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However Scarce the World May Make this Sense—In Awe One Feels Profoundly the Immense!

August 30, 2019 12:17 am

You simply do not know the flesh. The concept is too complex for you. What do you think taught your souls your souls in Sheol their perfection? Was it not suffering? Yes, they enter perhaps twisted and burnt if they have failed to see beyond suffering on Earth, and some may disappear. But in Sheol, over the centuries of suffering and longing, others are purged and purified. Since we generally think of aggression as being destructive, I shall not need to illustrate this beyond a brief personal example. I was engaged to speak at a conference of the junior executives of the American Telephone and Telegraph Corporation. This conference was part of a six-week training session held on the campus of a New England college and, I assumed, an expression of the humanistic interest of AT&T. I had spoken at such conferences before with gratifying results. However, I found, to my surprise and some bewilderment, that my talk was confronted with strange, invisible barriers. I have always been convinced of the truth of Walt Whiteman’s statement that the “audience makes the speech.” This audience seemed alert and fresh bur, try as I would, I just could not communicate my main ideas. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

At a recess I discovered that, for this part of their training, these young executives (being judged for possible promotion to the few top positions in the corporation) were being trained to be “aggressive,” and that AT&T has retained a couple of professors from college to grade the men and women on how efficiently they could shoot holes in the arguments presented. What I was really facing was not an audience that wanted to learn or even a group present for the pleasures of intellectual stimulation. Its aim was entirely different; the audience was listening not to what I said, but for the errors, the weaknesses in the argument. This was, in short, a sophisticated form of listening geared toward putting down the speaker. The aggression had a weighty competitive reward, namely promotion to high office. This is an example of noncommunication. Such an attitude will successfully inhibit any speaker; you cannot bring forth your ideas unless you feel that they will at least be heard. This does not mean that they will be agreed with; but it does mean that they will be listened to for their own intrinsic merit. If I had known about the purpose of this audience at the outset I could have simply changed the whole theme of my talk to aggression and its purposes and effect; then we would at least have been communicating. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

Many are wondering, as we speak about communication, how is the mass market formed on which popular culture is sold and perpetuated? In the first place, individual taste has become uneconomic for the purchaser and for the seller, and this effectively stunts its growth. People are prepared accordingly throughout the educational process. Group acceptance, shared taste, takes the place of authority and of individual moral and aesthetic judgment and standards. However, people often move from group to group. Any tastes therefore that cannot be sloughed off—an individual taste, not easily divided from the person in whom it dwells—becomes an obstacle to adaptation. Success is hindered by a discriminating personal taste which expresses or continues an individual personality, and success is fostered by an unselective appetite. Numerous precautions are taken, beginning in nursery school (itself hardly an individualizing institution) to avoid elaboration of personal discernment and to instill fear of separation from the group. Group acceptance is stressed through formal and informal popularity contests, teamwork, and polling. Education altogether stresses group instruction. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

For instance, the size of one’s classes and the class average, not the qualities of individual pupils, are often considered the measure of the teacher. The student oneself is so much treated as part of a group that, except in higher education (which is only partly immune), one may be automatically promoted with one’s group regardless of individual achievement or variation. Finally, the surviving individual talent is instructed not to cultivate, but to share, itself. The writer gives a writing course, the scholar lectures and writes popularizations, the beauty models of appears on TV, and the singer deserts the concert hall for the juke box. The aggregate effect of advertising is to bring about wide sharing of tastes. The actual social function of advertising is not to mold tastes in any particular way, nor to debase it. This goes for manufacturers, publishers and movie-makers too. They are quite content to produce and advertise what people want—be it T.S. Eliot or Edgar Guest, Kierkegaard or Norman Vincent Peale, “September Morn” or mobiles. It does not matter what people want to buy as long as they want to buy enough of the same thing to make mas production possible. Advertising helps to unify tastes, to de-individualize it and thus to make mass production possible. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

There is no evidence to support conspiracy theories which hold that wicked capitalists, through advertising and mass media, deliberately (or stupidly) debauch the originally good, natural tastes of the masses. Mass production—capitalist or socialist—demands unified taste; efficiency (or profitableness) is dependent only on its being shared by sizeable groups. Can one say anything about mass tastes beyond saying that they are widely shared? Are they homogenized on the lowest common denominator? There seem to be no good reasons to assume that the lowest tastes are most widespread. One may say something of the sort about some crowds untied temporarily by crude common appetites at the expense of reason, restraint and refinement. However, why consider consumers a crowd? Even the fare offered by the entertainment media is usually consumed by people separately or in very small groups. (Except for movies, but moviegoers are isolated from each other though they are together.) Producers have no interest in lowering tastes or in catering to low rather than high taste. They seek to provide for a modal average of tastes which through advertising they try to make as congruent with the mean average as possible. Neither average can be identical with the lowest common denominator. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

Yet in one sense consumers are treated as a crowd: their individual tastes are not catered to. The mass-produced article need not aim low, but it must aim at an average of tastes. In satisfying all (or at least many) individual tastes in some respects, it violates each in other respect. For there are—so far—no average persons having average tastes. Averages are but statistical composites. A mass-produced article, while reflecting nearly everybody’s tastes to some extent, is unlikely to embody anybody’s taste fully. This is one source of the sense of violation which is rationalized vaguely in theories about deliberate debasement of taste. The sense of violation springs from the same thwarting of individuality that makes prostitution (or promiscuity) psychologically offensive. The cost of inexpensive and easy availability, of mass production, is wide appeal; and the cost of wide appeal is de-individualization of the relationship between those who cater and those who are catered to; and of the relationship of both to the object of the transaction. By using each other indiscriminately as impersonal instruments (the seller for profit, the buyer for sensation—or, in promiscuity, both parties for sensation and relief of anxiety) the man or woman of the night and his or her client sacrifice to seemingly more urgent demands the self which, in order to grow, needs continuity, discrimination and completeness in relationships. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

Though profit and sensation can be achieved by depersonalization, the satisfaction ultimately sought cannot be, for the very part of personality in which it is felt—the individual self—is stunted and atrophied, at least if de-individualization continues long enough and is comprehensive. Ultimately, the sense of violation too is numbered. Now, the depersonalizing effects of the mass production of some things—say, electric clocks—may be minor as far as consumers are concerned and more than offset by the advantages of affordability. The same cannot be said for mass entertainment or education. And though some individuals may, society cannot have one without the other. The effects of mass production on people as producers and consumers are likely to be cumulative. Besides, even goods that seem purely utilitarian include elements of non-utilitarian, of aesthetic and psychic (for instance, prestige) appeal. Indeed, less than half of consumer expenditure goes for the satisfaction of simple biological needs. (More, perhaps, in the lowest income groups, and much less still in the higher ones.) One may work toward enlightenment and inner freedom, to the aspiration which draws one most. Whatever helps consciousness come nearer to high moods is a useful spiritual path to someone. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

Distinctions of this kind are necessarily hazy, but if cigarettes, newspapers, television, drinks, shaving lotion or lipstick, the prestige location of one’s Cresleigh Home, the fashionableness of one’s clothing, and so forth, are taken to satisfy nonbiological needs—and we can do without them biologically—then we are motivated by psychic needs in spending most of our money. This, of course, is not in itself objectionable—except that the processes by which many of these needs now arise and are stilled bring to mind the processes by which bread is now mass produced. In milling and baking, bread is deprived of any taste whatever and of all vitamins. Some of the vitamins are then added again (taste is provided by advertising). Quite similarly with all mass-produced articles. They can no more express the individual tastes of producers than that of consumers. They become impersonal objects, however pseudo-personalized. Producers and consumers go through the mass production mill to come out homogenized and de-characterized—only it does not seem possible to reinject the individualities which have been ground out, the way the vitamins are added to enrich bread. The human relations industry tried to do just that and it doubtlessly supplies a demand and can be helpful, just as chemical sedatives or stimulants can be. However, it seems unlikely that any assembly line—including manned by human relations counselors—can give more than the illusion of individuality. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

To produce more, people work under de-individualizing conditions and are rewarded by high income and leisure. Thus they can and do consume more. However, as consumers, they must once more rid themselves of individual tastes. The benefits of mass production are reaped only by matching de-individualizing work with equally de-individualizing consumption. The more discontinuous income earning and spending become physically, the more continuous they seem to become psychologically. Failure to repress individual personality in or after working hours is costly; in the end the production of standardized things by persons demands also the production of standardized persons. This intellectual preparation and emotional purification is a task that strains being’s faculties to the extreme. Nobody therefore need expect it to be other than a lifetime’s task. Few even succeed in finishing it in a single lifetime—a whole series is required in most cases. Nature has taken a very long time to bring beings to one’s present state, so she is in no hurry to complete their development in any particular reincarnation. Yet such is the mystery of grace, that this is always a grand possibility, always the sublime X-factor in every case. However, the individual aspirant cannot afford to gamble with this chance, which, after all, is a rare one. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

One must rely on one’s personal efforts, on one’s own strivings, more than anything else, to being one nearer to the desired goal. In a material sense, this assembly-line shaping, packaging and distributing of persons, of life, occurs already. Most people perch unsteadily in mass-produced, impermanent dwellings throughout their lives. They are born in hospitals, fed in cafeterias, married in churches or castles or mansions or rose gardens. After terminal care they perish in hospitals, are shelved briefly in funeral homes, and are finally incinerated or put in the ground. On each of these occasions—how many others?—efficiency and economy are obtained and individuality and continuity stripped off. If one lives and dies discontinuously and promiscuously in anonymous surroundings, it becomes hard to identify with anything even the self, and uneconomic to be attached to anything, even the self, and uneconomic to be attached to anything, even the self, and uneconomic to be attached to anything even one’s own individuality. The rhythm of individual life loses autonomy, spontaneity, and distinction when it is tired into a stream of traffic and carried along according to the speed of the road, as we are, in going to work, or play, or in doing anything. Traffic lights signal when to stop and go, and much as we seem to be driving we are driven. To stop spontaneously, to exclaim, Verweile doch Du bist so schoen (Stay, for you are beautiful), may not lose the modern Faust his soul—but it will cause a traffic jam. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

The egoism which falsifies our true sense of being and the materialism which distorts our true sense of reality are maladies which can hardly be cured by our own efforts. Only by calling, in trust and love, on a higher power, whether it be embodied in another man or in ourself, can their mesmeric spell ultimately be broken. Yet it is our own efforts which first must initiate the cure. Turning inward upon oneself might be retiring to a fool’s paradise or into a real one. To make progress inwardly is ultimately all that matters, everything else passes except the fruit of our spiritual efforts. Mysticism is the theory and practice of a technique whereby a being seeks to establish direct personal contact with spiritual being. The ideal here may not set at becoming a sinless saint but at becoming an enlightened and balanced human being. The ultimate point to be attained is fully humanity. One alone who has developed on all sides in this way is fully human. It is one sign of the sage who lives in perfect detachment that one does not miss an enjoyable experience which has passed away, and another sign that one is not afraid of this passing while one is enjoying it. What happened in all those earlier years is now veiled history to the enlightened being; what happens now, in the Eternal Now, is the important significant matter. Thus one’s mind is free from old burdens and errors. Yet, if needed, dead events can be resuscitated by intense concentration. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

The background of one’s mind is far away from everyday consciousness as if invisible, but it can spring instantly forward if needed. There is no split between higher and lower mind: they are in harmony but the kind of activity is different. It would not be correct to say that one’s consciousness splits itself into two. The proficient can mentally turn inside from the busyness of one’s environment and within a few moments find the divine presence there. One part of one can enter frequently into cerebral thinking but another part can drop out of this into celestial experience. Our work remains active in the foreground of consciousness, while our wisdom remains in the background as its inspirer. One moves in the World of bodily senses and their surrounding objects without losing the Presence, being held by it rather than holding on to it. Primitive society was organized for a certain kind of production of life, a ritual technique of manufacture of the things of the World that used the dimension of the invisible. Beings used their ingenuity to fill one’s stomach, to get control of nature for the benefit of one’s organism; this is only logical and natural. However, this stomach-centered characteristic of all culture is something we easily lose sight of. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

