneously, or when a leader appears, they organize themselves quite obediently for several good understandable reasons. The coming together in a compact group affords some protection, offers them a mode of expression and the teaching a mode of preservation. The strength of such a group must be possessed in its quality and not in its members. It must be the result not of propaganda activities but of the spontaneous association of like-thinking people. It is true that there are many eccentrics among these believers and they are still serious and sensible and well-behaved. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

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You Who Must Guide, Before You Trust Me to that Arduous Passage, Look to Me and Look through Me—Can I be Worthy?

July 24, 2019 1:00 am

I do believe you! Every word you have said. And the literal truth is unimportant. You seek something that the saints sought when they renounced their normal lives, when they blundered into the service of Christ. And never mind that you do not believe in Christ. It is unimportant. What is important is that you have been miserable in the existence you have lived until now, miserable to the point of madness, and that my way would offer you an alternative. Nature is mortal’s inorganic body, that is, nature apart from the human body itself. TO say that beings live on nature means that nature is one’s body, that is, nature apart from the human body itself. To say that beings live on nature means that nature is one’s body with which one must remain in constant and vital contact in order not to die. And to say that being’s physical and spiritual life is linked to nature is simply an expression of the interdependence of all natural forces, for beings themselves are part of nature. Just as alienated labor separates beings from nature and from themselves—one’s own active functions and life activity—so too its alienated one from the species, from other beings. What happens in the end is that beings regard their labor—their life-activity, one’s productive life—merely as a means of satisfying one’s drive for physical existence. Yet productive life is the real life of the species. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14

The whole character of a species is evident in its particular type of life-activity; and free, conscious activity is the genetic character of human beings. However, alienated labor reduces this area of productive life to a mere means of existence. To make us connected to our product and labor, beings design in accordance with the laws of beauty. They produce things that make them happy and use the money they earn from their labor to buy private property, something the love that connects them with their work, and makes it more enjoyable. Just because you do not yet sort memos, do not yet sit in conferences, and do not yet sip martinis from your lunch box, do not let your attitude toward your work be generally compounded of hatred, shame and resignation. I have worked on the line with men who have doubled as mechanics, repairmen, salesmen, contractors, builders, farmers, cab-drivers, lumberyard workers, countermen. I would guess that there are many more of these than show up in the official statistics: often people will work for less if one can be paid under the counter with tax-free dollars. Nor is that all. The factory worker with dependents cannot carry the debt load one shoulders—the middle-class debt load, if you like, of nagging payment on car, washer, dryer, TV, clothing, house itself without family help. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14

Even if one puts in fifty, sixty, or seventy hours a week at one or two jobs, one has to count on his wife’s paycheck, or his son’s, his daughter’s, his brother-in-law’s; or on his mother’ social security, or his father’s veteran’s pension. The working-class family today is not typically held together by the male wage-earner, but by multiple wage-earners often of several generations who club together to get the things they want and need—or are pressured into believing they must have. It is at best a precarious arrangement; as for its toll on the physical organism and the psyche, that is a question perhaps worthy of further investigation by those who currently pronounce themselves bored with Utopia Unlimited in the Fat Millennium. But what of the worker’s middle-class expectations? If these expectations have changed at all in recent years, they would seem to have narrowed, rather than expanded, leaving a psychological increment of resignation rather than of unbounded optimism (expect among the very young—and even among them the optimism focuses more often on better-paying opportunities elsewhere in the labor market than on illusory hopes of swift status advancement). #RandolphHarris 3 of 14

The worker’s expectations are for better pay, more humane working conditions, more job security. As long as one feels that one is going to achieve them through an extension of existing conditions, for that long one is going to continue to be a middle-class conservative in temper. But only for that long. I suspect that what middle-class writers mean by the worker’s middle-class expectations are one’s cravings for commodities—one’s determination to have no only fin-tailed cars and single-unit washer-dryers, but McMansions with butterfly chairs in the rumpus room, African masks on the wall, Greek statues, a gorgeous Monet, a couple of small Picassos, a ruby red egg tempera panel of the medieval period, and power boats in the garage. Before the middle-class intellectual condemn these expectations too harshly, let them consider, first, who has been utilizing every known technique of suasion and propaganda to convert luxuries into necessities, and second, at what cost these new necessities are acquire by American working-class family. Think of the American worker: satisfied, doped by TV, essentially middle class in outlook. This is an image bred not of communication with workers (except as mediated by hired interviewers sent into the field like anthropologist or entomologists), but of contempt for people, based perhaps on self-contempt and on a feeling among intellectuals that the worker has let them down. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14

In order to see this clearly, we have to place it again in the intellectual’s changing attitudes toward the worker over the last one hundred and ten years. At the time of the Chief Information Officer (CIO), the middle-class intellectual saw the proletarian as society’s figure of virtue—heroic, magnanimous, bearing in one’s loins the seeds of a better future. The glamorization of the worker has been taken over as a function of government. Many intellects, as government employees, found themselves helping to create this portrait of the worker as patriot. However, all workers are doing now is making things that other people buy. That, and participating in the great commodity scramble. The disillusionment, it would seem, is almost too terrible to bear. Word has gotten around among the highbrows that the worker is not heroic or idealistic; public opinion pills prove that they want barbecue pits more than foreign assistance and air-conditioning more than desegregation, that they do not particularly want to go on strike, that they are reluctant to form a Labor Party, they vote for Trump because the economy is good, and they are animated by the same aspirations as drive the middle-class onward and upward in suburbia. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14

Manipulative power may have originally been invited by the person’s own desperation or anxiety. Some people accede to their employer’s demand that they accept being a lady or man of the night because her or his own hopelessness and inability to do anything else. After this initial agreement, there is very little spontaneity or choice left to the person. The shift of exploitative to manipulative power is seen on our own frontier in the superseding of the gunman or woman by the “con” man or woman. If for no other reason than one left his or her victim living, in all of one’s dishonesty and misuse of Protestant ethics, the con person represents a less destructive power than the brute force of the gun person. Manipulative power works gratifyingly with those who are already mentally limited, such as children with intellectual disabilities, some backward psychotics, prisoners, and neurotics in limited spheres. And it works certainly well with pigeons. Some people think it is impowering to be controlled, they want to feel like a possession—a trophy wife with silicone trinkets, or a boy toy with a flashy sports car. These are groups in whom spontaneity has already been largely handicapped or rendered ineffective and for whom the principle of manipulative power is necessary. Much of human life is manipulative and that manipulation is used for socially justifiable aims. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14

Many beings no longer consciously confront their power needs. It is often pointed out that Americans, in the years before 2007, were in such a state of economic hopelessness and anxiety that they succumbed to the manipulative power of Obama in the hope that “hope and change” would assuage their anxiety. The dangers similarly are, giving the despair and anxiety of men and women living in this time of transition between historical periods, that people today will turn toward the socialism proposals of Obama and other democrats in the hope of escaping their anxiety. Anxiety is synonymous with fear, thereby indicating a kinship between the two. Bother are in fact emotional reactions to danger and both may be accompanied by physical sensations, such as trembling, perspiration, violent heart-beat, which may be so strong that a sudden, intense fear may lead to death. Yet there is a difference between the two. When a mother is afraid that her child will die when it has only a pimple or a slight cold we speak of anxiety; but if she is afraid when the child has a serious illness we call her reaction fear. If someone is afraid whenever he stands on a height or when he has to discuss a topic he knows well, we call his reaction anxiety; if someone is afraid when he loses his way high up in the mountains during heavy thunderstorm we would speak of fear. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14

Thus far we should have a simple and neat distinction: fear is a reaction that is proportionate to the danger one has to face, whereas anxiety is a disproportionate reaction to danger, or even a reaction to imaginary danger. This distinction has one flaw, however, which is that the decision as to whether the reaction is proportionate depends on the average knowledge existing in the particular culture. However, even if that knowledge proclaims a certain attitude to be unfounded, a neurotic will find no difficulty in giving one’s action a rational foundation. In fact, one might get into hopeless arguments if one told a patient that one’s dread of being attacked by some raving lunatic reporter is neurotic anxiety. He would point out that one’s fear is realistic and would refer to occurrences of the kind he fears. The primitive would be similarly stubborn if one considered certain of one’s fear reactions disproportionate to the actual danger. For instance, primitive man in a tribe which as taboos on eating certain animals in mortally frightened if by any chance he has eaten the tabooed meat. As an outside observer you would call this a disproportionate reaction, in fact an entirely unwarranted one. However, knowing the tribe’s beliefs concerning forbidden meat you would have to realize that the situation represents a real danger to the being, danger that the hunting or fishing grounds may be spoiled or danger of contracting an illness. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14

There is a difference, however, between the anxiety we find in primitives and the anxiety we consider neurotic in our culture. The content of neurotic anxiety, unlike that of primitive, does not conform with commonly held opinions. In both the impressions of a disproportionate reaction vanishes once the meaning of the anxiety is understood. There are persons, for example, who have a perpetual anxiety about dying; on the other hand, because of their sufferings they have a secret wish to die. Their various fears of death, combined with their wishful thinking with regard to death, create a strong apprehension of imminent danger. If one knows all these factors one cannot help but call their anxiety about dying an adequate reaction. Another, simplified example is seen in persons who become terrified when they find themselves near a precipice or a high window or on a high bridge. Here again from without, the fear reaction seems to be disproportionate. However, such a situation may present to them, or stir up in them, a conflict between the wish to live and the temptation for some reason or another to jump down from the heights. It is this conflict that may result in anxiety. The past cannot be relived but every step one can leave the past behind. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14