One reason is that beings were never content to just stop at food: they wanted more in life in the widest sense of the term—exactly what we would expect an organism to want if it could somehow contrive to be self-conscious about life and death and the need to continue experiencing. Food is only one part of that quest; being quickly saw beyond mere physical nourishment and had to conceive ways to qualify for immortality. In this way the simple food quest was transmuted into a quest for spiritual excellence, for goodness and purity. All of being’s higher spiritual ideals were a continuation of the original quest for energy-power. All morality is fundamentally a matter of power, of the power of organisms to continue existing by reaching for a superhuman purity. It is all right for a being to talk about spiritual aims; what one really means is aims for merits that qualify one for eternity. This too, of course, is the logical development of organismic ambitions. Thus the sacrificial lamb is no longer the young of an ewe slaughtered at the Paschal Feast as the embodiment of some god in order to promote the life of the crops, but a symbol expressing a sum of innocence, purity, gentleness, self-sacrifice, redemption and divinity. Doubtless many will be scandalized at any attempt to derive the cure of souls for the cravings of the stomach. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

Even so the rising generation may find cause not for anger, but for wonder, in the rapidity with which beings, so late emerged from the brute, has proceeded from the conquest of matter to that of the spirit. No one would dare gainsay the profoundly unselfish and spiritual emotions that beings are capable of. As a creature one is most attuned to the living miracle of the cosmos and responds to that miracle with a fineness and a nobility that are in themselves wondrous; the whole thing is surely part of a divine mystery. However, the step from the stomach quest to the spiritual one is not in itself as idealistic as some would seem to make it out. The earning of spiritual points is the initial impetus of the search for purity, however much some few noble souls might transmute that in an unselfish direction. For most beings faith in spirituality is merely a step into continued life, the exact extension of the organism stomach project. Many people what is going on in the mind that ideas they were pondering should break through at a sudden moment. Most striking at first is this appearance of sudden illumination, a manifest sign of long, unconscious prior work. The role of this unconscious work in mathematical invention appears to me, incontestable, and traces of it can be found in other cases where it is less evident. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

Often when one works at a hard question, nothing good is accomplished at the first attack. Then one takes a rest, longer or shorter, and sits down anew to the work. During the first half-hour, as before, nothing is found, and then all of a sudden the decisive idea presents itself to the mind. It might be said that the conscious work has been more fruitful because it has been interrupted and the rest has given back to the mind its force and freshness. The appearance of the illumination is not due to the relief from fatigue—for instance, simply taking a rest. It is more probably that this rest has been filled out wit unconscious work and that the result of this work has afterward revealed itself to the geometer or someone seriously considering the solution to a problem. Only the revelation, instead of coming during a walk or a journey, has happened during a period of conscious work, but independently of this work which plays at most a role of excitant, as if it were the goad stimulating the results already reached during rest, but remaining unconscious, to assume the conscious form. When it comes to the conditions of unconscious work, it is possible, and of a certainty it is only fruitful, if it is on the one hand preceded and on the other hand followed by a period of conscious work. These sudden inspirations (and the examples already cited sufficiently prove this) never happen expect after some days of voluntary effort which has appeared absolutely fruitless and whence nothing good seems to have come, where the way taken seems totally astray. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

These efforts then have not been as sterile as one thinks; they have set agoing the unconscious machine and without them it would not have moved and would have produced nothing. The aspirant’s decision to aim for the highest Goal is the governing factor: if one sticks to this decision, one is bound to succeed sooner or later. The question now arises: What is this Goal? It is the fulfilment of the Real Purpose of life, as apart from the lower purposes of earning a livelihood, rearing a family, and so forth. The aspirant will become fully Self-conscious—as aware of the divine Overself as one now is of one’s Earthly body. And this achievement will be perpetual, not just a matter of occasional glimpse or fleeting intuitions. Even though the Quest has become more difficult under modern conditions, it has not become impossible. The timeworn means t this end must simply be brought up to date. What are the means? They are thought, feeling, will, and intuition used in a special way. This constitutes the fourfold path, or Quest. “And now, behold, my joy is great, even unto fulness, because of you, and also this generation; yea, and even the Father rejoiceth, and also the holy Angels, because of you and this generation; for none of them are lost,” reports 3 Nephi 30. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

In the Great Boarding-House of Nature, the Cakes and the Butter and the Syrup Seldom Come Out so Even and Leave the Plates so Clean!

August 28, 2019 1:39 am

Well, what human souls see of this is a fragment. I saw the whole. I roamed extensively and fearlessly and regardless of Time, or out of it, though Time always continues to pass, of course, and I went where I chose. There were many, many mansions, to use the Scriptural words. Souls believing in like faiths had come together in desperation and sought to reinforce each other’s beliefs and still each other’s fears. However, the light of Earth was too dim to warm anyone here! And the Light of Heaven simply did not penetrate at all. The first thing I did was listen: I listened to the song of any soul who would sing to me, that is, speak, in my language; I caught up any coherent declaration or question or supposition that struck my ears. What did these souls know? What had become of them? Good beings would have us to believe failure to act in the right way, a failure to do the good one should have done is a sin. If this were sin, a less aggressive and less ugly terms, such as human weakness, could be applied. However, that is just what sin is not. And those of us who have experienced demonic powers within and around ourselves find such a description ludicrous. So we turn to Paul, and perhaps to Anne Rice’s Lestat to the conversation between God, the Memnoch Jesus and Lestat in Memnoch the Devil. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

From the legends and myths, we learn what sin is. And perhaps we may learn in through Picasso’s picture of that small Basque village, Guernica, which was destroyed in an unimaginably horrible way by the demonic powers of tyranny and oppression. And perhaps we learn it through the disrupting sounds in music that does not bring us restful emotions, but the feeling of being torn and split. Perhaps we learn the meaning of sin from the images of evil and guilt that fill our theatres, or through the revelations of unconscious motives so abundant in our novels. It is noteworthy that today, in order to know the meaning of sin, we have to look outside our churches and their average preaching to the artists and writers and ask them. However, perhaps there is still another place where we can learn what sin is, and that is our own heart. Paul seldom speaks of sins, but he often spears of Sin—Sin in the singular with a capital “S,” Sin as a power that controls World and mind, persons and nations. Have you ever thought of Sin in this image? It is the Biblical image. However, how many Christians or non-Christians have seen it? Most of us remember that at home, in school and at church, we were taught that there were many things that one would like to do that one should not. And if one did them, one committed a sin. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

We had lists of prohibitions and catalogues of commands; if we did not follow the, we committed sins. Naturally, we did commit one or more sins every day, although we tried to diminish their number seriously and with good will. This was, and perhaps still is, our image of sin—a poor, petty, distorted image, and the reason for the disrepute into which the word has fallen. The first step to an understanding of the Christian message that is called “good news” is to dispel the image of sin that implies a catalogue of sins. Those who are bound to this image are also those who find it most difficult to receive the message of acceptance of the unacceptable, the good news of Christianity. Their half-sinfulness and half-righteousness makes them insensitive to a message that states the presence of total sinfulness and total righteousness in the same being at the same moment. They never find the courage to make a total judgement against themselves, and therefore, they can never find the courage to believe in a total acceptance of themselves. Those, however, who have experienced in their hearts that sin is more than the trespassing of a list of rues know that all sins are manifestations of Sin, of the power of estrangement and inner conflict. Sin dwells in us, it controls us, and makes us do what we do not want to do. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

Sin produces a split in us that makes us lose identity with ourselves. Paul writes of this split twice: “If I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me.” Those who have suffered this split know how unexpected and terrifying it can be. Thoughts entered our mind, words poured from our mouth, something was enacted by us suddenly and without warning. And if we look at what happened, we feel—“It could not have been I who acted like this. I cannot find myself in it. Something came upon me, something I hardly noticed. However, there it was and here am I. It is I who did it, but a strange I. It is not my real, my innermost self. It is as though I were possessed by a power scarcely knew. However, now I know that it not only can reach me, but that it dwells in me.” Is this something we really know? Or do we, after a moment of shock, repress such knowledge? Do we still rely on our comparatively well ordered life, avoiding situations of moral danger, determined by the rules of family, school and society? For those who are satisfied with such a life, the words of Paul are written in vain. They refuse to face their human predicament. However, something further may happen to them: God Himself may throw them into more sin in order to make them aware of what they really are. This is a bold way of speaking, but it is the way people of the profoundest religious experiences have spoken. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

By God throwing them into more sin, they have felt the awakening hand of God. And awakened, they have seen themselves in the mirror from which they had always turned away. No longer able to hide from themselves, they have asked the question, from the depth of their self-rejection, to which the Christian message is the answer—the power of acceptance that can overcome the despair of self-rejection. In this sense, more sin can be the divine way of making us aware of ourselves. Then maybe people will feel love, maybe they will see love, feel the Love of Men and Women and for one another and for their Children, and understand the willingness to sacrifice for one another, and to grieve for those who are dead, and to seek for their souls in the hereafter, and to think of our Lord, of a hereafter where they might be reconciled with those souls again. It is out of this love and the family, it is out of this rare and unprecedented bloom—so Creative of our Lord, that is seems in His Image of his Creations—that the souls of these beings remain alive after death! What else in Nature can do this? All gives back to the Earth what it has taken. God’s Wisdom is Manifested throughout; and all those that suffer and die beneath the canopy of God’s Heavens are mercifully bathed in brutal ignorance of the scheme which ultimately involved their own deaths. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

Then, we ask with Paul—what is it within us that makes a dwelling place for this power? He answers that is it our members in which sin hides. He also calls this place “flesh,” and sometimes he speaks of “our body of death.” However, there are also forces within us that resist the power—our innermost self, our mind, our spirit. With these words, Paul wrestles with the deep mystery of human nature just as we do today. And it is no easier to understand him than our present scholarly language about beings. However, one this is certain: Paul, and with him, the whole Bible, never made our body responsible for our estrangement from God, from our World and from our own self. Body, flesh, members—these are not the only sinful parts of us, while the innermost self, mind and spirit, comprises the other, sinless part. Our whole being, every cell of our body, and every movement of our mind is both flesh and spirit, subjected to the power of sin and resisting its power. The fact that we accuse ourselves shows that we cannot acknowledge our estrangement from out true nature. The fact that we are ashamed shows that we still know what we ought to be. And in their hearts, loving one another as they do, mate with mate, and family with family, they have imagined Heaven. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

Beings have imagined it; the time of the reunion of souls when their kind 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! There is no part of beings that is bad in itself, as there is no part o beings that is good in itself. Any Christian teaching that has forgotten this has fallen short of the height of Christian insight. And here all Christian churches must share the grave guilt of destroying human beings by casting them into despair over their own guilt where there should be no guilt. In pulpits, schools and families, Christians have called the natural strivings of the living, growing and self-propagating body sinful. They concentrate in an inordinate and purely pagan way on the pleases of the flesh differentiation of all life and its possible distortions. Certainly, these distortions are as real as the distortions of our spiritual life—as, for example, pride and indifference. However, to see the power of sin in the power of the pleasures of the flesh of life as such is itself a distortion. Such preaching completely misses the image of sin as Paul depicts it. What is worse, it produces distorted feelings of guilt in countless personalities, that drive them from doubt to anxiety, from anxiety to despair, from despair to escape into mental disease, and thence the desire to destroy themselves altogether. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

And still other consequences of this preaching about sin become apparent. Paul points to the perversions of desires for pleasures of the flesh as an extreme expression of sin’s control of humankind. Have we as Christians ever asked ourselves whether or not, in our defamation of the natural as sin, or at least as a reason for shame, we have perhaps contributed most potently to this state of affairs? For all this results from that petty image of sin, that contradicts reality as much as it contradicts the Biblical understanding of a being’s predicament. It is dangerous to preach about sin, because it may induce us to brood over our sinfulness. Perhaps one should not preach about it at all. I myself have hesitated for many years. However, sometimes it must be risked in order to remove the distortions which increase sin, if, by the persistence of wrong thoughts, wrong ways of living are inevitable. I believer it possible to conquer the dangers implied in the concentration of sin, if we look at it indirectly, in the light of that which enables us to resist it—reunion overcoming estrangement. Sin is our act of turning away from participation in the divine Ground from which we come and to which we go. Sin is the turning towards ourselves, and making ourselves the center of our World and of ourselves. Sin is the drive in everyone, even those who exercise the most self-restraint, to draw as much as possible of the World into oneself #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