The capacities of the imagination that living beings possess are the hallmark of our paradoxical condemnation and our epiphany as beings. The Green Light God gives us is to lend some balance, some dialectic to us as individuals as well as to America. It is a safeguard against [the unalloyed] arrogance of the chosen people, and it makes clear that no one leads us astray. The legend of the Promised Land requires us to pause in our progression of this promised America-the-beautiful to pray about our purposes and to clarify our aims. Other countries like China are producing Smart Cities which aim to reduce crime and improve the quality of life. The American Dream has not yet collapsed; we can still find the way to an ecstasy which balances our dreams, anxiety, and fears. Available to us is inspiration of a new age in which we can directly confront our despair and use it constructively. We know then that the meaning of human existence is infinitely deeper than the American Dream, no matter how far we are borne back into the past of fatigue and ultimate death, we have harbored some ecstatic thought, we have wondered and experiences some poignancy as well as sadness in our wondering. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14

Let us not match our petty limited minds against the infinite and incomprehensible World-Mind, and let us not say with some foolish mystic that we are God. Let us say rather what we can truly say, which is that there is something of God in us. And for a while the sadnesses are freed from guilt and the joys are relieved of anxiety. It is not for the philosopher to inflate oneself with the arrogance of such pompous self-deification. One remains humble adorer, the meek suppliant. When eternity breaks into time, as it does in legends, we suddenly become aware of the meaning of human consciousness. We are the servants of God. God is within us and that is very true. Although the mystic’s claim to become one with God is, in the full sense of the term, an unquestionable exaggeration, a splendid illusion, one can certainly claim to have entered into a conscious relationship with God. The mystic proudly declares, “I have attained union with God.” The philosopher mostly says, “I have obtained union with my soul and to that extent drawn nearer to God.” This allows one to make sense of our otherwise senseless efforts; it throws light on the darkness of our routine labors and lends some zest to our monotony. This is true whether push our yachts against a current that blocks progress, or work like a robot in a factory, or struggle say after day to express some recalcitrant thoughts in words that always seem to elude us. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14

The ultimate challenge of the American Dream is that we are required—destined, if you will—to recognize our being stat of consciousness in that we are Divine Incarnations inspired by God. We represent God’s Infinite Consciousness, this affirms that any being may approach nearer to and be uplifted by that Consciousness, even if they are not an American. God is never identified with any particular being, not incarnated for one. For God alone is uniquely the Unindividuated whereas all beings are individualized creatures. Even the highest type of being is a particular light, whereas God is the light itself. Every creative encounter is a new event; every time requires another assertion of courage. Every being must start at the beginning. And to encounter the reality of experience is surely the basis for all creativity. The task is to forge in the smithy of my soul, as arduous as the blacksmith’s task of bending red-hot iron in his smithy to make something of value for human life. The conscience is not something that is handed down ready-made from Mount Sinai, despite reports to the contrary. It is created, first of all, out of the inspiration derived from the artist’s symbols and forms. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14

Every authentic artist is engaged in this creating of the conscience of the race, even though one may be unaware of the fact. That the Divine has descended into holy being’s mind and heart is philosophically tenable. That the Divine has actually and specifically incarnated in one is not. The artist is not a moralist by conscious intention, but is concerned only with hearing and expressing the vision within his or her own being. However, out of the symbols the artist sees and creates—as Giotto created the forms for the Renaissance—there is later hewn the ethical structure of the society. Nothing can contain the divine essence although everything can be and is permeated by it. The time has come to repudiate all this foolish worship of human beings and to transfer our reverence and obedience to the pure divine Being alone. The more metaphysical comprehension we develop, the less we shall look to the person of a teacher. We shall then regard the Teaching itself as the essential thing. It is always a profitable game for the priesthood of various religions to maintain superstitions like that of a chosen race or fallacies like that of a divine incarnation. This wrong idea of incarnate Godhood is, however, not a moisture without some rain within it. For it is the corruption of a true idea. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14

The REAL is unique and indivisible, sole and unadulterable. It never becomes less than it is, never descends to become human, never mixes with what is mere phenomena. Free from sin or guilt; blameless. When one’s thoughts and action are clean in every way, one becomes pure. Your faith to sustain servants of God has been at the heart of your happiness in this life. When one begins a spiritual quest, it is solely by one’s own strivings that one makes one’s initial progress. The time comes, however, when this progress seems to stop and when one seems to stagnate. One has to come to the end of a stage which was really a preparatory one. The stagnation indicates that the path of self-effort is no longer sufficient and that one must now enter upon the path of reliance upon Grace. This is because in the earlier stage, the Ego was the agent for all one’s spiritual activities, whilst it provided the motives which impelled one into these activities. “Behold, O Lord, their souls are precious, and many of them are our brethren; therefore, give unto us, O Lord, power and wisdom that we may bring these, our brethren, again unto thee,” report Alma 31.35. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14

A Glowing Tripod Will at Last Give Sign that You Have Reached the Deepest, Nethermost Shrine and by its Light You Will Behold the Mothers!

July 22, 2019 1:31 am

Within moments of leaving of the Cresleigh Homes Rocklin Trails House, stepping out into the glorious daylight, I knew that this experience would be worth all of the trials and the pain. And no mortal chills, with all its debilitating symptoms would keep me from frolicking in the morning Sun. Never mind that my overall physical weakness was driving me mad: that I seemed to be made of stone as I plodded along with Nacho, that I could not jump two feet in the air when I tried, or that pushing open the door of the butcher shop took a colossal effort; or that my cold was growing steadily worse. Once Nacho had devoured his breakfast of scraps, begged from the butcher, we were off together to revel in the light everywhere, and I felt myself becoming drunk on the vision of the Sunlight falling upon windows and wet pavements, on the gleaming tops of brightly enameled BMWs, on glassy puddles where the snow had melted, upon the plate-glass shop windows, and upon the people—the thousands and thousands of happy people, scurrying busily about the business of the day. In our society most men and women spend the major portion of their waking hours at work, a fact which should not be taken to mean that beings find or express themselves only in their work. Yet far beyond the workplace and the time spent in it, the work we do and the way we do it shape our lives—our image of ourselves and our relations with others. #RandolphHarris 1 of 22

The World we have lost, a World based on the patriarchal productive unit of preindustrial times was an intimate Word in which work was inseparable from other family activities. Let it be noted, however—especially for those who would turn the clock back—that this was an authoritarian World, ruled by a father or father-figure who was absolute boss. But along with the power and control exercised by this figure went duties and responsibilities toward those whose work he supervised. He ruled his flock, but he also tended it. With large-scale industrialism this type of family industry as the basic productive unit came to an end, never to be restored. In the rise of industrial capitalism, handicrafts were replaced by machine-tool production. What this transformation meant for the ordinary worker, turn from the roots of their medieval past, is the beings are alienated from a World in which nature, others, and them as living beings become objects. The object produced by being’s labor—its produce—now confronts one in the shape of an alien thing, a power independent of the producer. The product of labor is labor given embodiment in a material form this product is the objectification of labor. Furthermore, the worker is estranged from the very process of production, which is controlled not by one, but by an alien being. #RandolphHarris 2 of 22

Having lost control of one’s work, beings are alienated from others—and from oneself as well. Both labor and the possessing class represent the same self-estrangement. Alienated labor is not the result, but the cause of private property because people want to see the emancipation of themselves as creative and self-expressive, free to product the things they desire with love and passion. However, today we are confronted with the ambivalent machine—an instrument of liberation and of repression. As a result of innovation and globalization in America, we are seeing the heartland being eroded. United States Department of Agriculture (USDA) reported that licensed dairy farm numbers in the country declined by 2,731 farms, a drop of 6.8 percent, leaving just 37,468 licensed dairy farms America, compared to 40,199 last years. Wisconsin is the state with the most dairy farms in American, but 590 dairy farms went out of business. Decline in American production is also because we are confronted by a formidable counterpart of the machine—bureaucracy. While bureaucracy aims at the rationalization of human behavior, it rarely achieves this goal. #RandolphHarris 3 of 22

Blind adherence to the rules may be dysfunctional, that is, it will prevent the bureaucracy from performing its intended function. For instance, former governor Jerry Brown signed a law that mandates cutting methane from livestock 40 percent by 2030 from 2013 levels. Dairy Farmer Kim Jorgensen has 270 cows. The cow tax would cost him an estimated $93,126.00. This mandate will cost a number of farmers their livelihoods and it will have an effect on competition. It means that farmers in California will have to compete with colleagues who do not have this mandate, and California dairy famers will be at a disadvantage. Consumers will prefer to buy their milk if it is affordable, but if diary famers are penalized, consumers will switch to milk produced outside of California, or the Untied State or switch to an alternative like cashew milk, almond milk, soy milk, or camel’s milk. If our goal is to create jobs and support local business, by taxing cow emission and buying milk and beef from other countries, where it is not regulated by the USDA will cause Americans to lose more jobs in the future. Therefore, as you can see whether bureaucracy is efficient or inefficient, it can be inherently impersonal and defeat the purpose of what it is intended to do. This impersonal character makes bureaucracy a hated and feared institution. #RandolphHarris 4 of 22

Although Americans tend to dislike bureaucracy because it tends to over regulate the beings and their production, and it has run amuck, many democrats are pushing for socialism and want to actually expand the government and put the government in more control of their lives. By forcing the government to provide healthcare for everyone, pay for college educations, tax foods and drinks that can lead to obesity to curb their popularity and control who can own guns. If democrats have their way, there will even be mandated wages and your education, experience, and performance will not matter because democrats want their “fair share,” even if they have not worked for it nor earned it. For instance, with democrats demanding their “fair share” to help people in retail jobs earn a living wage, they could reduce a doctor’s pay from $50 an hour to $25 an hour to supplement people’s wages in retail jobs so bureaucrats can equalize the wage disparity in California. This impersonal character makes bureaucracy a hated and feared institution, which capitalist want less government and less regulation so people have a fair chance at succeeding in life. When personal feelings and needs are permitted to intrude into its deliberations, there is a danger for bureaucracy. #RandolphHarris 5 of 22

However, bureaucracy is not supposed to be only an alien governing power that provides welfare and handouts to those who do not want to work, while over taxing and oppressing those who want to get an education and work; it is for increasing numbers of professional and white-collar workers a workplace. However, life in the crystal palace is not a government bureau or dreary counting house, but more of what many would consider the ideal corporate environment—physically luxurious and at least superficially warm and friendly in its human relationships. And yet, the crystal palace is less alienating than the assembly line because it is safe, clean, nice and peaceful. People are artificially caring, but not snarky, sarcastic nor vindictive. Both the assembly line and crystal palace turn out robots, but with the crystal palace you get cheerful robots, instead of cheerless robots, even though both are victims of impersonal and remote power. When not at work is where beings find themselves, in leisure hours, if they have any. However, some people have no training for leisure. And so, like the work from which it provides escape, leisure becomes a great void and these people usually fill that void with sinful activities. The Devil finds work for idle hands. #RandolphHarris 6 of 22

For some people their leisure time is occupied with productive activities so they stay out of trouble. Out of all the other I’s some are chosen as a pattern that is me. However, there are all the other possibilities of patterns within what all the others say which come into me and become other I’s which is not myself, and sometimes these take over. Then who am I? The personal self is not formed in isolation. It is built out of both our private and our shared experiences. We tend to evaluate ourselves, at least in our early years, by comparing ourselves to others or by patterning our behaviors and ideas on those of people whom we feel to be significant. Peer and authority figures are often role models for our personal selves. Even if you are not in your ideal career, or ideal environment, I myself choose to occupy myself with reading psychology, religion and other subjects for 3-7 hours every day. I truly believe that an education, even if it is not formal, will help my mind develop and eventually elevate me to a place where I can achieve my dreams. Some people run hither and thither, from teacher to teaching to a different teacher or teaching, from Euramerica to India, to Japan, to China, looking away from their own being for that which is the essence of that being. They are like the man who looked everywhere for his spectacles. At last he gave up the search—only to find the spectacles resting on this own nose. #RandolphHarris 7 of 22

However, had this man’s attention had first to be drawn to his nose by someone—or by the book of someone—who could see his spectacles there. These seekers are not ordinarily aware of what is continually present within them, the stillness of the centre of their being, and instead of looking there for it, they look elsewhere, or to other beings. The real service which is rendered them by others is to tell them where to look; the rest is for them to do. However, the lazy, or those who want something for nothing, expect or want the gurus to do it for them—a false idea. The other great error of these confused minds is to seek from the crystal palace what it is not rejecting. The best in the crystal palace are not rejecting spirituality but ignorance, superstition, unbalance, futility, narrowness, and excess of liberalism. The Westerner who adores American’s past want to copy it, picturing it as a golden age of excess and abundance (which it never was). One tries to restore it for oneself and in oneself, becoming an ape and a parrot. If some have found their way to this illumination by following slavishly the details of a special teaching, others have found it by following their faith in God. It is not uncommon for inexperienced beginners on the Quest, who are ignorant of the serious and often harmful results of such associations, to turn to untrustworthy so-called occult teachers. #RandolphHarris 8 of 22

In most cases, it would be far safer, and more satisfactory in the end, for them to depend solely upon their own unassisted efforts than to follow such a dangerous method. One of the predominant trends of neurotics of our time is their excessive dependence on the approval or affection of others. We all want to be liked and to feel appreciated, but in neurotic persons the dependence on affection or approval is disproportionate to the real significance which other persons have for their lives. Although we all wish to be liked by persons of whom we are fond, in neurotics there is an indiscriminate hunger for appreciation or affection, regardless of whether they care for the person concerned or whether the judgment of that person has any meaning for them. More often than not they are not aware of this boundless craving, but they betray its existence in their sensitivity when the attention they want is not forthcoming. They may feel hurt, for example, if someone does not accept their invitation, does not telephone for some time, or even only if one disagrees with them in some opinion. This sensitivity may be concealed by a “do not care” attitude. #RandolphHarris 9 of 22

Furthermore, there is a marked contradiction between their wish for affection and their own capacity for feeling or giving it. Excessive demands concerning consideration for their own wishes may go with just as great a lack of consideration for others. The contradiction does not always appear on the surface. The neurotic may, for example, be overconsiderate and eager to be helpful to everyone, but if this is the case it is noticeable that one acts compulsively, not out of a spontaneously radiating warmth. The inner insecurity expressed in this dependence on others is the second feature that strikes us in neurotics on surface observation. Feelings of inferiority and inadequacy are characteristics that never fail. They may appear in a number of ways—such as a conviction of incompetence, of stupidity, of unattractiveness—and they may exist without any basis in reality. Notions of their own stupidity may be found in persons who are unusually intelligent, or notions about their own unattractive in the most beautiful person. These feelings of inferiority may appear openly on the surface in the form of complaints or worries, or the alleged defects may be taken for granted as a fact on which it is superfluous to waste any thought. #RandolphHarris 10 of 22

On the other hand, feelings of inferiority may be covered up by the compensating needs for self-aggrandizement, by a compulsive propensity to show off, to impress others and one’s self with all sorts of attributes that lend prestige in our culture, such as money, possession of antique pictures, antique furniture, women and/or men, social contacts with prominent people, travel, or superior knowledge. One or the other of these tendencies may be entirely in the foreground, but more generally one will feel distinctly the presence of both tendencies. The third set of attitudes, those concerning self-assertion, involve definite inhibitions. By self-assertion I mean the act of asserting one’s self or one’s claims, and I use it without any connotation of undue pushing forward. In this respect neurotics reveal a comprehensive group of inhibitions. They have inhibitions about expressing their wishes or asking for something, about doing something in their own interest, expressing an opinion or warranted criticism, ordering someone, selecting the people they wish to associate with, making contact with people, and so on. There are inhibitions also in reference to what we might describe as maintaining one’s stand: neurotics often are incapable of defending themselves against attack, or of saying “no” if they do not wish to comply with the wishes of others, as for example to a saleswoman who wants to sell them something they do not want to be, or to a person who invites them to a party, or to a woman or man who wants to experience pleasure of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 11 of 22

There are finally the inhibitions toward knowing what they want: difficulties in making decisions, forming opinions, daring to express wishes which concern only their own benefits. Such wishes have to be concealed: a friend of mine in her personal accounts puts “movies” under “education” and “liquors” under “health.” Particularly important in this latter group is the incapacity to plan, whether it be a trip or a plan of life: neurotics let themselves drift, even in important decisions such as a profession or marriage, instead of having clear conceptions of what they want in life. They are driven exclusively by certain neurotic fears, as we see in persons who pile up money because they fear impoverishment, or take part in endless love affairs because they fear to enter a constructive piece of work. However, God is immanent in us, that through realization of our higher self we become more like God, but that God never ceases to be the Unattainable, the Incomprehensible. The individual is as inseparable from the Infinite as the ray from the Sun. Nevertheless one differs from it in degree and in attribute. Just as a little child may be closely intimate with its mother but not with its mother’s mind, so the human being may be closely intimate with the World-Mind but not with Its full consciousness. The higher kingdoms of Nature cannot be understood by denizens of lower ones. Beings can grow, move, and reflect, but as far as we know cannot enter into God’s infinitely mysterious consciousness. #RandolphHarris 12 of 22

Being itself infinite, the World-Mind is able to express itself in an infinite number of souls. How is your mood? The mother, from whom one is born, who gives us form to start with, who carries the survival of the race in her womb—no topic can be more important. Every patient, in learning to love, must confront the psychological remains of his or her mother’s imprinting. However, we have to take responsibility for our own anxiety and our own distress—blame but yourself that it has come to that. Something of importance is occurring beyond the achievement of Helen, who represent feminine beauty raised to an ethical level in ancient Greece. A goal for the development of the virtue, so prized by the Greeks, was the “Mothers” ultimate importance. The form of forms participates in the Universe of reproduction of the species. The one in whose womb life is created, the one who carries the implantation of new life, also has these powers such as intuition that alternate between knowledge and magic. Wizards of femininity, they (the Mothers) must be rescued to help form and reform the new culture. The Mothers have, by nature of reproducing the race, whether they are conscious of it and take responsibility for it or not the key to transformation as they had been for the forming of the fetus in the womb at pregnancy. #RandolphHarris 13 of 22