However, if we have found a certain level of life above ourselves, we can be fully aware that we should not try to draw too much of the World into ourselves. After one has lost oneself, whoever has found oneself knows how deep one’s loss of self was. If we look at our estrangement from the point of reunion, we are no longer in danger of brooding over our estrangement. We can speak of Sin, because its power over us is broken. It is certainly not broken by ourselves. The attempt to break the power of sin by the power of good will has been described by Paul as the attempt to fulfill the law, the law in our mind, in our innermost self that is the law of God. The result of this attempt is failure, guilt and despair. The law, with its commands and prohibitions, despite its function in revealing and restricting evil, provokes resistance against itself. In a language both poetic and profoundly psychological, Paul says that the sin that dwells in our members is asleep until the moment in which it is awakened by the “thou shalt not.” Sin uses the commandments in order to become alive. Prohibition awakens sleeping desire. It arouses the power and consciousness of sin, but cannot break its power. Only if we accept with our whole being the message that it is broken, is it also broke in us. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

This picture of sin is a picture full of ugliness, suffering and shame, and at the same time, drama and passion. It is the picture of us as the battleground of powers greater than we. It does not divide beings into categories of black and white, or good and evil. It does not appear as the threatening finger of an authority urging us—do not sin! However, it is the vision of something infinitely important, that happens on this small planet in, our bodies and minds. It raises humankind to a level in the Universe where decisive things happen in every moment, decisive for the ultimate meaning of all existence. In each of us such decisions occur, in us, and through us. This is our burden. This is our despair. This is our greatness. Moral questions immediately present themselves as questions whose solution cannot wait for sensible proof. A moral question is a question not what sensibly exists, but of what is good, or would be good if it did not exist. Science can tell us what exists; but to compare with worths, both of what exists and of what does not exist, we must consult not science, but our heart. Science herself consults her heart when she lays it down that the infinite ascertainment of fact and correction of false belief are the supreme goods for beings. Challenge the statement, and science can only repeat it oracularly, or else prove it by showing that such ascertainment and correction brings beings all sorts of other goods which a being’s heart in turn declares. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

The question of having moral beliefs at all or not having them is decided by our will. Are our moral preferences true or false, or are they only odd biological phenomena, making things good or bad for us, but in themselves indifferent? How can your pure intellect decide? If your heart does not want a World of moral reality, your head will assuredly never makes you believe in one. Mephistophelian skepticism, indeed, will satisfy the head’s play-instincts much better than any rigorous idealism can. Some beings (even at the student age) are so naturally cool-hearted that the moralistic hypothesis never has for them any pungent life, and in their supercilious presence the hot young moralist always feels strangely ill at ease. The appearance of knowingness is on their side, of naivete and gullibility on one’s. Yet, in the inarticulate heart of one, one clings to it that one is not a dupe, and that there is a realm in which all their with and intellectual superiority is no better than the cunning of a fox. Moral skepticism can no more be refuted or proved by logic than intellectual skepticism can. When we stick to it that there is truth (be it of either kind), we do so with our whole nature, and resolve to stand or fall by the results. The sceptic with one’s whole nature adopts the doubting attitude; but which of us is the wiser, Omniscience only knows. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

Turn now from these wide questions of good to a certain class of questions of fact, questions concerning personal relations, states of mind between one being and another. Do you like me or not?—for example. Whether you do or not depends, in countless instances, on whether I meet you half-way, am willing to assume that you must like me, and show you trust and expectation. The previous faith on my part in your liking’s existence is in such cases previous what makes your liking come. However, if I stand aloof, and refuse to budge an inch until I have objective evidence, until you shall have done something apt, as the absolutist say, ad extorquendum assensum meum, ten to one your liking never comes. How many women’s hearts are vanquished by the mere sanguine insistence of some being that they must love one! one will not consent to the hypothesis that they cannot. The desire for a certain kind of truth here beings about that special truth’s existence; and so it is in innumerable cases of other sorts. Who gains promotions, boons, appointments, but the being in whose life they are seen to play the part of live hypotheses, who discounts them, sacrifices other things for their sake before they have come, and takes risks for them in advance? One’s faith acts on the powers above one as a claim, and creates its own verification. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

A social organism of any sort whatever, large or small, is what it is because each member proceeds to one’s own duty with a trust that the other members will simultaneously do theirs. Wherever a desired result is achieved by the co-operation of many independent persons, its existence as a fact is pure consequence of the precursive faith in one another of those immediately concerned. A government, an army, a commercial system, a ship, a college, an athletic team, all exist on this condition, without which not only is nothing achieved, but nothing is even attempted. A whole train of passengers (individual brave enough) will be looted by a few highwaymen, simply because the latter can count on one another, while each passenger fears that if one makes a movement of resistance, one will be shot before any one else backs one up. If we believed that the whole car-full would rise at once with us, we should each severally rise, and train-robbing would never even be attempted. There are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming. And where faith in a fact can help create the fact, that would be an insane logic which should say that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is the lowest kind of immorality into which a thinking being can fall. Yet such is the logic by which our scientific absolutists pretend to regulate our lives! #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

Social betterment is a good thing but it is not a substitute for self-betterment. Love of one’s neighbour is an excellent virtue but it cannot displace the best of all virtues, love of the divine soul. The being who is discontented with the World as one finds it and sets out to improve it, must begin with oneself. There is authority for this statement in the life-giving ideas of Jesus as well as in the light-giving Plato. One has enough to do with the discovery and correction of one’s own deficiencies or weaknesses, not to meddle in criticism of other people’s. One can best use one’s critical faculties by turning them on oneself rather than on others. Progress in self-evolvement on the Quest must be due to the individual’s own efforts. It can be encouraged or fostered only in proportion to the same individual’s wishes and needs. Other people, who are not interested in an inner search, are, at present, fulfilling their own karmic need for a particular variety of experience; it is neither advisable nor feasible to urge them to follow this path. It is a worthwhile cause, this, and does not require us to interfere with others, to propagandize them or to reform them. Rather does it as us to do these things to ourselves. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

Few know where really to look for the truth. Most go for it to other beings, to books, or to churches. However, the few who know the proper direction turn around and look in that place where the truth is not only a living dynamic thing but is their own. And this is deep, deep within themselves. It is logical to assert if every individual in a group is made better, the group of which one is a part will be made better. And what is human society but such a group? The best way to help it is to start with the individual who is under one’s actual control—oneself—and better one. Do that, and it will then be possible to apply oneself to the task of bettering the other members of society, not only more easily but with less failure. The Holy Land, flowing with milk and honey, is within us but the wilderness that we have to cross before reaching it, is within us too. The great sources of wisdom and truth, of virtue and serenity, are still within ourselves as they have ever been. Mysticism is simply the art of turning inwards in order to find them. Will, thought, and feeling are withdrawn from their habitual extroverted activities and directed inwards in this subtle search. One understands then what it means to do nothing of oneself, for one feels clearly that the higher power is doing though one whatever has to be done, is doing it rightly, while one oneself is merely watching what is happening. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

The experience of enlightenment brings a tremendous feeling of well-being. It is in one’s attitude toward oneself particularly that we see the immense advance one has made beyond ordinary beings. Just as the Illumined State does not prevent one from receiving physical impressions from the World around one, so it does not prevent one from receiving psychic impressions from the people around one. However, one does not cling to any of these impressions, nor does one let one’s emotions get entwined with them. For one there is no split between the spiritual and secular, nothing done that is not done in holy meditation. The serenity of one’s life is a hidden one. It does not depend on fortune’s halting course. The feeling nature of one who attains enlightenment opens itself to purely impersonal reactions. It is a state of tranquil feeling, not of emotional feeling. Both opposites find their place in existence for the unenlightened, the masses, the narrow-horizoned. The tension between them contributes toward development, the conciliation of extremes broadens views. With enlightenment comes equilibrium, harmony, balance, the larger outlook, piercing insight. “And behold, the people did rejoice and glorify God, and the whole face of the land was filled with rejoicing,” reports Helaman 11.18. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

One Possesses a Largeness of Heart at All Times, an Immense Tolerance Towards the Frailty of Faulty Men and Women

August 24, 2019 12:52 am

I mean you no harm. I came from Heaven. I came to learn about you and to love you. And I wish you only all good things under God! The gateway is open to Heaven for all those who gain Understanding and Acceptance of the Harmony of Creation and the Goodness of God while on Earth. Though let me assure you such aged and wounded individuals still have souls, which will at some point cease to be dependent upon their crippled brains. I live, to be sure, by the practical faith that we must go on experiencing and thinking over our experience, for only thus can our opinions grow more true; but to hold any one of them—I absolutely do not care which—as if it never could be reinterpretabled or corrigible, I believe to be a tremendously mistaken attitude, and I think that the whole history of philosophy will bear me out. There is but one indefectibly certain truth, and that is the truth that pyrrhonistic skepticism itself leaves standing,–the truth that the present phenomenon of consciousness exists. That, however, is the bare starting-point of knowledge, the mere admission of a stuff to be philosophized about. No concrete test of what is really true has ever been agreed upon. Some make the criterion external to the moment of perception, putting it either in revelation, the consensus gentium, the instincts of the heart, or systematized experience of the race. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

The World is rational through and through,–its existence is an ultimate brute fact; there is a personal God,–a personal God is inconceivable; there is an extra-mental physical World immediately known,–the mind can only know its own ideas; a moral imperative exists,–obligation is only the resultant desires; a permanent spiritual principle is in every one,–there are only shifting states of mind; there is an endless chain of causes,–there is an absolute first cause; and eternal necessity,–a freedom; a purpose,–no purpose; a primal One,–a primal Many; a universal continuity,–and essential discontinuity in things; an infinity,–no infinity. There is this,–there is that; there is indeed nothing which some one has not thought absolutely true, while one’s neighbor deemed it absolutely false; and not an absolutist among them seems ever to have considered that the trouble may all the time be essential, and that the intellect, even with truth directly in its grasp, may have no infallible signal for knowing whether it be truth or no. When, indeed, one remembers that the most striking practical application to life of the doctrine of objective certitude has been the conscientious labors of the Holy Office of the Inquisition, one feels less tempted than ever to lend the doctrine a respectful ear. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

However, please observe, now, that when as empiricists we give up the doctrine of objective certitude, we do not thereby give up the quest or hope of truth itself. We still pin our faith on its existence, and still believe that we gain an ever better position towards it by systematically continuing to roll up experiences and think. Our great difference from the scholastic lies in the way we face. The strength of one’s system is possessed in the principles, the origin, the terminus a quo of one’s thought; for us the strength is in the outcome, the upshot, the terminus ad quem. Not where it comes from but what it leads to is to decide. It matter not to an empiricist from what quarter an hypothesis may come to one: one may have acquired it by fair means or by foul; passions may have whispered or accident suggested it; but if the total drift of thinking continues to confirm it, that is what one means by its being true. Primitive life was basically a rich and playful dramatization of life; primitive beings acted out one’s significance as a living creature and as a lord over other creatures. It seems to me like genius, this remarkable intuition of what beings need and want; and primitive beings not only had this uncanny intuition but actually acted on it, set up one’s social life to give oneself what one needed and wanted. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