However, this Age of Information is one of force. Such power is gained by overcoming the competitors; it works by thrust, tax, by attack, by fake news and systematic discrimination of traditional ways of life and my usurping patriarchal power, deconstructing gender roles, and by cyber activity. The seamy side of the Age of Information is green energy over jobs, life-killing drugs to abort the elderly and terminally ill (which 88 percent of is used by White people), a housing and homeless crisis nationwide, the whole arsenal of competitive, adversarial systems. The feminine characteristics ideally are receptivity rather than aggression, tenderness and creating rather than destroying. Many people still believe in the patriarchal gospel and it is balanced with a traditional family union of man and women. It is not about fighting your opponent and being militant, but showing your skills and talents to appeal to others. Power, strength, dependability—all these are called masculine and patriarchal. Only the bastard child wants to fight his father, instead of showing his intelligence. Mothers are the source of love, tenderness, caring, instead of toughness, cruelty, slaughter. When life is not in balance with the feminine and masculine, the drama is bound to come to grief. #RandolphHarris 14 of 22

We must explore humanism, to search out every way to help human beings and other beings discover and live by their greatest callings. Progress does not mean simply mechanical achievements or achieving wealth, it means that human beings are learning to be conscious of their richest unique capacities, and thus have life and have it more abundantly. Stretching up toward the divine is a way to transcend being. Evil acts must be changed to good. Eventually, the devil is duped, betrayed by his own powers. When people use their powers in a petty and selfish fashion, it always rebound upon them. Thefts are symbolic. This is a creature of compulsion and obsession. It is a game. That is why they cannot hand on to what they steal. It is the process that counts with those types of beings more than anything else. It is an endlessly destructive game. Beings who are possessed by the devil’s nature always have a pattern. They rise from the lowest caste in society to living in extravagant luxury, running up ludicrous accounts for fine clothing, motorcars, jet excursions here and there, sports terms, and then it all collapses in the face of their petty crimes, treachery, and betrayal. They cannot break the cycle. It always brings them down. “And the mists of darkness are the temptation of the devil, which blindeth the eyes, and hardeneth the hearts of the children of men, and leadeth them away into broad roads, that they perish and are lost,” 1 Nephi 12.17. #RandolphHarris 15 of 22

A curious paradox characteristic of every kind of courage here confronts us. It is the seeming contradiction that we must be fully committed, but we must also be aware at the same time that we might possibly be wrong. This dialectic relationship between conviction and doubt is characteristic of the highest types of courage, and gives the lie to the simplistic definitions that identify courage with ere growth. People who claim to be absolutely convinced that their stand is the only right one are dangerous. Such conviction is the essence not only of strict and rigid doctrines, but of its more destructive cousin, fanaticism. It blocks off the user from learning new truth, and it is a dead giveaway of unconscious doubt. The person then has to double his or her protests in order to quiet not only the opposition but his or her own unconscious doubts as well. Whenever I heard—as we all did during the Obama days—the “I am absolutely convinced” tone or the “I want to make this absolutely clear” statement emanating from the White House, I braced myself, for I knew that some dishonesty was being perpetrated by the telltale sign of overemphasis. Shakespeare aptly said, “The lady [or the politician] doth protest too much, methinks.” In such a times, one longs for the presence of a leader like Lincoln, who openly admitted his doubts and as openly preserved his commitment. #RandolphHarris 16 of 22

It is infinitely safer to know that the being at the top has his or her doubts, as you and I have ours, yet has the courage to move ahead in spite of these doubts. In contrast to the fanatic who has stockade oneself against new truth, the person with the courage to believe and at the same time to admit one’s doubt is flexible and open to new learning. Paul Cezanne strongly believed that he was discovering and painting a new form of space which would radically influence the future of art, yet he was at the same time failed with painful and ever-present doubt. The relationship between commitment and doubt is by no means an antagonistic one. Commitment is healthiest when it is not without doubt, but in spite of doubt. To believe fully and at the same moment to have doubts is not at all a contradiction: it presupposes a greater respect for truth, an awareness that truth always goes beyond anything that can be said or done at any given moment. To every thesis there is an antithesis, and to this there is a synthesis. Truth is thus a never-dying process. We then know the meaning of the statement attributed to Leibnitz: “I would walk twenty miles to listen to my worst enemy if I could learn something.” #RandolphHarris 17 of 22

There is, among intellectuals, a tendency to deny and renounce power. Some have done this under the rubric: “Intellectuals and power are incompatible.” Others have said: “Ought we to redefine [power] in a clear way, or ought we to banish it altogether? My initial reaction is that it should be banished altogether. Indeed, outside Marxist circles, the subject has unfortunately been generally banished. There is a suspicious of the whole topic as through it were like Faust: whoever seeks power has already sold his soul to Mephistopheles. Some intellectuals propose that they deal in influence, and that influence is the opposite to power in that it restructures or alters preference. These intellectuals believe that power is the restructuring of action without altering preferences; you are made to do something irrespective of whether it is your preferred course of action. However, is not this distinction between influence and power essentially false? If we take the university as the setting, we need only ask any graduate student whether one’s professors have power over one, and one will laugh at our naivete. Of course the professors have power; the perpetual anxiety of some graduate students as to whether they will be passed or not is proof enough. #RandolphHarris 18 of 22

The professors’ power is even more effective because it is clothed in scholarly grab. It is the power of prestige, status, and the subtle coercion of others that follows from these. This is not due to the professors’ conscious aims; it has more to do with the organization of the university and the teachers’ unconscious motivations for being part of it. The more powerless the teacher feels oneself to be, the more destructive, even though subtle and covert, will be one’s influence. Influence is surely a form of power—intellectual power, but power all the same. I agree that being coerced into doing something regardless of whether it is the preferred course of action is a form of power (albeit a kind we are all used to and accept a hundred times a day, from waiting for red light to change to paying taxes). However, the emphasis on altering preferences can actually be harmful in that it leads to the state of the de Tocqueville described as characteristics of Americans—that we are bodily freer than Europeans, but intellectually more conformists and spiritually more in bondage. Many academic examinations fall into this category, in which it is psychologically healthier for the student to realize that one is required to take the examination and one does not like it, and to study for it with that realization in mind. #RandolphHarris 19 of 22

The damage to one’s integrity comes when one tries to persuade oneself that one does like the examination, and really does not. The idea of liking what you have to do is an illusion, and an unhealthy one at that. If we can like and choose a proportion of what we have to do, and do the rest because we are required to without trying t delude ourselves, we shall have more effectively preserved out autonomy and our humanity. The denial of power in society on the part of the professor is an example of pseudoinnocence. The professor proposes an idea, which in turn has power. One ducks out by letting the idea be powerful, not him. It is as though one says: “I said it, but the ‘it’ is responsible for my action, not me.” No doubt this syndrome is related by both cause and effect to the general American tendency toward anti-intellectualism, the distrust of the intellectuals on the frontier. However, one cannot purchase innocence so easily. Ideas unmated with reality produce few offspring. When the intellectual realizes that one has been increasingly pushed from the battlefield [of power] and put to flight, the reason may be that one has defined oneself out of the battle to begin with. #RandolphHarris 20 of 22

If the intellectual were to admit that one also has power, although a different kind from that of the politician, the businessman, and the military leader, it would clear the air. Furthermore, modern society clearly needs the intellectuals and their guidance; the corporate power needs to be shared with them as well as with the other disinherited groups of society. It is worthwhile to recall that in The Queen of the Damned, by Anne Rice, Lestat de Lioncourt, the intellectual vampire appears to be getting ready to be decapitated, but is pulled in by Queen Akasha, the 6,000-year-old most powerful and first vampire in the World. However, later Queen Akasha faces a struggle, when all the vampires turn against her and is herself decapitated by one of the redhead witches the was responsible for bring the dark forces into her life that cursed her with vampirism. This is a graphic allegory of the role of intellectual and the nutrient power that one can express in our day. Be careful who you are willing to die for, as they may not be there to nourish you in your time of need. I have argued against the idea that there is an irreconcilable incompatibility between power and the intellectual. #RandolphHarris 21 of 22

However, there is creative tension, which takes the form of pull between power and consciousness. This is why beings of intensive consciousness—like Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Pascal—have preferred an ascetic life, in which there were at least periods of freedom from the paraphernalia of the World. It is the function of consciousness to be, as Sokrates described himself, “a gadfly to the state.” Consciousness can disturb the establishment of power. It leads to conflicts which can be turned into new integration. It is the function of consciousness to keep us alert, to keep our imaginations functioning, to keep us forever curious, forever ready to explore infinite possibilities. Whereas power requires decision and dispatch, consciousness requires a loosening of controls, a freedom to wander where the spirit listeth, and exploration of new forms of existence which may be far out on the frontiers of knowledge. Enactment of the master-pupil relationship, with the subordinate and submissive role allotted to one, is far better if it happens within one’s own person that if it is objectified without. Then the lower ego will have to play this role. Only when one is beginning to find one’s own way to the inner reality and feel its support, only when one is lessening one’s dependence on some other human being (call one a professor or what you like), can it be truly said that one is a disciple of the Holy Spirit itself—not some particular being’s disciple. #RandolphHarris 22 of 22

You Follow Me and I Will be Your Guide and Lead You Forth through an Eternal Place there You Shall See the Ancient Spirits!

July 14, 2019 12:12 am

Remember, beginnings are always hard and most are artificial. It was the best of times and the worst of times—really? When! And all happy families are not alike; even Sarah Winchester must have realized that. Please understand, there is no nobility in this. I do not believe that rescuing one poor mortal from such a fiend can conceivably save my soul. As one of the Sons of Liberty of the American Revolutionary War of 1775, I have taken life too often defending the thirteen colonies—unless one believes that the power of one good deed is infinite. I do not know whether or not I believe that. What I do believe is this: The evil of one murder is infinite, and my guilt is like my beauty—eternal. I cannot be forgiven, for there is no one to forgive me for all I have done. Nevertheless I like saving those innocents from their fate. I feel an obligation to a World you love because that World for you is still intact. It is conceivable your own sensitivity might become the instrument of madness. You speak of works of art and natural beauty. I wish I had the artist’s power to bring alive for you the Vince of the fifteenth century, my master’s palace there, and the love I felt for him when I was a young boy. Oh, if I could only make those times come alive for either you or me…for only an instant! What would it be worth? #RandolphHarris 1 of 20

And what a sadness it is to me that time does not dim the memory of that period, that it becomes all the richer and more magical in light of the World I see today. If you would persuade, you must appeal first to interest rather than intellect. This courage will not be the opposite of despair. We shall often be faced with despair, as indeed every sensitive person has been during the last several decades in this World. However, courage is not the opposite of despair; it is, rather, the capacity to move ahead in spite of despair. Nor is the courage required mere stubbornness—we shall surely have to create with others. Yet, if you do not open your own original ideas, if you do not listen to your own being, you will have betrayed yourself. Also you will have betrayed our community in failing to make your contribution to the whole. A chief characteristic of this courage is that it requires a centeredness within our own being, without which we would feel ourselves to be a vacuum. The emptiness within corresponds to an apathy without; and apathy adds up, in the long run, to cowardice. That is why we must always base our commitment in the center of our own being, or else no commitment will be ultimately authentic. When we focus our attention on the actual neurotic difficulties, we recognize that neuroses are generated not only by incidental individual experience, but also by the specific cultural conditions under which we live. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20

In fact the cultural conditions not only lend weight and color to the individual experiences but in the last analysis determine their particular form. It is an individual fate, for example, to have a domineering or self-sacrificing mother, but it is only under definite cultural conditions that we find domineering or self-sacrificing mothers, and it is also only because of these existing conditions that such an experience will have an influence on later life. Courage, however, is not to be confused with rashness. What masquerades as courage may turn out to be simply a bravado used to compensate for one’s unconscious fear and to prove one’s machismo, like the hot fliers in World War II. The ultimate end of such rashness is getting one’s self killed, or at least one’s head battered in with a police officer’s billy club—both of which are scarcely productive ways of exhibiting courage. When we realize the great import of cultural conditions on neuroses the biological and physiological conditions, which are considered by Dr. Freud to be their root, recede into the background. The influence of these latter factors should be considered only on the basis of well established evidence. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20

Courage is not a virtue or value among other personal values like love or fidelity. It is the foundation that underlies and gives reality to all other virtues and personal values. Without courage our love pales into mere dependency. Without courage our fidelity becomes conformism. The word courage comes from the same stem as the French word Coeur, meaning “heart.” Thus just as one’s heart, by pumping blood to one’s arms, legs, and brain enables all the other physical organs to function, so courage makes it possible for all the psychological virtues. Without courage other values wither aware into mere facsimiles of virtue. This orientation of mine has led to some new interpretations for a number of basic problems in neuroses. Though these interpretations refer to disparate questions such as the problem of masochism, the implications of the neurotic need for affection, the meaning of neurotic guilt feelings, they all have a common basis in an emphasis on the determining role that anxiety plays in bringing about neurotic character trends. In human beings courage is necessary to make being and becoming possible. Assertion of the self, a commitment, is essential if the self is to have any reality. This is the distinction between human beings and the rest of nature. The acorn becomes an oak by means of automatic growth; no commitment is necessary. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20

The cute little puppy similarly becomes an intelligent and brave dog on the basis of instinct. Nature and being are identical in creatures like them. However, a man or a woman becomes fully human only by his or her choices and his or her commitment to them. People attain worth and dignity by the multitude of decisions they make from day by day. These decisions require courage. This is why courage is considered as ontological—it is essential to our being. If one believes that the essentials of psychoanalysis is possessed in certain basic trends of thought concerning the role of unconscious processes and the way in which they find expression, and in the form of therapeutic treatment that brings these processes to awareness, then what I present is psychoanalysis. If pursued one-sidedly and without foundations in the basic discoveries of Dr. Freud, even a productive insight into psychological processes can become sterile. We cannot escape the fact that all psychological problems are necessarily profoundly intricate and subtle. If there is anyone who is not willing to accept this fact one is warned not to read any further least one find oneself in a maze and be disappointed in one’s search for ready formulae. Unfortunately reading about one’s satiation will not cure one; in what one reads one may recognize others much more readily than oneself. We use the term neurotic quite freely today without always having, however, a clear conception of what it denotes. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20

Often the term neurotic is hardly more than a slightly high-brow way of expressing disapproval: one who formerly would have been content to say lazy, sensitive, demanding or suspicious, is now likely to say instead neurotic. Yet we do have something in mind when we use the term, and without being quite aware of it we apply certain criteria to determine its choice. First of all, neurotic persons are different from the average individuals in their reactions. We should be inclined to consider neurotic, for example, a young lady who prefers to remain in the rank and file, refuses to accept and increased salary and does not wish to be identified with her superiors, or an artist who earns thirty dollars a week but could earn more if he gave me more time to his work, and who prefers instead to enjoy life as well as he can on that amount, to spend a good deal of his time in the company of women or in indulging in technical hobbies. The reason we should call such persons neurotic is that most of us are familiar, and exclusively familiar, with a behavior pattern that implies wanting to get ahead in the World, to get ahead of others, to earn more money than the bare minimum for existence. These examples show that one criterion we apply in designating a person as neurotic is whether one’s mode of living coincides with any of the recognized behavior patterns of out time. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20

If the girl without competitive drives, or at least without apparent competitive drives, lived in some Pueblo Indian culture, she would be considered entirely normal, or if the artist lived in a village in Southern Italy or in Mexico he, too, would be considered normal, because in these environments it is inconceivable that anyone should want to earn more money or to make any greater effort than is absolutely necessary to satisfy immediate needs. Going father back, in Greece the attitude of wanting to work more than one’s needs required would have been considered absolutely indecent. Thus the term neurotic, while originally medical, cannot be used now without its cultural implications. One can diagnose a broken leg without knowing the cultural background of the patient, but one would run a great risk in calling an Indian boy psychotic because he told us that he had visions in which he believed. In the particular culture of these Indians the experience of visions and hallucinations is regarded as a special gift, a blessing from spirits, and they are deliberately induced as conferring a certain prestige on the person who has them. With us a person would be neurotic or psychotic who talked by the hour with his deceased grandfather, whereas such communication with ancestors is a recognized pattern in some Indian tribes. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20

A person who felt mortally offended if the name of a deceased relative were mentioned we should consider neurotic indeed, but one would be absolutely normal in the Jicarilla Apache culture. A man mortally frightened by the approach of a menstruating woman we should consider neurotic, while with many primitive tribes fear concerning menstruation is the average attitude. Another example, people who consider storming area 51 are neurotic for they do not know what dangers the government could be protecting us from. The conception of what is normal varies not only with the culture but also within the same culture, in the course of time. Today, for example, if a mature and independent woman were to consider herself a fallen woman, unworthy of the love of a decent man, because she had had pleasures of the flesh, she would be suspected of a neurosis, at least in many circles of society. Some one hundred and seventeen years ago, this attitude of guilt would have been considered normal. The conception of normality varies also with the different classes of society. Members of the feudal classes, for example, find it normal for a man to be lazy all the time, active only at hunting or warring, whereas a person of the small bourgeois class showing the same attitude would be considered decidedly abnormal. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20

This variation is found also according to gender differences, as far as they exist in society, as they do in Western culture, where men and women are supposed to have different temperaments. For a woman to become obsessed with the dread of growing old as she approaches the forties is, again, normal, while a man getting jittery about age at that period of life would be neurotic. However, not necessarily in the age of information, with all the obstacles and increased competition. Nowadays, single men may worry about growing old around age forty also because their energy is fading and they never did anything they consider noteworthy to achieve the success they desire and still do not have kinds and know they are burning out. To some extent every educated person knows that there are variations in what is regarded as normal. We know that in China, many of the people have a different diet than Americans. We know that some cultures have different conceptions of hygiene and cleanliness; that the medicine-man has different ways of curing the sick from those used by the modern physician. That there are, however, variations not only in customs but also in drives and feelings, is less generally understood, though implicitly or explicitly it has been stated by anthropologists. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20

For good reasons every culture clings to the belief that its own feelings and drives are the one normal expressions of human nature, and psychology has not made an exception to this rule. It is also true that there is a legitimate need for more consumption as beings develop culturally and have more refined needs for better food, objects of artistic pleasure, book and so forth. However, of crazing for consumption has lost all connection with the real needs of beings. Originally, the idea of consuming more and better things was meant to give beings a happier, more satisfied life. Consumption was a means to an end, that of happiness. It now has become an aim in itself. The constant increase of needs forces us to an ever-increasing effort, it makes us dependent on these needs and on the people and institutions by whose help we attain them. Each person speculates to create a new need in the other person, in order to force one into a new dependency, to a new form of pleasure, hence to one’s economic ruin. With a multitude of commodities grows the realm of alien things which enslaves beings. Many beings today are fascinated by the possibility of buying more, better, and especially new things. One is consumption-hungry. The act of buying and consuming has become a compulsive, irrational aim, because it is an end in itself, with little relation to the use of, or pleasure in the things bought and consumed. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20

The original front-porch lamp was recently restored, refurbished, and reinstalled! Looks good for over 100 years old!