We may know what we lack in modern life, and we brood on it, but twist and sweat as we may we can never seem to bring it off. Perhaps things were simpler and more manageable in prehistoric times and had not gotten out of hand, and so being could act on what one knew. Primitive beings set up society as a stage, surrounded oneself with actors to play different roles, invented gods to address the performance to, and then ran off one ritual drama after the other, raising oneself to the stars and bringing the stars down into the affairs of beings. One staged the dance of life, with oneself at the center. Over and above the satisfaction of these biosocial needs and the individual therapeutic benefits there were other reasons, concessions by the Principium Individuationis, which made beings seek for and submit to absolute collective loyalties. Individual survival as much as group survival dictated close cohesion: the small groups of beings were surrounded by a hostile nature and by an often hostile rivalry of neighboring groups. When the tribes had been welded into states and empires and the preservation of security was no longer a daily anxiety, collective loyalties too on a more diffuse, anemic character or thickened only occasionally in emergencies. Consequently a ritual of communal solidarity was no longer a routine practice. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

At the lower level of local groups it lingered on for a while as a rare festivity to be held on a few specified occasions. It is for this reason that the choral dance reached its final form in the prehistoric era and has not changed its basic pattern ever since. Strange as it may sound—since the Stone Age, the dance has taken on as little in the way of new forms as of new content. The history of the creative dance takes place in prehistory. The choral dance as the cultural form of a pre-cultural, biosocial practice survived for a long time. We find chiral dances widely practiced as late as the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries. These are, however, no longer the comprehensive experiences their pre-cultural predecessors used to be. Even so they continued to fulfill an integrative function in rural communities which were isolated and enslaved by feudal bondage. If there were real peasant communities under feudal lordship these were made possible by integrative practices issuing from the community itself and not by the strictures imposed on the community by feudal rule. The latter could have created only compounds of serfs and not village communities. Towards the end of the feudal era the choral dance began to decline. For some time after the sixteenth century choral dances and couple dances persisted together. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

At the beginning of the nineteenth century the spread of the waltz, the polka, the Bostin finally ended the popularity of the choral dances. During the intervening centuries there were numerous pointers suggesting the presence of some kind of a transition in this process. The group is broken up into independent couples: the minuet, allemande, passepied, bourrée, gigue are mixed dances with a strong choral framework; the cotillion-quadrille type of so-called square dances represent the link between the choral and couple dances. This later transition is already a historical and not a phylogenetic process; it is not our task to sketch the history of an art form but to examine whether it continues to answer the requirements of a biosocial need. It may be of some advantage, perhaps for the sake of brining a contrast into high relief, to analyze the contemporary function of the dance. This contrast is presented to show the biosocial impoverishment of our species and complete our outline of the phylogenetic process. Today the dance is hardly ever the function of the group as a whole. Going to a dance very often means going out, that is outside the group, preferably in twos. In the age of the tango (1900), the shimmy (1920) or the jitterbug (1950s), or this new fan dance usually women preform with their rear ends, the dance has been reduced to the role of being a medium of courtship, of sexual titillation, and of motor frenzy. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

The modern dance may serve sexual and matrimonial purposes well, but these purposes can hardly be described as communal. The couple arrive en deux and rarely join others among the dancers. The big city dance halls, and the dance floors of restaurants, night clubs and so on are removed from the community, are outside the community, and it is perhaps this character of such places which makes them eminently suitable for the purposes of present-day dancing. Apart from the popular couple dances, we have spectacular stage dancing, ballet, etc.; but these belong to the split World of performers and audiences, and with these we are not concerned here. After all, the hypertrophy of audiences is just another symptom of desocialization, a symptom which calls for specific study. Today the commercialization of dance activities has largely stabilized the hegemony of the isolate couple dance. The dance has ceased to be an opportunity when participation inertia can be overcome and when an ease in intimate contact can be developed. It is no longer an important formalizer of social skill, of manners, and it has become arid, businesslike or downright erotic, and non-social. The dance palaces hug the central portion of the city where recreational business concentrates and neighborhood relations are almost absent…there is little or no pretence of social control or of intent to regard personal or group relations: there is merely a recognition of a want for a dance place with or without food and drink, and a commercial answer for that want. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

And to think that when Western beings first crashed uninvited into these spectacular dramas, one was scornful of what one saw. That is because Western beings were already a fallen creature who had forgotten how to play, how to impart to a life high style and significance. Western beings wee being given a brief glimpse of the creations of human genius, and like a petulant imbecile bully who feels discomfort at what one does not understand, one proceeded to smash everything in sight. Many people have scoffed at the everyday modern rituals of face-work and status forcing; they have argued that these types of petty self-promotion might be true of modern organization beings hopelessly set adrift in bureaucratic society but these kinds of shallow one-upmanship behaviors could not possibly be true of beings everywhere. Consequently, these critics say, we are definitely not talking about human nature. However, these critics are very wrong, and that is because it is more in context with primitive society. When you set up society to do creation rituals, then you obviously increase geometrically the magnitude of importance that organisms can impart to one another. It is only in modern society that the mutual imparting of self-importance has trickled down to the simple maneuvering of face-work; there is hardly any way to get a sense of value expect from the boss, the company dinner, or the random social encounters in the elevator or on the way to the executive toilet. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

It is pretty demeaning, but it is playing out of the historical decadence ritual. Primitive society was a formal organization for the apotheosis of beings. Our own everyday rituals seems shallow precisely because they lack the cosmic connection. Instead of only using one’s fellow being as a mirror to make one’s face shine, the primitive used the work cosmos. I think it is safe to say that primitive organization for ritual was nothing other than in-depth face-work; it related the person to the mysterious forces of the cosmos, gave one an intimate share in them. This is why the primitive seems multidimensional to many present-day anthropologists who are critical of modern mass society. The word aggression crops up in our day-to-day speech in an endless variety of ways. We speak of an aggressive business deal, used as a compliment and meaning a deal that risks a lot to make a lot more money. On the stock market it is the aggressive broker and aggressive way of handling stocks that usually pay off. “We follow an aggressive policy” is generally welcomed in the business World as an indication that these fellows are on their toes and plan to get come place. It is good to have an aggressive lawyer pleading your case because he or she knows how to put your legal opponent at a disadvantage. In the business World the positive use of aggression is widely accepted. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

Most aggression is indirect, masked, taking the form of subtle put-downs of the other person. This shows itself in psychotherapy under the guise of civil, friendly cooperation. A patient will say one has to be “honest” and will then let loose with a stream of fault-findings, covering everything from the therapist’s way of working to one’s family and one’s office. When the therapist says something that does not strike the patient as true, the latter finds one negation not enough, but has to say, “No, no, no, no” as though one is surprised that anyone could suggest such an uneducated thing. These techniques of upmanship go on in daily conversation between people of all sorts, especially between married couples. They take the form of an interminable superiority-inferiority struggle, in ways generally not picked up by the “victim” but obvious to everyone else. This indirect kind of aggression is almost always destructive, and I can see no good in whatever. There is another kind of aggression—that within the self or, as it is generally experienced by the person, against the self. I sit down early in the morning to work on this essay. Up till now I have been relaxed, relatively happy, even a bit placid. However, as I sit here thinking of the subject of aggression, I summon up my rambling thoughts, I open my mind to whatever insights may come, I contemplate the topic. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

I summon the rebellious parts of myself; inwardly I look for a “fight,” aware that creative power and vision come out of such a struggle. I summon the daimonic—so far as it can be summoned. If I were describing it mythologically, I would say that a swarm of dwarfs, elves, and trolls become embroiled in my mind and refuse to do my bidding. The melee that results until some clear ideas and insights emerge is actually my own self, tearing down conventional ideas and ways of seeing in order to grasp anew being’s life and problems. It is the daimonic in full force. All art must be aggressive in some sense. Artists are not necessarily belligerent people as a group; they are generally the ones who fight their most important battles within themselves and on canvases, typewriters, or some other medium of art. No one can look at Hans Hofmann’s paintings, with their bright colors clashing and half the edges free to form their own boundaries or mixing with other colors, without being aware that one is seeing in action this very daimonic, this plastic aggression before one’s eyes. Robert Motherwell and Franz Kline, as they seek to paint the tension and restlessness of our time, splash a black form across a canvas and leave it hanging in air with the rough edges, as though some great object was bodily torn apart right there on the canvas. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

The power in conflicting forms is, in these paintings, strained to the breaking point. However, how can we, today, create in any authentic sense without such straining and, indeed, without such aggression? Norman Mailer’s passion is boxing, and Ernest Hemingway not only climbed into the ring whenever he could but described getting ready to write a novel as being similar to getting in shape for a fight. Both of these writer have had a need to assert their power’ and out of this need also springs, at least in part, their ability as writers. And now we must take another step in our attempt to penetrate the riddle of inequality by asking—why do some of us use and increase what was given to us, while other do not and thus lose what was given to them? Why does God say to the prophet in the Old Testament that the ears and eyes of a nation are made insensitive to the divine message? Is it sufficient to answer—because some use their freedom responsibility and do wat they ought to do, while others fail through their own guilt? This answer, which seems so obvious, is sufficient only when we apply it to ourselves. Each one of us must consider the increase or loss of what was given as a matter for one’s own responsibility. Our conscience tells us that we cannot blame anybody or anything other than ourselves for our losses. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

However, when we consider the plight of others, this answer is not sufficient. We cannot tell somebody who comes to us in great distress about oneself—“Make use of what was given to you,” for one may have come to us precisely because one is unable to do so! And we cannot tell those in despair because of what they are—“Be something else,” for the inability to get rid of oneself is the exact meaning of despair. We cannot tell those who failed to conquer the destructive influences of their surroundings and thence were driven into crime and misery—“You should have been stronger,” for it was just this strength of which they were deprived by heritage or environment. Certainly they are all beings, and freedom is given to them all. However, they are also all subject to destiny. It is not for us to condemn others because they were free, as it is also not for us to excuse them because of the burden of their destiny. We cannot judge them. And when we judge ourselves, we must keep in mind that even this judgment has no finality, because we, like them, stand under an ultimate judgment. In it the riddle of inequality is eternally answered. However, the answer is not ours. It is our predicament that we must ask the question, and we ask with an uneasy conscience—why are they in such misery? Why not we? Thinking of those near to us, we ask—are we partly responsible? #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

However, even though we are, the riddle of inequality is not solved. The uneasy conscience asks also about those most distant from us—why they, why not we? Why did my child, or any one of the millions of children, die before he had the chance to grow out of infancy? Why was my child, or any child born, born with spina bifida when I took my folic acid, and was totally sober and went to prenatal visits? Why has my friend or relative, or anyone’s friend or relative, disintegrated in one’s mind, and thus lost both his or her freedom and his or her destiny? Why has my son or daughter, gifted as they were with many talents, wasted them and been deprived of them? Why do such things happen to any parent at all? And why have the creative powers of this boy or that girl been broken by a tyrannical father or a possessive mother? None of these questions concern our own misery. At present, we are not asking—why did this happen to me? It is not Job’s question that God answered by humiliating one and then elevating one into communion with Him. It is not the old and urgent question—where is divine justice, where is divine love, for me? It is almost an opposite question—why did this not happen to me, while it did happen to another, to innumerable other ones, to whom not even Job’s power to accept the divine answer was given? Why, Jesus asks also, are many called but few elected? #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

Jesus does not answer the question, but states simply that this is the human predicament. Shall we therefore cease to ask, and humbly accept a divine judgment that would hurl most human beings out of community with the divine and condemn them to despair and self-destruction? Can we accept the eternal victory of judgment over love? We can not, nor can any human being, though he may preach and threaten in such terms. As long as one is able to visualize oneself with absolute certainty as eternally rejected, one preaching and threats are self-deceptive. For who can see oneself eternally rejected? However, if this is not the solution of the riddle of inequality at its deepest level, may we go outside the boundaries of Christian tradition to listen to those who would tell us that this life does not determine our eternal destiny? There will be other lives, they would say, predicted, like our present life, on previous ones and what we wasted or achieved in them. This is a serious doctrine and not completely strange to Christianity. However, since we do not know and never shall know what each of us was in a previous existence, or will be in a future one, it is not really our destiny developing from life to life, but in each life, the destiny of someone else. Therefore, this doctrine also fails to solve the riddle. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