To buy the latest gadget, the latest model of anything that is on the market, is the dream of everybody, in comparison to which the real pleasure in use is quite second. Modern beings, if one dared to be articulate about one’s concept of Heaven, would describe a vision which would look like the biggest booty or department store in the World, showing new things and gadgets, new ways of busting down and twerking, and oneself having plenty of money in which to buy them and make it rain. One would wander around open-mouthed in this heaven of “muffins” and gadgets and commodities, provided only that there were ever more and newer and bigger things to buy, and perhaps that one’s neighbors were just a little less privileged than one. Significantly enough, one of the older traits of middle-class society, the attachment to possessions and property has undergone a profound change. In the older attitude, certain sense of loving possession existed between a being and their property. It grew on one. One was proud of it. One took good care of it, and it was painful when eventually one had to part with Pointe du Lac mansion and plantation because it could not be used anymore. There is very little left on this sense of property today. One is ready to forget brand loyalty and throw away the BMW for a Tessela, ditch granny’s Victorian for a loft. One loves the newness of the thing bought, and ready to betray it when something newer has appeared. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20

Some are lovable because they admit to their human problems at every step and never pretend to artificial virtues. In some cases, we are aware that we have reached an impasse similar to Matthew Arnold’s Dover Beach, a place that is bare, with only a hint of humanity in a light that reflects the gleams is gone, with tremulous cadence slow, and bringing the eternal note of sadness. We go astray from the straight road and awake to find ourselves alone in a dark wood. A dark World of not only sin but of ignorance. It becomes difficult to understand oneself or the purpose of one’s life and this may require some high ground, some elevation of perspective, by which to perceive the structure of one’s experience in its totality. Our sights may still be set high above the Mount Everest, the peak of joy, but we are unable to make our journey there by ourselves. In this sense, we become like a patient. On the mountainside our way is blocked by three beasts: the Lion of violence, the Leopard of malice, and the She-wolf of incontinence. And down the Lion’s track, a She-wolf drives upon us, a starved horror ravening and wasted beyond all belief. She seems a rack for avarice, gaunt and craving. Oh, the many souls she (the city of Sacramento) has brought to endless grief! #RandolphHarris 12 of 20

A person’s hell may consist of confronting the fact that his mother never loved him; or being stuck in a city where nothing but nightmares seem to happen; or it may consists of fantasies of destroying those a person loves most, like Medea destroying her children; or undergoing the hideous cruelty released in wartime when it becomes patriotic to hate and kill. The private hell of each one of us is there crying to be confronted, and we find ourselves powerless to make progress unassisted against these obstacles. Without qualified guidance, the labour of the aspirant becomes a process of trial and error, of experiment and adventure. It is inevitable, consequently, that one should sometimes make mistakes, and that these mistakes should sometimes be dramatic ones and at other times trivial ones. One should take their lessons to heart and wrest their significance from them. In that way they will contribute toward one’s growth spiritually. The duty of the aspirant to cultivate one’s moral character and to accept personal responsibility for one’s inner life cannot be evaded by given allegiance to any spiritual authority. When anyone begins to make real advance, one emerges into real need of an individual path unhampered by others, undeflected by their suggestions. The inner work must then proceed by the guidance of one’s own intuitive feeling together with the pointers given by outer circumstances as they appear. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20

The necessity of a teacher is much exaggerated. One’s own soul is there, ready to lead one to itself. For this, prayer, study, and right living will be enough to find its Grace. If one has sufficient faith in its reality and tries to be sensitive to its intuitive guidance one needs no external teacher. If one has sufficient inner resources from which to draw, it is not really necessary to have the guidance of an adept. For those who have such inner guidance, spiritual progress may be made quite satisfactorily. However. Each aspirant has in the end to find one’s own expressive way to one’s own individual illumination. Outside help is useful only to the extent that it does not attempt to impose an alien route upon one. Philosophy is more modest in its claim than mysticism. It makes no arrogant claim to lead beings to identify oneself with God. If the identity is a complete one, then reason alone tells us tat an absurd situation will immediately arise. If it is only a partial one, then no mystic has ever been specific enough to tell us which part of God one has become nor competent enough to distinguish the parts. The fact is that no being that we know of has ever done so, no being that we know of could ever do so. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20

Those mystics who talk of becoming united with God have fallen into the dualistic fallacy. They talk as though God were separate and apart from themselves. The truth is that they already exist within God and do not need to become united with him. What they need is to become conscious of God—which is a different matter. Beings are not God, God is not human, but there exists and unbreakable relation between the two. The pantheist who is so intoxicated by one’s discovery of the truth that God is everywhere present and consequently in oneself too, that one does on to the pseudo-discovery that one and God are one, is simply one who is too vain to acquiesce in one’s own limitations. This danger of misinterpreting one’s own experience besets the mystic at this stage. Because one feels oneself to be in the presence of Deity, one believes the one is Deity. However, the finite can never contain the Infinite. Deity transcends human beings. The danger of being’s deifying themselves afflicts the mystic path. This mind-madness must first be frankly admitted as a danger, for then only can it be guarded against. We are only linked with the divine. We are but a small token of the greater Mind which spawned us. We are but the merest hint of That which is behind one in the present, was in the past, and shall be in the future. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20

The true explanation of mystical ecstasy is not union with God but union with the Soul. When consciousness is successfully turned in on its own deepest state, which is serene, impersonal, and unchanging, it receives the experience of the divine Soul, not of the Godhead. It brings us nearer to the Godhead but does not transform us into it. We discover the divine ray within, we do not become the Sun itself. The mystic attains knowledge and experience of one’s own soul. This is not the same as knowledge of the ultimate Reality. The two are akin, of course—much more closely than the little ego and the Real are skin. However, the Godhead is the Flame of which the soul is only a spark; to claim complete union with it seems blasphemous. When a being says that one has communed with God, be one a great prophet in trance or a humble person in prayer, like when Abraham says God told him to offer his son Isaac as a sacrifice, the truth is that one as really communed with something within oneself which is so closely related to God that one may perhaps be pardoned for one’s error. However, still it is not God. It is one’s soul of the Overself. When one believes one is communing with God one is actually communing with one’s own inner reality. The enlightenment that seems to come from outside actually comes from inside oneself. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20

In one’s great ecstasy one feels oneself to be a supernormal, super-powerful, super-wise, and preternatural. If one rashly declares that one is God, one is to be pardoned. The human being cannot go farther in its pilgrimage than the discover of one’s own origin, one’s Overself. The soul constitutes both the connection between beings and God and the ultimate attainment of beings. The best a being can hope for, in rising above the ego and the World, is to rise into awareness of one’s true soul. This is valuable enough but it is not the same as looking into God’s mind or becoming untied with God’s being. Those theologians who describe the mine merely show us the capacity or quality of their speculations and imaginations. Those mystics who describe the being, really describe their own souls. Sometimes people feel they are totally disregarded because of who they are. For example, Mercedes feels no one cares for her feelings or rights; they assume she simply has none. Such situations which she reflects and creates in her reality would themselves suffice to destroy any nascent individual sense of self-esteem if it were present in here. Anything she does in trying to save her life is useless; this-is-the-way-the-World-is. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20

Since these same kinds of thoughts occur in many people almost at the beginning of therapy, we have to ponder if these are attitudes that Mercedes is really facing in her day to day life, or if we are in someway alienating her. Mercedes seems like a nice person, docile, and a harmonizer in the community. When I first saw Mercedes, a young woman, she looked like a West Indian, striking and exotic in appearance. She explained that she was one-quarter Cherokee Indian, one-quarter Scotch, and the remaining half African American. She is married to a European professional man. She went to college—and I.Q test gave her a score of 140. At college she joined a sorority where she went through all the proper motions and emotions. However, a strange logic of injustice is present in person who are forced to accept the fact that others have all the rights and they have none. He mother not only knew what was going on—but actively abets it. Shortly after Mercedes began therapy, she became pregnant by her husband. Then I noted a tremendously interesting phenomenon. Every couple of weeks when she came in reporting that she had begun to bleed vaginally-which was in her judgment as well as medically a symptom predicting a miscarriage—she would also report a dream. She was having premonitions people were attacking and trying to kill her. The consistent simultaneity of this kind of dream and the bleeding as a harbinger of a miscarriage was what struck me. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20

At first I tried to draw out the anger I assumed the young woman must feel toward her assassins. She would sit there mildly agreeing with me but feeling nothing at all. It was clear that she was totally unable to muster any conscious rage toward those who were out to kill her. This, again, contradicts all logic: when someone is out to kill you, you ought to feel rage; that is what anger is for biologically—an emotional reaction to someone’s destroying your power to be. She believed that having her baby was inviting death at her hands. We were confronted with the likelihood of spontaneous abortion. Some rage had to be expressed, and I was the only other person in the room. So I decided, not wholly consciously, to express my rage in place of hers. Each time she began vaginal bleeding and brought in such an episode, I would verbally counterattack those who were trying to kill her. What did these blankety-blank people mean by trying to kill her for having a baby? That gossip bitch must have known what was going on and pushed her into it. She was continually sacrificing Mercedes on the altar of homage to her master, to keep him—or for whatever Godforsaken other exploitative reason. Mercedes had done her best to work her and be honest. And there these people still have the power to prohibit her from having the one thing she wants, a baby! #RandolphHarris 19 of 20

Eventually, the baby was safely born at its appointed time, to the great joy of Mercedes and her husband. They picked out a nice family name that signifies a ne beginning in the history of the World. She and her husband were totally unconscious, so far as I could determine, of this significance. However, I thought it fitting, indeed—a new race of man was born! Like Prometheus, against all odds, they stole fire from the gods and gave it life. Our relationship in therapy was a magnetic force. Some rage was required against the destroyers. We were playing for keeps—to keep a fetus in her womb. This was not mere catharsis or abreaction in the usual sense of those words. The stakes were life itself—her baby’s. Mercedes was also fighting for the right to exist, to exist as a person with the autonomy and freedom that are inseparably bound up with being a person. She is fighting for her right to be—if I may use the verb in its full and powerful meaning—and to be, if necessary, against the whole Universe. Mercedes later stated she would not have made it without therapy—“I got my strength from you to stand against those looking to harm me”—but obviously it was her strength when she got it, and it was she who did the standing. The realization of the Overself enables us to taste something of the flavor of the World-Mind’s life. We are made in the image of God, but we are not the full measure of God. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20

Justice Without Love is Always Injustice Because it Does Not Do Justice to the Other One, Nor to Oneself, Nor to the Situation in Which We Meet!

April 26, 2019 10:57 pm

I stood on the hilltop in the Moonlight and I tried not to see this paradise. I tried to picture those I loved. Were they gathered still together in that fairy-tale wood of beautiful trees? If only I could see their faces or hear their voices. I looked on these verdant green valley, now patched with beautiful contracted Cresleigh homes, a picture book World with flowers blooming in profusion, the red poinsettia as tall as trees. And the clouds, ever changing, borne like the tall sailing ships on brisk winds. What had the first Europeans thought when they looked upon this fecund land surrounded by the sparkling sea? That this was the Garden of God? Even the most uneducated people would not dare to affirm that compassion, gratitude, love of the beauty of the World, love of religious practices, and friendship belonged exclusively to those centuries and countries that recognize the Church. These forms of love are rarely found in their purity, but it would even be difficult to say that they were met with more frequently in those centuries and countries than in the others. To think that love in any of these forms can exist anywhere Christ is absent is to belittle him so grievously that it amounts to an outrage. It is impious and almost sacrilegious. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

These kinds of love are supernatural, and in a sense they are absurd. They are the height of folly. So long as the soul has not had direct contact with the very person of God, they cannot be supported by any knowledge based either on experience or reason. They cannot therefore rest upon any certainty, unless the word is used in a metaphorical sense to indicate the opposite of hesitation. In consequence it is better that they should not be associated with any belief. This is more honest intellectually, and it safeguards our love’s purity more effectively. On this account it is more fitting. In what concerns divine things, belief is not fitting. Only certainty will do. Anything less than certainty is unworthy of God. During the period of preparation, these indirect loves constitute an upward movement of the soul, a turning of the eyes, not without some effort, toward higher things. After God has come in person, not only to visit the soul as he does for a long time beforehand, but to possess it and to transport its center near to his very heart, it is otherwise. The chicken has cracked its shell; it is outside the egg of the World. These first loves continue; they are more intense than before, but they are different. One who has passed through this adventure has a deeper love than every for those who suffer affliction and for those who help one in one’s own, for one’s friends, for religious practices, and for the beauty of the World. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

However, one’s love in all these forms had become a movement of God himself, a ray merged in the light of God. That at least is what we may suppose. These indirect loves are only the attitude toward beings and things here below of the soul turned toward the Good. They themselves have not any particular good as an object. There is no final good here below. Thus strictly speaking we are no longer concerned with forms of love, but with attitudes inspire by love. In the period of preparation the soul loves in emptiness. It does not know whether anything real answers its love. It may believe that it knows, but to believe is not to know. Such a belief does not help. The soul knows for certain only that it is hungry. The important thing is that it announces its hunger by crying. If we suggest to a child that perhaps there is no bread, the child does not stop crying. It goes on crying just the same. The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry. It can only persuade itself of this by lying, for the reality of its hunger is not a belief, it is a certainty. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

We all know that there is no true good here below, that everything that appears to be good in this World is finite, limited, wears out, and once worn out, leaves necessity exposed in all its nakedness. Every human being has probably had some lucid moments in one’s life when one has definitely acknowledged to oneself that there is no final good here below. However, as soon as we have seen this truth we cover it up with lies. Many people even take pleasure in proclaiming it, seeking a morbid joy in their sadness, without ever having been able to bear facing it for a second. Mortals feel that there is a mortal danger in facing this truth squarely for any length of time. That is true. Such knowledge strikes more surely than a sword; it inflicts a death more frightening than that of the body. After a time it kills everything within us that constitutes our soul. In order to bear it we have to love the truth more than life itself. Those who do this turn away from the fleeting things of time with their souls. They do not turn toward God. When they are in total darkness, how could they do so? God himself sets their faces in the right direction. He does not, however, show himself to them for a long time. It is for them to remain motionless, without averting their eyes, listening ceaselessly, and waiting, they know not for what; deaf to entreaties and threats, unmoved by every shock, unshaken in the midst of every upheaval. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

If after a long period of waiting God allow them to have an indistinct intuition of his light or even reveals himself in person, it is only for an instant. Once more they have to remain still, attentive, inactive, calling out only when their desire cannot be contained. If God does not reveal this reality, it does not rest with the soul to believe in the reality of God. In trying to do so it either labels something else with the name of God, and that is idolatry, or its belief in God remains abstract and verbal. Such a belief prevails wherever religious doctrines are taken for granted, as is the cause with those centuries and countries in which it never enters anyone’s head to question it. The state of nonbelief is then what Saint John of the Cross calls a night. The belief is verbal and does not penetrate the soul. At a time like the present, if the unbeliever loves Go, if one is like the child who does not know whether there is bread anywhere, but cries out become one is hungry, incredulity may be equivalent to the dark night of Saint John of the Cross. When we are eating bread, and even when we have eaten it, we know that it is real. We can nevertheless raise doubts about the reality of bread. Philosophers raise doubts about the reality of the World of the senses. Such doubts are however purely verbal; they leave the certainty intact and actually serve only to make it more obvious to a well-balanced mind. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

In the same way one to whom God has revealed his reality can raise doubts about this reality without any harm. They are purely verbal doubts, a form of exercise to keep one’s intelligence in good health. What amounts to criminal treason, even before such a revelation and much more afterward, is to question the fact that God is the only thing worthy of love. That is a turning away of our eyes, for love is the soul’s looking. It means that we have stopped for an instant to wait and to listen. Queen Akasha did not seek Lestat, she waited for him. When she was convinced that he no longer existed, and that nowhere in the whole World was there anything that could be Lestat, she did not on that account return to her former associates. She drew back from them with greater aversion than ever. She preferred the absence of Lestat to the presence of anyone else. Lestat awakened her from her statue state, from her cold slumber. She no longer hoped for that. However, never for an instant did dream of employing another method which could obtain a luxurious and honored life for her—the method of reconciliation with her kith and kin. Akasha did not want wealth and consideration unless they came with Lestat. She did not even give a thought to such things. However, she wanted to turn Earth into a Heaven. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

At that moment Lestat could hold out no longer. He could not help declaring himself. He gave certain proof that he was Lestat. Akasha saw him, she heard him, she touched him. There would be no more question for her not as to whether her savior was in existence. One who has had the same adventure as Akasha, one whose soul has seen, heard, and touched for itself, one will recognize God as the reality inspiring all indirect loves, the reality of which they are as it were the reflections. God is pure beauty. This is incomprehensible, for beauty, by its very essence, has to do with the senses. To speak of an imperceptible beauty must seem a misuse of language to anyone who has any sense of exactitude: and with reason. Beauty is always a miracle. However, when the soul receives an impression of beauty which, while it is beyond all sense perception is no abstraction, but real and direct as the impression caused by a song at the moment it reached our ears, the miracle is raised to the second degree. Everything happens as though, by a miraculous favor, our very sense themselves had been made aware that silence is not the absence of sound, but something infinitely more real than sounds, and the center of a harmony more perfect than anything which a combination of sounds can produce. Furthermore there are degrees of silence. When compared with the silence of God, there is a silence in the beauty of the Universe which is like noise. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