Actually, there is no answer at all to our question concerning the temporal and eternal destiny of a single being separated from the destiny of the whole. Only in the unity of all beings in time and eternity can there be a humanly possible answer to the riddle of inequality. “Humanly possible” does not mean an answer that removes the riddle of inequality, but one with which we can live. There is an ultimate unity in all beings, rooted in the divine life from which they emerge and to which they return. All beings, non-human as well as human, participate in it. And therefore, they all participate in each other. And we participate in each other’s having and in each other’s not having. When we become aware of this unity of all beings, something happens to us. The fact that others do not have changed the character of our having: it undercuts our security and drives us beyond ourselves, to understand, to give, to share, to help. The fact that others fall into sin, crime and misery alters the character of the grace that is given us: it makes us recognize our own hidden guilt; it shows us that those who suffer for their sin and crime suffer also for us, for we are guilty of their guilt and ought to suffer as they suffer. Our becoming aware of the fact that others who could have developed into full human beings did not, changes our state of fully humanity. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

Their early death, their early or late disintegration, brings to our own personal life and healthy a continuous risk, a dying that is not yet death, a disintegration that is not yet destruction. In every death we encounter, something of us dies, and in every disease, something of us tends towards disintegration. Can we live with this answer? We can to the degree to which we are liberated from oneself unless one is grasped by that power which is present in everyone and everything—the eternal, from which we come and to which we go, and which gives us to ourselves and liberates us from ourselves. It is the greatness and heart of the Christian message that God, as manifest in the Christ on the Cross, totally participates in the dying of a child, in the condemnation of the criminal, in the disintegration of a mind, in starvation and famine, and even in the human rejection of Himself. There is no human condition into which the divine presence does not penetrate. This is what the Cross, the most extreme of all human conditions, tells us. The riddle of inequality cannot be solved on the level of our separation from each other. It is eternally solved through the divine participation in the life of all of us and every being. The certainty of the divine participation gives us the courage to endure the riddle of inequality, although our finite minds cannot solve it. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

Why should anyone who has come to show beings the interior way proceed to delude them by pointing out an exterior one? In other words, if the Kingdom of Heaven is within us, what use will it be to set up an institution without us? The primary task of a being sent from God is not to found a church which will keep them still looking outward, and hence in the wrong direction, but to shed invisible grace. If one or one’s closer disciples do organize such a church, it is not only as a secondary task and as a concession to human weakness. The only schools worth finding are the schools without disciples. The ordinary beings are aware of one’s surroundings, first, by naming and labelling them; second, by linking them with past memory of them; and third, by relating them to one’s own personal self. The illumined egoless being is simply aware of them, without any of these other added activities. We have to have a certitude which follows being freed from all doubt. Why then should one be afraid of acknowledging one’s personal-impersonal existence in, and awareness of, the World? “How long shall we suffer these great afflictions, O Lord? O Lord, give us strength according to our faith which is in Christ, even unto deliverance,” reports Alma 14.26. My thoughts behave like circles on water. A little stone makes a dot, from which thoughts spread ever outward until they creak on the shores of the unthinkable. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

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My First Act of Free Will Shall be to Believe in Free Will

August 23, 2019 12:38 am

My courtyard banana trees had not been touched by a heatwave this Summer, and grew thick and drowsing as ever against the stucco walls. The wild impatients and lantana were glowing in the overgrown beds, and the fountain, the fountain with its cherub, was making its crystalline music as the water splashed from the cherub’s horn into the basin. And the flowers introduced a profusion of colors which had never been before in nature, expect in the rainbow! Colors we had known in Heaven and thought to be purely celestial and now we saw they were in this beautiful community. Trees rose in their mature fullness; rain came in whispering gusts, full of fragrance. They sky warmed and colors everywhere expanded or deepened. These souls took the invisible fabric of Heaven, whatever it is—energy, essence, the light of God, the Creative Power of God—and in a twinkling surrounded us all with wonderous constructions representing their curiosity, their concepts of beauty and their desires! What was going on at the moment when this breakthrough occurred? Taking this experience of mine as a start, we noticed, first of all, that the insight broke into my conscious mind against what I had been really trying to think rationally. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

I had a good, sound thesis and I had been working very hard trying to prove it. The unconscious, so to speak, broke through in opposition to the conscious belief to which I was clinging. There is a polarity, a kind of opposition, between unconscious experience and consciousness. The relationship is compensatory: consciousness controls the wild, illogical vagaries of the unconscious, while the unconscious keeps consciousness from drying up in banal, empty, arid rationality. The compensation also works on specific problems: if I consciously bend too far one way on some issues, my unconscious will lean the other way. This is, of course, the reason why the more we are unconsciously smitten with doubt about an idea, the more strict and rigidly we fight for it in our conscious argument. This is also why persons as different as Saint Paul on the Damascus road and the alcoholic in the Bowery go through such radical conversions—the repressed unconscious side of the dialectic erupts and takes over the personality. The unconscious seems to take delight (if I may so express it) in breaking through—and breaking up—exactly what we cling to most rigidly in our conscious thinking. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

What occurs in this breakthrough is not simply growth; it is much more dynamic. It is not a mere expansion of awareness; it is rather a kind of battle. A dynamic struggle goes on within a person between what one consciously thinks on the one hand and, on the other, some insight, some perspective that is struggling to be born. The insight is then born with anxiety, guilt, and the joy and gratification that is inseparable from the actualizing of a new idea or vision. The guilt that is present when this breakthrough occurs has its source in the fact that the insight must destroy something. My insight destroyed my other hypothesis and would destroy what a number of my professors believed, a fact that caused me some concern. Whenever there is a breakthrough of a significant idea in science or a significant new form in art, the new idea will destroy what a lot of people believe is essential to the survival of their intellectual and spiritual World. This is the source of guilt in genuine creative work. As Picasso remarked, “Every act of creation is first of all an action of destruction.” The breakthrough carried with it also an element of anxiety. For it not only broke down my previous hypothesis, it shook my self-World relationship. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

At such a time I find myself having to seek a new foundation, the existence of which I as yet do not know. This is the source of the anxious feeling that comes at the moment of the breakthrough; it is not possible that there be a genuinely new idea without this shake up occurring to some degree. However, beyond guilt and anxiety, as I said above, the main feeling that comes with the breakthrough is one of gratification. We have seen something new. We have the joy of participating in what the physicists and other natural scientists call an experience of elegance. When the Universe itself runs down and disintegrates given enough time, how can this little and limited being of a person hope to preserve one’s personal consciousness, one’s personality, one’s character just as it is today? Any belief fostered by any kind of authority—religious or metaphysical or any other—which fosters this illusion is a false one. However, this said, let it be counted by that other truth which is needed to complete the thought. If the individualized being must one day part with its limited consciousness, this is only in order to return to its origin in the universal consciousness, for consciousness cannot come out of nothing. It came from and goes back to the universal mind. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

Therefore, if a being loses the little and temporary immortality of the ego, it will only be to gain the greater and true immortality of that mind. The higher individuality is preserved, but the lower personality, with its miserable limitations, is not. The difference between the individual and the universal self persists throughout the incarnations and no mystical emotionalism or metaphysical jugglery can end it. It will end indeed not by the individual transforming oneself into the greater being but by one’s merging oneself into it, that is, by the disappearance of one’s separate consciousness in the pure essence of all consciousness. However, it need not so end unless one wants it. Even if we should surrender it to God, there is no reason why we should not preserve own individuality. When the higher self encloses and absorbs the ego, the goal is achieved. Through one has been caught up into something immensely great than oneself, one still remains an individual—albeit a loosely held one. One’s further life will be a record of discovery rather than speculation, of insights rather than intellections. What will happen to one’s environment after illumination? Nothing. It will not be miraculously transformed so that one sees auras, ghost, and atoms mixed up with its ordinary appearance. It will still look as it did before. The grass will have the same shapes and colour. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

However, the question of inequality has not yet been answered. For now we must ask—why do some of us receive more than others in the very beginning, before using or wasting our talents is even possible? Why does the one servant receive five talents, and the second, two, and the third, one? Why is one person born to desperate less affluence, and another to affluence? To reply that much will be demanded of those to whom much is given, and little of those to whom little is given, is not adequate. For it is just this original inequality, internal and external, that gives rise to the question. Why is the power to gain so much more out of one’s being human given to one human being rather than to another? Why is so much given to one that much can be asked of one, while little can be asked of another, because little was given one? If we consider this problem in relation not only to individual beings, but also to classes, races, and nations, the question of political inequality also arises, and with it the many ways in which beings have tried to abolish inequality. In every revolution and way, the will to solve the riddle of inequality is a driving force. However, neither war nor revolution can answer it. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

And even though we may imagine that most social inequalities will be conquered in the future, there remain three realities: the inequality of talents in body and mind, the inequality created by freedom and destiny, and the inequality of justice deriving from the fact that all generations before the time of such equality would by nature be excluded from its blessings. This last would be the greatest inequality possible! No! In the face of one of the deepest and most tormenting problems of life, we cannot permit ourselves to be so shallow or foolish as to try to escae into a social dreamland. We have to live now. We have to live this life. We must face the riddle of inequality today. Let us not confuse the riddle of inequality with the fact that each of us is a unique and incomparable self. Our being individual certainly belongs to our dignity as beings. This being was given to us, and must be made use of an intensified, not drowned in the gray waters of conformity that threaten us so much today. One should defend every individuality and the uniqueness of every human self. However, one should not be deluded into believing that this is a solution to the riddle of inequality. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

Unfortunately, there are social and political reactionaries who exploit this confusion social and political reactionaries who exploit this confusion in order to justify social injustice. They are at least as foolish as those who dream of the future abolition of inequality. One who has witnessed hospitals for the ill and insane, prisons, sweat shops, battlefields, people starving, family tragedies, or moral aberrations should be cured of any confusion of the gift of individuality with the riddle of inequality. One should be cured of any sense of easy consolation. If any teacher or organization asks you to swear ceremoniously that you will not reveal to others what you are taught, be sure that you will receive inferior occultism, not philosophic truth. For the truth hides itself from the unready: it does not have to be hidden from them. Do not confuse the necessary secrecy of philosophic presentation with the portentous secrecy of charlatanic cults. It is not necessary to call meetings or to organize societies in order to propagate truth. There is no crowd salvation, no communal redemption. The monasteries and ashrams, the organizations and societies, the institutions and temples have their place and use. However, the one is very elementary and the other is very limited. Whatever is most worthwhile to, and in, a being must come forth from one’s own individual endeavour. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

Society improves only as, and when, its members improve. This is strikingly shown by the moral failure of some states with dictatorships, and by the half-failure of established religions. Most institutions and organizations have developed in time the fault of an egocentrism which cases them to lose sight of their original higher purpose, and so they join the list of additions to societies which have a mixed selfish and idealistic character. Too many spiritual organizations exist mainly to serve those who create or staff them. When those who direct the affairs of an institution become more concerned about the state of its revenue than about its state of spirituality, when they are more affected by its increasing financial returns than about its increasing materiality, it is time to pick up one’s hat and stick and bid it farewell. Starting from speculations on the beginning of life and from biological parallels I drew the conclusion that, besides the instinct to preserve living substances, there must exist another, contrary instinct seeking to dissolve those units and to bring them back to their primaeval, inorganic state. That is to say, as well as Eros there was an instinct of death. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

The death instinct is directed against the organism itself and this is a self-destructive drive, or it is directed outward, and in this case tends to destroy others rather than oneself. When blended with sexuality, the death instinct is transformed into more harmless impulses expressed in sadism or masochism. Even though Dr. Freud suggested at various times that the power of the death instinct can be reduced, the basic assumption remained: beings were under the sway of an impulse to destroy either oneself or others, and one could do little to escape this tragic alternative. It follows that, from the position of the death instinct, aggression was not essentially a reaction to stimuli but a constantly following impulse rooted in the constitution of the human organism. The death instinct is a biological force in all living organisms: this should mean that animals, too, express their death instinct either against themselves or against others. Hence one should find more illness or early death in less outwardly aggressive animals and vice versa; but, of course, there are no data supporting this idea. Yet, there is a dualistic concept in which two basic forces are opposed to each other. This dichotomy was at first that between self-preservation and libido, and later that between life and death instincts. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

There is a vastness and the precariousness of existing fully and the courage required to preserve in the face of ill health and depression. The organism has a great stake in blowing itself up in size, importance, and durability. Because only if we understand how natural this motive is can we understand how it is only in society tat beings can get the symbolic measures for the degrees of one’s importance, one’s qualification for extradurability. And it is only by contrasting and comparing oneself to like organism, to one’s fellow being, that one can judge if one has some extra claim to importance. Obviously it is not very convincing about one’s ultimate worth to be better than a lobster, or even a fox; but to outshine that fellow sitting over there, the one with the black eyes—now that is something that carries the conviction of ultimacy. The faces beings carry the highest meaning to other beings. Once we understand this, we can see further why the moiety organization is such a stroke of primitive genius: it sets up society as a continuing contest for the forcing of self-feeling, provides ready-made props for self-aggrandizement, a daily script that includes straight men for joking relationships and talented rivals with whom to contend for social honor in games, feats of strength, hunting and warfare. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

Sociologist have very nicely described the dynamics of status forcing and similar types of behavior, in which people try to come out of social encounters a little bigger than they went in, by playing intricate games of one-upmanship. However, you cannot force your status vis-à-vis someone else unless there is a someone else and there are rules for status and verbal conventions for playing around with status, for coming out of social groups with increases self-inflation. Society almost everywhere provides codes for such self-aggrandizement, for the ability to boast, to humiliate, or just simply to outshine in quiet ways—like displaying one’s superior achievements, even if it is only skill in hunting that feeds everyone’s stomach. A being cannot impart life to oneself but must get it via ritual from one’s fellow being, then we can say even further that beings cannot impart importance to oneself; and importance, we now see, is just as deep a problem in securing life: importance equals durability equals life. However, I do not want to seem to be making out that primitive society organized itself merely as a stage for competitive self-aggrandizement, or that beings can only expand their sense of self at the expense of others. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

This would not be true, even though it is a large and evidently natural part of human motivation. Primitive society also expressed its genius by giving to people much less invidious and competitive forms of self-expansion. People impart to one another the daily sense of importance that each needs, not with rivalry and boasting, but rather with elaborate rules for protecting their insides against social damage and deflation. People do this in their interpersonal encounters by using verbal formulas that express proper courtesies, permit gentle handling, save the other’s face with the proper subtleties when self-esteem is in danger, and so on. Social life is interwoven with salutations foe greeting and taking leave, for acknowledging others with short, standardized conversations which reinforce the sense of well-being of all the members. Beings in society manage to give each other what they need in terms of good organismic self-feeling in two major ways: on one hand, by codes that allow people to compare their achievements and virtues so as to outside rivals; on the other hand, by codes that support and protect tender human feelings that prevent the undermining and deflation that can result from the clash of organismic ambitions. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

However, now to see how the technique for the ritual renewal of nature worked—how well it served the actors who played the parts. We can really only get inside primitive societies by seeing them as religious priesthoods with each person having a role to pay in the generative rituals. We have so long been stripped of a ritual role to play in creation that we have to force ourselves to try to understand this, to get this into perspective. We do not know what it means to contribute a dance, a chant, or a spell in a community dramatization of the forces of nature—unless we belong to an active religious community. Nr can we feel the immense sense of achievement that follows from such a ritual contribution: the ritualist has done nothing less than enable life to continue; one has contributed to sustaining and renewing the Universe. If rituals generate and redistribute life power, then each person is a generator of life. That is how important a person could feel, within the ritualist view of nature, by occupying a ritual place in a community. Even the humblest person was a cosmic creator. We may not think that the ritual generation of brown kangaroos is a valid casual affair, but the primitive feels the effect of one’s ability to generate life, one is ennobled by it, even though it may be an illusion. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

We may console ourselves about our historical demotion from the status of cosmic heroism by saying that at least we know what true religion is, whereas these cosmic creators lived according to immature magic. I will admit that our historical disenchantment is a burden that gives us a certain sober Worldliness, but there is no valid difference between religion and magic, no matter how many books are written to support the distinction. Magic is religion we do not believe in, and religion is magic we believe in. Voila tout. A school should exist not only to teach but also to investigate, not to formulate prematurely a finalized system but to remain creative, to go on testing theories by applying them and validating ideas by experience. The formation of a society of seekers may have a social value but it has little instructional value, for it merely pools their common ignorance. The justification of a society educationally is its possession of a competent teacher—competent because one’s instruction possess intellectual clarity and one’s knowledge possesses justifiable certitude. “I will not show unto the wicked of my strength, to one more than the other, save it be unto those who repent of their sins, and hearken unto my words,” reports Helaman 7.23. The mind passes through a stage, when seeking after truth, it finds out that the World is other than it seems to be. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

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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

The Full Development of the Individual is Conditioned by the Most Ruthless Struggle of Individuals

August 11, 2019 1:43 am

I was lying still somewhere, in an open place, on the rocky ground. I had the veil. I could feel the bulk of it, but I did not dare to reach inside and draw it out or examine it. Help the souls who are lost! Help them. Do not leave them in the whirlwind, do not leave them on Earth struggling to gain understanding. The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of one’s existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life. The fight with nature which primitive beings has to wage for one’s bodily existence attains in the modern form its latest transformation. The eighteenth century called upon beings too free themselves of all the historical bonds in the state and in religion, in morals and in economics. Being’s nature, originally good and common to all, should develop unhampered. In addition to more liberty, the nineteenth century demanded the functional specialization of beings and their work; this specialization makes one individual incomparable to another, and each of them indispensable to the highest possible extent. However, this specialization makes each being the more directly dependent upon the supplementary activities of all other. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

The full development of the individual is conditioned by the most ruthless struggle of individuals; socialism believes in the suppression of all competition for the same reason. Be that as it may in all these positions the same basic motive is at work: the person resists being leveled down and worn out by a social-technological mechanism. An inquiry into the inner meaning of specifically modern life and its products, into the soul of the cultural body, so to speak, must seek to solve the equation which structures like the metropolis set up between the individual and the super individual contents of life. Such an inquiry must answer the question of how they personality accommodates itself in the adjustments to external forces. The psychology basis of the metropolitan type of individuality consists in the intensification of nervous stimulation which results from the swifts and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli. Beings are a differentiating creature. Their minds are stimulated by the difference between a momentary impression and the one which preceded it. Lasting impressions, impressions which differ only slightly from one another, impressions which take a regular and habitual course and show regular and habitual contrasts—all these use up, so to speak, less consciousness than does the rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

These are the psychological conditions which the metropolis creates. With each crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life, the city sets up a deep contrast with small town and rural life with reference to the sensory foundations of psychic life. The metropolis exacts from beings as a discriminating creature a different amount of consciousness than does rural life. Here the rhythm of life and sensory mental imagery flows more slowly, more habitually, and more evenly. Precisely in this connection the sophisticated character of metropolitan psychic life becomes understandable—as over against small town life which rests more upon deeply felt and emotional relationships. These latter are rooted in the more unconscious layers of the psyche and grow most readily in the steady rhythm uninterrupted habituations. The intellect, however, has its locus in the transparent, conscious, higher layers of the psyche; it is the most adaptable of our inner forces. In order to accommodate to change and to the contrast of phenomena, the intellect does not require any shocks and inner upheavals; it is only through such upheavals that the more conservative mind could accommodate to the metropolitan rhythm events. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

Thus the metropolitan type of being—which, of course, exists in a thousand individual variants—develops an organ protecting one against the threatening current and discrepancies of one’s external environment which would uproot one. One reacts with one’s head instead of one’s heart. In this an increased awareness assumes the psychic prerogative. Metropolitan life, this, underlies a heightened awareness and a predominance of intelligence in metropolitan beings. The reaction to metropolitan phenomena is shifted to that organ which is least sensitive and quite remote from the depth of the personality. Intellectuality is thus seen to preserve subjective life against the overwhelming power of metropolitan life, and intellectuality branches out in many directions and is integrated with numerous discrete phenomena. The metropolis has always been the seat of the money economy. Here the multiplicity and concentration of economic exchange gives an importance to the means of exchange which the scantiness of rural commerce would not have allowed. Money and economy and the dominance of the intellect are intrinsically connected. They share a matter-of-fact attitude, a formal justice is often coupled with an inconsiderate hardness. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

The intellectually sophisticated person is indifferent to all genuine individuality, because relationships and reactions result from it which cannot be exhausted with logical operations. In the same manner, the individuality phenomena is not commensurate with the pecuniary principle. Money is concerned only with what is common to all: it asks for the exchange value, it reduces all quality and individuality to the question: How much? All intimate emotional relations between persons are founded in their individuality, whereas in rational relations beings are reckoned with like a number, like an element which is in itself indifferent. Only the objective measurable achievement is of interest. Thus metropolitan beings reckons with one’s merchants and customers, one’s domestic servants and often even with persons with whom one is obliged to have social intercourse. These features of intellectuality contrast with the nature of the small circle in which the inevitable knowledge of individuality as inevitably produces a warmer tone of behavior, a behavior which is beyond a mere objective balancing of service and return. In the sphere of the economic psychology of the small group it is of importance that under primitive conditions productions serves the customer who orders the goods, so that the producer and the consumer are acquainted. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

The modern metropolis, however, is supplied almost entirely by production for the market, that is, for entirely unknown purchasers who never personally enter the producer’s actual field of vision. Through this anonymity the interests of each party acquire an unmerciful matter-of-factness; and the intellectually calculating economic egoisms of both parties need not fear any deflection because of the imponderables of personal relationships. The money economy dominates the metropolis; it has displaced the last survivals of domestic production and the direct barter of goods; it minimizes from day to day, the amount of work ordered by customers. The matter-of-fact attitude is obviously so intimately interrelated with the money economy, which is dominant in the metropolis, that nobody can say whether the intellectualistic mentality first promoted the money economy or whether the latter determined the former. The metropolitan way of life is certainly the most fertile soil for this reciprocity, a point which I shall document merely by citing the dictum of the most eminent English constitutional historian: throughout the whole course of English history, London has never acted as England’s heart but often as England’s intellect and always as her moneybag! #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

In certain seemingly insignificant traits, which lie upon the surface of life, the same psychic currents characteristically unite. Modern mind has become more and more calculating. The calculative exactness of practical life which the money economy had brought about corresponds to the ideal of natural sciences: to transform the World into an arithmetic problem, to fix every part of the World by mathematical formulas. Only money economy has filled the days of so many people with weighing, calculating, with numerical determinations, with a reduction of qualitative values to quantitative ones. Through the calculative nature of money a new precision, a certainty in the definition of identities and differences, an unambiguousness in agreements and arrangements has been brought about in the relations of the life-elements—just as externally this precision has been effected by the universal diffusion of pocket watches. However, the conditions of metropolitan life are at once cause and effect of this trait. The relationships and affairs of the typical metropolitan usually are so varied and complex that without the strictest punctuality in promises and services the whole structure would break down into an inextricable chaos. Above all, this necessity is brought about by the aggregation of so any people with such differentiated interests, who must integrate their relations and activities into a highly complex organism. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

If all clocks and watches in Berlin would suddenly go wrong in different ways, even if only by one hour, all economic life and communication of the city would be disrupted for a long time. In addition an apparently mere external factor—long distances—would make all waiting and broken appointments result in an ill-afforded waste of time. Thus, the technique of metropolitan life is unimaginable without the most punctual integration of all activities and mutual relations into a stable and impersonal time schedule. Here again the general conclusions of this entire task of reflection become obvious, namely, that from each point on the surface of existence—however closely attached to the surface alone—one may drop a sounding into the depth of the psyche so that all the most banal externalities of life finally are connected with the ultimate decisions concerning the meaning and style of life. Punctuality, calculability, exactness are forced upon life by the complexity and extension of metropolitan existence and are not only most intimately connected with its money economy and intellectualistic character. These traits must also color the contents of life and favor the exclusion of those irrational, instinctive sovereign traits and impulses which aim at determining the mode of life from within, instead of receiving the general and precisely schematized form of life from without. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