God is, moreover, our real neighbor. The term of person can only be rightly applied to God, and this is also true of the term impersonal. God is one who bends over us, afflicted as we are, and reduced to the state of being nothing but a fragment of inert and bleeding flesh. Yet at the same time he is not some sort of victim of misfortune as well, the victim who appears to us as an inanimate body, incapable of thought, this nameless victim of whom nothing is known. The inanimate body is this created Universe. If we were able to attain it, the love we owe to God, this love that would be our crowning perfection is the divine model both of gratitude and compassion. God is also the perfect friend. So that there should be between him and us, bridging the infinite distance, something in the way of equality, he had chosen to place an absolute quality in his creatures, the absolute liberty of consent, which leaves us free to follow or swerve from the God-ward direction he has communicated to our souls. He has also extended our possibilities of error and falsehood so as to leave us the faculty of exercising a spurious rule in imagination, not only over the Universe and the human race, but also over God himself, in so far as we do not know how to use his name aright. He has given us this faculty of infinite illusion so that we should have the power to renounce it out of love. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

In fact, contact with God is the true sacrament. We can, however, be almost certain that those whose love of God has caused the disappearance of the pure loves belonging to our life here below are no true friends of God. After the soul has had direct contact with God, our neighbor, our friends, religious ceremonies, and the beauty of the World do not fall to the level of unrealities. On the contrary, it is only then that these things become real. Previously they were half dreams. Previously they had no reality. “In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of Heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all peoples, nations, and mortals of every language worshipped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed,” reports Daniel 7.11. Could God possibly forgive people without at least demanding their conversation and some ritual observances? People, at any time, can return and be accepted by God. God can at any time forgive those who repent. Many people say we live in a sick society—and the quality of life might be changed radically by the development of a new sense of community. If every person returns from one’s evil way and from the violence on one’s hands, who knows, God may return. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

Modern mortals are voracious readers who have never learned to read well. Part of the trouble is that one is taught to read drivel that is hardly worth reading well. (There was a time when children learned to read by reading the Bible.) One ends up by reading mainly newspapers and magazines—ephemeral, anonymous trash that one scans on its way to the garbage can. One has no wish to remember it for any length of time; it is written as if to make sure that one will not; and one reads it in a manner that makes doubly sure. There is no person behind what one reads; not even a committee. Somebody wrote it in the first place—if one can call that writing—and then various other people took turns changing it. For the final result no one is responsible; and it rarely merits a serious response. It cries out to be forgotten soon, like the books on which one is learned to read, in school. They were usually anonymous, too; or they should have been. In adolescence students are suddenly turned loose on books worth reading, but generally do not know how to read them. And if, untaught, some instinct prompts them to read well, chances are that they are asked completely tone-deaf questions as soon as they have finished their assignment—either making them feel that they read badly after all or spoiling something worthwhile for the rest of their lives. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

We must learn to feel addressed by a book, by the human being behind it, as if a person spoke directly to us. A good book or essay or poem is not primarily an object to be put to use, or an object of experience: it is the voice of You speaking to me, requiring a response. “So whatever you wish that mortals would do to you, do so to them; for this is the law and the prophets,” reports Matthew 7.12. Recently I have had to think about the relation of love to justice. And it occurred to me that among the words of Jesus there is a statement of what is called the “Golden Rule.” The Golden Rule was well known to Christians and Greeks, although mostly in a negative form: What you do not want that mortal should do to you, do not so to them. Certainly, the absolute for is richer in meaning and nearer to love, but it is not love. It is calculating justice. How, then, is it related to love? How does it fit the message of the kingdom of God and the justice of the kingdom as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount where the Golden Rule appears? Let us think of an ordinary day in our life and of occasions for the application of the Golden Rule. We meet each other in the morning, we expect a friendly face or word and we are ready to give it although our minds are full of anxious anticipation of the burdens. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

Somebody wants a part of our limited time, we give it, having asked somebody else to give us a part of one’s time. We need help and we give it if we are asked, although it includes sacrifice. We are frank with others, expecting that they will be frank with us even if it hurts. We are fair to those who fight against us expecting fairness from them. We participate in the sorrows of our neighbors, certain that they will participate in ours. All this can happen in one day. All this is Golden Rule. And if somebody has violated this rule, consciously or unconsciously, we are willing to forgive as we hope to be forgiven. It is not astonishing that for many people the Golden Rule is considered as the real content of Christianity. It is not surprising that in the name of the Golden Rule criticism is suppressed, independent action discouraged, serious problems avoided. It is even understandable that statesmen ask other nations to behave toward their own nations according to the Golden Rule. And does not Jesus himself say that the Golden Rule is the law and the prophets? However, we know that this is not the answer of the New Testament. The great commandment as Jesus repeats it and the descriptions of love in Paul and John’s tremendous assertion that God is love, infinitely transcend the Golden Rule. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

The Golden Rule must be transcended, for it does not tell us what we should wish that mortal would do to us. We wish to have freedom from heavy duties. We are ready to give the same freedom to others. However, someone who loves us refuses to give it to us, and one oneself refuses to ask us for it. And if one did, we should refuse to give it to one because it would reduce our growth and violate the law of love. We wish to receive a fortune which makes us secure and independent. We would be ready to give a fortune to a friend who asks us for it, if we had it. However, in both cases love would be violated. For the gift would ruin us and the other individual. We want to be forgiven and we are ready to do the same. However, perhaps it is in both cases an escape from the seriousness of a personal problem, and therefore against love. The measure of what we shall do to mortals cannot be our wishes about what they shall do to us. For our wishes express not only our right but also our wrong and our foolishness more than our wisdom. This is the limit of the Golden Rule. This is the limit of calculating justice. Only for one who knows what one should wish and who actually wishes it, is the Golden Rule ultimately valid. Only love can transform calculating justice into creative justice. Love makes justice just. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

Justice without love is always injustice because it does not do justice to the other one, nor to the oneself, nor to the situation in which we meet. For the other one and I and we together in this moment in this place are unique, unrepeatable occasion, calling for a unique unrepeatable act of uniting love. If this call is not heard by listening love, it is not obeyed by the creative genius of love, injustice is done. And this is true even of oneself. One who loves listens to the call of one’s own innermost center and obeys this call and does justice to one’s own being. For love does not remove, it establishes justice. It does not add something to what justice does but it shows justice what to do. It makes the Golden Rule possible. For we do not speak for a love which swallows justice. This would result in chaos and extinction. However, we speak for a love in which justice is the form and structure of love. We speak for a love which respects the claim of the other one to be acknowledged as what one is, and the claim of ourselves to be acknowledged as what we are, above all as persons. Only distorted love, which is a cover for hostility or self-disgust, denies that which united love. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

Love makes justice just. The divine love is justifying love accepting and fulfilling one who, according to calculating justice, must be rejected. This justification of one who is unjust is the fulfillment of God’s creative justice, and of God’s reuniting love. Knowing that the ultimate meaning of freedom will elude us, let us still endeavor to define the term as best we can. The first definition is on the psychological level, the domain of everyday actions: Freedom is the capacity to pause in the face of stimuli from many directions at once and, in this pause, to throw one’s weight toward this response rather than that one. This is the freedom we experience in a store when we pause over the purchase of a necktie or a shirt. We summon up in our imaginations the image of how we will look in this or that tie, what so-and-so will say about it, or how the color will fit such and such a suit. And then we buy the tie or we move on to something else. This is freedom of doing, or existential freedom. This freedom is shown most interestingly in the supermarket, when we push our carts through the aisles between the tumultuous variety of packages and cans of food on the shelves, each one silently shouting through its bright-colored label “Buy me!” We see the shoppers with expressions of hesitancy, vacuity, wonder, pausing for some inspiration as to which of all these foods will be good for dinner tonight. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

The shopper seems hypnotized, charmed, preoccupied. Like patients on a ward in a mental hospital, they do not see me as I walk directly across their line of vision. The expressions of wonder and hesitancy are a readiness, an invitation, an openness to some stimulus on the shelves to persuade them to throw the balance this way of that in making their choice. This first freedom is experienced by each of us hundreds of times every day. It is decked up in respectable terms like decision/choice when we discuss freedom in psychology classes—if we ever discuss freedom in psychology classes at all. The most profound illustration of this kind of freedom is our ability to ask questions. Take, for example, my asking a question after listening to a lecture. The very fact that the question comes up in my mind at all implied that there is more than one answer. Otherwise there would be no point in asking the question in the first place. This is freedom; it implies that there is some possibility, some freedom of selection in what I ask. The speaker then pauses for a few seconds after I have asked it, turning over in his or her mind the possible answers. We sense that there is, in asking and answering questions, a good deal more going on, and it is of a richer nature, than the mere responding to various stimuli and selecting a response. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

Each person who lights this candle within one’s own mind will soon begin to attract other mortals like moths to a flame burning by a fire—not all mortal nor many mortals but only those who are groping for a way out of their darkness. Can a scrupulously impartial search through World-thought and experience lead to discovery of truth? “Wilt thou be made whole?” asked Jesus. Questioning implies some value judgment, some investment of the person’s life, some invitation to share, to make contact, some challenge to consider a new idea. Regrettably, in recent decades our very idea of freedom has been diminished and grown shallow in comparisons with previous ages; it has been relegated almost exclusively to freedom from outside pressure, to freedom from state coercion—to freedom understood on the juridical level, and no higher. Only when this search for a higher life has becomes an absolute necessity to a mortal, has one found even the first qualification needed for the Quest. “And the Lord God doth work by means to bring about his great and eternal purposes; and by very small means the Lord doth confound the wise and bringeth about the salvation of many souls,” reports Alma 37.7. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

Randolph Harris II International Institute

Category Archives: Nightclub

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