Even though sovereign types of personality, characterized by irrational impulse, are by no means impossible in the city, they are, nevertheless, opposed to typical city life. The passionate hatred of the metropolis is understandable in these terms. The nature of some beings discover the value of the alone in the unschematized existence which cannot be defined with precision for all alike. From the same source of this hatred of the metropolis surged their hatred of money economy and the intellectualism of modern existence. The idea of introducing Questers to the Quester has generally failed to effect the original purpose and has not seldom had disappointing results. It is better to recognize that this is an individual work, not to be identified with any group effort, even so small a group as two or three, let alone the larger ones of several dozen. People cannot blend so easily as to form a harmonious friendship or group, even if they are Questers. Yet many beginners in their enthusiasm try to create such friendships and have to learn their lessons when the friendship falls apart. It is better to let people find their affinity and form their companionships in a natural way. There is no duty laid upon anyone, whether teacher or taught, to give introductions unless a direct, intuitive bidding points to that duty. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

Even where an organization is not actually obstructive or misleading, it is often cumbersome. Can the inquiring and aspiring person find no better refuge anywhere than some rigid church? Must one join some institution and have the rest of one’s life laid out for one by others even if it does violence to one’s own finer feelings and best reasonings? Must one join a crowd of other aspirants or attach oneself to some persuasive leader? It is a fact that many if not most do this, which shows the lack of strength in their minds and characters; but on the other hand a more popular way is easer and more comfortable. Belonging to an elite group, whether or not it be real as self-claimed, allows its members to feel superior, to be condescending, and to denigrate others. A movement may begin and seek to keep free from organization, administration, and authority, but it is unlikely to remain so. For human beings, fallible or ambitious, frail or emotional, will sooner, or later seek to impose their ideas, will, or themselves on the others. Few are willing to sacrifice their desire for the gregarious support offered by joining an organization and therefore few see how this binds them to its strict and rigid doctrines, imprisons them in its practices or methods, and obstructs their free hearing of the intuitive voice of their own soul. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

With the capacity of hostility to generate anxiety the relation between the two is not exhausted. The process also works the other ways around: anxiety in its turn, when based on a feeling of being menaced, easily provokes a reactive hostility in defense. In this regard it does not differ in any way from fear, which may equally provoke aggression. The reactive hostility too, if repressed, may create anxiety, and this a cycle is created. This effect of reciprocity between hostility and anxiety, one always generating and reinforcing the other, enables us to understand why we find in neuroses such an enormous amount of relentless hostility. When the intensification of hostility through anxiety is realized it seems unnecessary to look for a special biological source for destructive drives. This reciprocal influence is also the basic reason why severe neuroses so often become worse without any apparent difficult conditions from the outside. It does not matter whether anxiety or hostility has been the primary factor; the point this that is highly important for the dynamics of a neurosis is that anxiety and hostility are inextricably interwoven. I am not enamoured overmuch of this modern habit, which forms a society at faint provocation. A being’s own problem stares one alone in the face, and is not to be solved by any association of others. Every new society we join is a fresh temptation to waste time. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

The great mistake of all spiritual organizations is to overlook the fact that progress or salvation is a highly individual matter. Each person has one’s unique attitude towards life; each must move forward by one’s own expanding comprehension and especially by one’s own personal effort. Some people are held spellbound by others because their statements matter. Some authorities speak out of their own doubt-ridden souls—souls which always existed on the boundary. Many are called to give doubt to the faithful and faith to the doubters. Doubting is the symbol of the growing process, and may lead one into the mist interesting and even thrilling phenomena. To doubt constructively requires that one be well fortified with knowledge; the person who knows very little cannot take the risk the doubting requires. When we bring doubt to the faithful, that means these faithful are soundly based and can stand—and even need to stand—looking into the abyss of doubt. They are the one who can take the risk which confronts anyone who gazes into the Holy Void. It takes more than knowledge to doubt; it takes courage. Richness is a product of prolonged and multitudinous doubting. Doubting in this sense is a rich and adventurous back-packing among the high mountains; one’s knowledge gives one a firm footing on the trail but one’s doubt give the sense of venture. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

Doubt opens new trails to the unknown; one learns new paths; one sees new things on the trip; there are fresh winds blowing from different directions. Doubt in this sense is expressive of the courage to venture when one never knows where one will come out. To venture cases anxiety, but not to venture is to lose one’s self. The courage to doubt for the enlightened is one’s quest for the Holy Void and the use of the soul and love as our teacher. It means our lives are far from simple but at the same time they are glorious. Some may accuse one of being an atheist, but it also means that thousands of others will see one as their guide to meaning, to mystery and blessedness. To live in doubt is to live in ecstasy. It means no loner to live life continually under the phrase “in spite of.” As our faith increase, we will unequivocally know it is because we are seeking the truth and not merely because we are told to believe is the right thing to do. When the masculine and feminine temperaments within us are untied, completed, and balanced, when masculine power and feminine passivity are brought together inside the person and knowledge and reverence encircle them both, then wisdom begins to dawn in the soul. The ineffable reality and the mentalist Universe are then understood to be non-different from other another. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

Where both unity and diversity are experienced and the individual is able to attain both these levels, one is surely gifted with insight. However, if diversity has to be blotted out before becoming aware of unity, this may be regarded as a penultimate faculty; that is, the insight is genuine but is still not fully mature. Everything depends on the capacity of the individual. When one’s mind moves entirely and wholly into the One Infinite Presence, and when it settles permanently there, the divided existence of glimpse and darkness, of Spirit and matter, of Overself and ego, of Heaven and Earth, will vanish. The crossing over to a unified existence will happens. The state of nonduality is a state of intense peace and perfect balance. It is so peaceful because everything is seen as it belongs—to the eternal order of cosmic evolution; hence, all is accepted, all reconciled. For the heart in inner harmony and for which everything is one, no difference exists between this and that. Why is it that despite all the visible and touchable counter-attractions, despite the innumerable failures and long years of fruitlessness, so many beings have sought through so many ages in so many lands for God, for wat is utterly intangible, unnamable, shapeless, unseen, and unheard? #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

Because the simple but astonishing fact is that the Overself, which is the presence of God in them, is part of their nature as human beings is why we search for God! Mysticism is nothing more than the methodical attempt to wake up to this fact. The soul which metaphysics points to in reasoning, mysticism establishes in experience. We all need to feel the divine presence. Even the being who asserts that one does not is no exception. For one indirectly finds it just the same in spite of oneself but under limited forms like aesthetic appreciation or Nature’s inspiration. Even if all contemporary mystics were to die out, even if not a single living being were to be interested in mysticism, even if all mystical doctrines were to disappear from human memory and written record, the logic of evolution would bring back both the teaching and the practice. They are two of those historical necessities which are certain to be regained in the course of humanity’s cultural progress. Because the Overself is already there within one in all its immutable sublimity, beings have not to develop it or perfect it. One has only to develop and perfect one’s ego until it becomes like a polished mirror, held up to and reflecting the sacred attributes of the Overself, and showing openly forth the divine qualities which had hitherto lain hidden behind itself. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

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

And How do We Relight the Flame When it is Cold, Why do We Dream When Our Thoughts Mean Nothing?

August 6, 2019 8:17 am

God said: “Wait!” So I found myself stopped at the gates of Heaven, along with all my companions, the Angels who generally went and did what I did, and Michael and Gabriel and Uriel, though not among my companions, were there, too. “Memnoch, my accuser,” said God, and the words were spoken with the characteristic gentleness and a great effulgence of light. “Before you come into Heaven, and you begin your diatribe, go back down to the Earth and study all you have seen thoroughly and with respect—by this I mean humankind—so that when you come to me, you have given yourself every chance to understand and to behold all I have done. I tell you now that Humankind is part of Nature, and subject to the Laws of Nature which you have seen unfold all along. No one should understand batter than you, save I. But go, see again for yourself. Then, and only then, will I call together a convocation in Heaven, of all Angels, of all ranks and all endowment, and I will listen to what you have to say. Take with you those who seek the same answers you seek and leave me those Angels who never cared, nor taken notice, nor though of anything but to live in My Light.” Parts of the psychoanalysis of a young man will demonstrate what happens when an individual’s power cannot be admitted consciously and openly, much like Memnoch In Anne Rice’s Memnoch the Devil. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

The power is not erased but comes out in a myriad of other, separate ways. These ways may be camouflaged power or they may be pseudopower. Soren, a Ph.D. student, good-looking, tall, appeared younger than his twenty-six years. He was the third and last child of an affluent Italian family of which the oldest child, Soren’s brother, who was nine years his senior, had always been successful both socially and on the athletic field. Soren’s sister, who was seven years older, had been in some form of therapy most of her life, had been hospitalized after a schizophrenic breakdown, and had been mute for two years in the mental hospital where she now was. His father, the treasurer of a large chain of stores, was detached, successful at work, and hypochondriacal at home—kind at times, but completely unpredictable, wanting the children to be “sweet” to him and reacting to family disagreements by becoming sick and withdrawing. Soren’s mother, who had been and still was a beauty, dominated the family constellation. She was flighty, subtle, inconsistent, intelligent, and in arguments would change her viewpoint with every sentence in order to put the other person on the defense. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

She had “spoiled” Soren—preparing his favorite cuisine, driving him to school so that he would not have to take the subway like the other boys—and was more than glad when Soren, who disliked school consistently and strongly, would feign illness in order to stay home with her. Soren’s mother was delicate toward him, actively opposing his ineffectual efforts later to date girls. The mean table was a constant battlefield of bickering, with one member of the family not speaking to another for weeks on end. This technique of cutting the resented person dead (“I would walk by my father as though he was not there,” said Soren) was resorted to particularly by Soren and his sister, the weakest members of the family. Soren’s sister eventually enlarged the pattern to include the whole World by her muteness at the hospital. Our opening question is: How was Soren to achieve any power in such a family and such a World? Caught in a double bind, with a mother who would change her stance at the drop of a word, with a father who would withdraw with the threat of a heat attack whenever the smoldering undercover warfare of the family burst out into the open, a pawn between his sister who was mentally disturbed and a successful brother who did come to protect Soren at school but teased him mercilessly at home—what was Soren to do? #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

Should Soren try, now that he had grown to six feet and was good-looking, to assert himself on the social scale? However, the girls at high school had always called him the “baby” (which he had been), and this still bedogged him. The athletic field? He was a novice there; and besides his brother had completely usurped that mode of recognition. Intellectually? For his entire life, until he got into college, he had hated school, did not prepare his work. All of this in spite of the fact that he basically was highly imaginative and, as it later turned out, demonstrated a rich mind and active intelligence. In his boyhood Soren presents the picture of the “little fellow,” who had learned early to be “sweet” to others, never to blow up, and, like the little countries in Europe in the eighteenth century, to get some protection by making alliances with different important members of the family. This self-deprecation pattern went so far, he confessed, that he preferred to be disliked in high school (the other boys had for him a disparaging nickname, “Sappo”) because that at least brought him some attention. Where does his power go? When he was sixteen he had had two epileptic attacks and had been on a daily dose of Dilantin since. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

These epileptic attacks are interesting for our purpose as a symptom of the seething cauldron of emotions under the surface in Soren. Whatever these attacks show physically, the psychological dimension is generally a massive rage. This rage builds up and finally explodes in the periodic seizure. The explosion is blotted out of consciousness, so the individual never has to be aware of, or has to be responsible for, what he does. However, it turns out to be violence directed chiefly against himself—the person himself gets physically hurt, to a greater or lesser degree, as he falls at the time of the seizure. Furthermore he is, like Soren, chronically crippled by having this Damocles’ Sword hanging over his head, never knowing when it will fall. All the while Soren denied this, saying: “I never get emotional or upset—I saw what it does to my sister so I vowed I would never get that way.” Soren’s dreams early in the therapy were frequently of thieves breaking into the house, which was a kind of fortress for him. The only thing he could do was to play dead, the ultimate symbol of impotence and innocence: A group of thieves was in the house. Someone came downstairs—I curled up as though dead. He looked at me a long time. After a while I went outside. The thieves grabbed me. Then a crowd of people were outside, where a woman began to chase me with a meat cleaver in her hand, and then a man took the cleaver and began to chase me. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

“I remember moments of unhappiness,” said Soren, “never any joy in our family. I learned to roll with the punches in family fights, to go along, never to expect anything—you get hurt that way. Why struggle? It is painful, and I learned early never to believe in pain of any sort…Nobody paid any attention to my feelings. I was always belittled.” This is similar to the way Memnoch felt about God creating human beings and their suffering. “I went up to Heaven,” he said, “ablaze with thoughts and doubts and speculations. I knew wrath. The cries of suffering mammals had taught me wrath. The screams and roars of wars amongst beings had taught me wrath. Decay and death had taught me fear. Indeed all of God’s Creation had taught all I needed to speed before him (God) and say, ‘Is this what you wanted! Your own image divided into male and female! The spark of life now blazing huge when either dies, male or female! This grotesquerie; this impossible division; this monster! Was this the plan?’” Soren and Memnoch are both like Gulliver, all tied up with ropes by Lilliputians, this is a symbol which betrays their own image of hidden power. Memnoch’s only happy time was before the creation of humans. Soren’s only happy time was the year he went to Israel. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

The Israeli-Arab war was beginning, and Soren covered it for an American newspaper. He looked back upon this period with fond memories; he loved the excitement, the enforced relationship with death in his walking along the Gaza strip among the bodies of fallen soldiers. For a brief period he left himself to be of some significance. He was twenty-four at this time, and Soren fell in love with a girl—the first time he had ever been in love. The occasion, as distinguished from the cause, of his coming for psychoanalysis was his turmoil over whether to marry this girl or not. His family was aligned against her, but when I met her she seemed a sympathetic though somewhat optimistic person who was someone Soren could talk and who gave him some recognition. About three months after his psychotherapy started, he told me that he believed he could influence distant objects to change. He was shy and hesitant in telling me this, saying he knew it sounded irrational and adding that if I did not believe what he said he could not tell me. I replied that my task was not to argue the truth or falsehood of such ideas; but to find out what function they served for him; and obviously the ideas were significant for him. This apparently satisfied him, for Soren then began to reveal a whole system of belief in “retribution” at the hands of God and in harm being meted out to others and punishment for wrongs they had done. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

When we awakens in the morning, Soren must think of his family or else they would get hurt. He must lift the sheets up two feet, look at an exact spot on the wall, stand up exactly the right way on the floor, go to the bathroom and urinate, all before he exchanged a word with anyone. He must take his clothes out, put on his undershirt, sit down on the bed and put his left shoe on first, then his trousers. If he makes a mistake in this ritual, he must go back to bed and start the whole thing over. After that he must say “good morning” to Charlotte (the maid) or to his brother. At breakfast he had to eat in the same rigid order; he must drink his orange juice, then eat his egg, then drink his milk. And so on. When he does something wrong in this system, his father will have a heart attack or something will happen to his mother. Punishment and happiness, he believed, were portioned out by God. Several years earlier Soren had been relatively happy when enrolled in journalism school. As a “result” his grandmother died because he had placed the book Huckleberry Finn in a certain position on his desk or because of the way he had placed his pennies on his dresser. When I, testing the rigidity of the system, asked whether his grandmother might not have died anyway, he replied, not at the time or in some other way. If Soren does right, others will benefit; if he does wrong, others, especially those in his own family, will get sick or have accidents. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

Soren cannot have pleasures of the flesh, nor must he enjoy it very much. When he did experience pleasures of the flesh, he waited in fear for several days for the retribution to fall. Surely enough, two days later his mother was mugged and robbed in the train station in a neighboring city. What strikes us immediately in this complex system is the tremendous power it gives him. Any chance deed of his could decide whether someone lived or died. He even had power over the weather: “When it rains, the rain is sent by God to punish me.” He actually controlled the Universe that way. “I have to control everything about my life. I could not live if I did not control the future.” It is worthy of note that “control” was one of Soren’s favorite words, and he used it often. I contended myself at first by remarking that he must feel as if he were in a strait jacket with all those rigid compulsions, and did not he find it a heavy weight upon him? He agreed that it was difficult, but he had no choice. Moreover, he had not been able to read Faust when in high school because of all the “demons” running around in it, and even Mary Poppins was prohibited when it became filled with devils. He could not say the word that goes before Yankees in the title of a contemporary play. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

Soren did see the vast power that his system gave him, after I pointed it out to him. However, Memnoch was also very powerful. God created him and his followers first—the archangels were Memnoch, Michael, Gabriel, Uriel, and many others whose names have never been discovered—either inadvertently or deliberately. There were actually fifty archangels, and they were the first made. Memnoch is actually Satan. The archangels are very powerful because they are the ones who communicated in the most direct way with God, and also with the Earth. That is why they were labeled Guardian Angels, as well as Archangels. Much like Soren, the Archangels were sometimes given a low rank in religious literature, but they do not have a low rank. What they have is the greatest personality and the greatest flexibility between God and humans. However, whenever the Angels have a problem with God, they would take their concerns to Memnoch, so much like Soren a lot of power rested on his shoulders. Also, like Soren, Memnoch became rejected as he was deemed God’s accuser. Satan means accuser. “And the early religious writers, knowing only bits and pieces of the truth, thought it was man whom I accused, not God; but there are reasons for this, as you will soon see. You might say I have become the Great Accuser of everybody,” says Memnoch. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

Much like Soren, some thought Memnoch seemed “exasperated.” Soren have lived as a child, he knew, in such emotional disorder that he had to have something solid. He was compensating for a boyhood that was completely powerless. “I would allow people to use me to build themselves up,” he said; and one can be sure Soren have to take revenge. The neurotic power (or magic) is in direct proportion to the early powerlessness. Such a person will not and cannot five up his system until he experiences some real power in the actual World. That Soren had plenty of threats against which to protect himself is shown in several dreams that occurred during the weeks he was telling me about his retribution system. One was: “I was left in the house alone. A masked man and woman disguised as my mother and father broke into our house to attack me.” He also often dreamed of the Mafia, and suddenly asked one day: “Is my mother this Mafia, the enemy? Sometime pain is the punishment or is an alleviating factor. I then can give up the compulsions. Generally the compulsions does not affect my life, but it leaves me very frightened. In some ways it is like voodoo. I keep thinking may I have dome something I should not have. I do not want to be responsible for all those things happening.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

Memnoch feels the say way as Soren, he does not want to be held responsible for everyone’s mistakes. “At times when I am angry and making speeches to all of Heaven, I accuse them…if you will pardon the expression again—of being held to Go as if by a magnet and not having a free will or personality such as we possess. But they have these things, they do, even the Ophanim, who are in general the least articulate or eloquent—in fact, Ophanim are likely to say nothing for eons—and any of these First Triad can be sent by God to do this and that, and have appeared on Earth, and some of the Seraphim have made rather spectacular appearances to men and women as well. To their credit, they adore God utterly, the experience without reserve the ecstasy of his presence, and he fills them completely so that they do not ask questions of him and they are more docile, or more truly aware of God, depending on one’s point of view,” Memnoch. So, you can see that both Memnoch and Soren feel frustrated and like they are the only ones who can keep the order and peace. However, is it not that Soren and Memnoch want the controlling the system not to continue—it gives their lives a tremendous sense of significance—but neither wants to accept the responsibility for the power. It is to be kept secret, not admitted openly; they both are a controller of life and death for countless people related to them, and no one but the both of them know it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

By acting as controller, Memnoch and Soren can preserve their façade of innocence. When people have to ask for help, and feel a need to be in control, it can be humiliating. Therefore, they have to work out a covert system of secret control over others while doing so. Much like Memnoch, Soren was a puppeteer, pulling wires, in reality or in fantasy, to direct his therapist, his girl friend, his professors, and everyone around him. Memnoch had to direct God, the Angels, and humans. They both are weak, greatly needing an authority figure and tried to maneuver people into taking the responsibility they felt they had. One must, at all costs, not let one’s power come out into the open or let oneself be seen as powerful; one must forever remain the innocent little boy or Angel. To make someone else responsible but powerless—this is the bind the Soren and Memnoch tried to put their authority figure in. It is the bind both of them had been in all of their lives. The pattern of God and retributions, I proposed, must have the effect of reversing the above pattern: it must be a way that one can be powerful with no responsibility. Memnoch and Soren had no confidence in the possibility of their changing; change must come from the outside. This conviction was necessary to keep the whole retribution system intact. Memnoch and Soren get their power by being secretly allied with God. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

All power remains with God; God requires that Soren and Memnoch have no autonomous power to assert themselves. If one once decided that one could make a fateful decision on one’s own, God himself would be challenged and the whole system would fall away like mist under the morning Sun. Taking responsibility upon one’s self, asserting one’s own autonomy, was challenging God and committing the sin of hubris. “Angels are not perfect. You can see that already. They are Created Beings. They do not know everything God knows, that is obvious to you and everyone else. However, they know a great deal; they know that all can be known in Time if they wish to know it; and that is where Angels differ, you see. Some wish to know everything in Time, and some care only for God and god’s reflection in those of his most devoted souls,” Anne Rice. One who has attained the consciousness of Overself puts in no claim to the attainment. One accepts it in so utterly natural and completely humble a manner than most people are deceived into regarding one as ordinary. One has not attained who is conscious that one has attained, for this very consciousness cunningly hides the ego and delivers one into its power. That alone is attainment which is natural, spontaneous, unforced, unaware, and unadvertised, whether to the being or to others. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

At this stage there is no struggle for further growth; it comes as softly and as naturally as a flower’s. There is no sacrifice of things the ego desires or clutches to itself, for there is such insight as to their worth or worthlessness that they stay or fall away of themselves. It is better to attain such high status without knowing it. For this absence of pride and presence of humility keeps the ego from threatening it. The actions of a being who has attained this degree are inspired directly by one’s Overself, and consequently are not dictated by personal wishes, purposes, passions, or desires. They are not initiated by one’s ego’s will higher than one’s own. Since there is no consciously deliberating thinking, no broken trends. There is only spontaneous thought, feeling, and action, all being directed by intuition. For one not to be aware that one is acting virtuously, courageously, wisely, or practicing contemplation beautifully, free from interfering mental images and thought, this is the ideal disposition. For then, if one does not know that one—the person—is doing so, no egoism will taint one’s consciousness. It will be pure being. One will do whatever has to be done by one as a human creature—whether it be a physical act or a mental one, one will respond to all situations that call for a human response, but neither the act nor the response will be accompanied by the personal ego. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

This does not mean that one’s Worldly life or one will suffer loss of identity—only that one will be isolated from the Worldly self-centered thought, desire, and motive which prompts the existence of the mass of people. One feels no need—so conspicuous in neurotics with a message—to call attention to oneself. Rather does one seek to keep it away. The strength of the enlightenment will determine the extent of its effects. An illumination maybe permanent but at the same time it may be only partial. Not until it is complete and lasting is it really philosophic. It is not only true that there is variety in the types of illumination but also true that there is a scale of degrees in the illumination itself. Until one has established permanently, although not necessarily at the very highest level, the consciousness can become corrupted, the being can fall back. “As I sit here and slowly close my eyes, I take another deep breath and feel the wind pass through my body. I am the one in your soul, reflecting inner light. Protect the ones who hold you, cradling in your inner child. I need serenity in a place where I can hide. I need serenity, nothing changes, days go by. Where do we go when we just do not know and how do we relight the flame when it is cold. Why do we dream when our thoughts mean nothing and when will we learn to control? Tragic visions slowly stole my life. Tore away everything, cheating me out of my time,” Serenity by Godsmack. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

Randolph Harris II International Institute

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

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