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One Must Know What the Struggle Between Self and Soul Really Feels Like through One’s Own Experience!
We even went in search of haunted houses together—a newfound pastime that excited us both. Of course, most of the time we found nothing in the empty buildings where spirits were supposed to appear. And those wretched persons supposed to be supposed to by possessed by the devil were often no more than commonly insane. What, then, shall we do? The only answer is: Be compassionate. The universality of evil makes human compassion necessary. I often remark to the parents who are sad about the part they are played in the problems of their children. You and I—all of us who are human—are on the same yacht. Platitude through this is it often helps relieve them of the solitary, pariahlike quality that makes them feel they are alone in their mistakes and solitary in their evil. Mere rationalism can never solve the problem of life for the intellect no longer knows is from the ought, or known from the known—that is to say, ascents to Heaven; only the dead can be forgiven; but when I think of that my tongue’s a stone. However, there is an act of harmony between the two. I am content to follow to its source every event in action or in thought; measure the lot; forgive myself the lot! When such as I cast out remorse so great a sweetness flows into the heart, we must laugh and we must sing, we are blest by everything, everything we look upon is blest. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
This is an exquisite description of what happens in the deeper sense of forgiveness toward oneself. The forgiveness extends, in the case of parents and children, to the sons and daughters as well; for the regrets are often bound up with what seems to be their opposite, resentment on the part of the parents at the son or daughter for causing him or her such perplexity and sufferings. Thus forgiveness of oneself permits one to forgive others. Forgiveness, which is one phase of compassion, puts deeper meaning into our human comedies, and enables us to get insight from our tragedies so that they become bearable. Forgiveness means to overcome the resentment—to cast out remorse—which is the curse that accumulates in most human relationships. Forgiving ourselves as well as others may be the only way of transcending this resentment. The health-enhancing aspect of the forgiving of others is that it helps wipe away the resentment toward oneself at the same time. Compassion gives us fresh perspective on what it means to be human, and helps us judge less harshly ourselves as well as the persons who impinge upon us. Paradoxical as it sounds, this gives us a point outside our remorse from which we can do more to correct it. We stop, then, condemning ourselves for being human, and we can at the same time stop condemning others for the same condition. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
All my brilliantly colored birds given away, probably for sale in the bazaar. Gray African parrots that live to be as old men. Nicolas de Lenfent lived to be thirty. Two hundred years ago, the people of Paris would have got him. He would not have had to burn himself. Got me too maybe. But I doubt it. No, there never would have been any witches place for me. He lives on in my mind now. Pious mortal phrase. And what kind of life is that? I do not like living here myself! What does it mean to live on in the mind of another? Nothing, I think. You are not really there, are you? This means that everybody needs all the clarity they can muster regarding their ignorance and finiteness, and all the support they can obtain in order to face the upsetting implications of what their clarity reveals to them. A compassionate person is one who, by virtue of accepting this situation, can provide others as well as self with such support. As a mortal walks through life keeping a secret loyalty to one’s inner spiritual self, one is likely to make a few friends among those who are keen-sighted enough to perceive this loyalty, and a few enemies among others who misconstrue one’s actions and misunderstand one’s motives. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
And because one firmly believes in complete payment for all deeds by God sets over humankind, one will remain indifferent without resentment and without hatred to the latter, while silently returning a benign love to one’s friends. Freedom without compassion is demoniacal. Without compassion, freedom can be self-righteous, inhuman, self-centered, and cruel. The less affluent and the rich are both equally free to sleep under the bridges of Paris at night—this illustrates how freedom can turn into cruelty toward the less fortunate. Many of the crusades under the banner of freedom—and not merely the ones we read about in history books—have consisted of requiring the other person to accept one’s own concept of freedom. Thus, they have turned out to be tyrannical. This can be seen in some experiences of psychotherapy. The therapist may be convinced that one’s own form of freedom is the only thing that is good for the client, which then makes for coldness, rigidity, inhumanness in the therapist even though what one does may be technically correct. Mysticism is not concerned with those who depend on traditional forms of worship and current religious creeds for the satisfaction of all their inner needs. It is not for them and could do nothing for them. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
However, those to whom such dependence is mere incidental or mostly provisional may find further nutriment in mystical teachings and practices. Spiritual pride can take different forms. One of them is a studied intellectual independence, a refusal to be committed, the maintenance of a so-called open mind which never comes to a decision. Any good thing overdone becomes a bad thing and although independent judgment and thinking for oneself, if pushed to an extreme it merges into mere pride—egoistic pride. It is only as one gets released from all the self-pictured, self-made, much limited imaginations provided for one by less educated but well-meaning mortals that one can begin to let in the grace-bestowed new understanding of God. The person, young or mature, who has one’s mind set on higher things than pleasures of the moment and is willing to sacrifice a fragment of time, attention, and interest of such studies and such prayers, will find one’s refusal to conform to other people’s ways is repaid in inner growth on the quest. Attainment of sanctity may not be bought at the price of relinquishment of sanity. I once supervised a psychiatrist whose patient, a young woman of nineteen, was giving him a good deal of trouble. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
The patient was constantly being irritated, changing the subject, and in general angry and petulant. I remarked in the supervisory hour that the young woman might be trying to get some sign of affection from the therapist. The psychiatrist in the next session, when the young woman was playing out her petulant drama, interrupted her with “You know, I like you.” The patient stopped talking, paused a moment and then said, “I guess that is what it is all about.” When the therapist reported this to me, I asked, “Do you like her?” And he answered, “No, I really do not.” There flashed before my mind a glimpse of the whole treatment collapsing, for there is no doubt that patients in therapy can sense this presence of lack of compassion, despite all pretenses. Surely enough, she broke off the therapy after a couple of sessions. Compassion on the part of the therapist is the essence of any psychotherapy which deserves the name. When the level is basic as compassion, even if though they may not speak of it, patients will see through any pretense, since they are taught in our culture to pretend that they do not see such negative things. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
If people would learn to accept the authority of the Voice of Inspiration whenever and wherever it spoke to them, they would not need to cramp and confine themselves within the narrowing walls of any sect or section, any cult or organization. The Real Self dwells above time and space, matter and form, inviolable in its perfect liberty. If that be the goal of ideal state, one must sooner or later make a beginning to come into closer relations to it and to grow by the radiance of its light. Therefore one does no wrong in standing aloof from the confinements of discipleship to one particular mortal, and the restrictions of membership in one organized group. No longer is one willing to accede to the World’s demand for one’s loyalty, for one’s conformity, for one’s surrender. One is recovering one’s own individual identity and is determined to keep it. It is to God that one must give one’s ultimate allegiance. If one’s mind is filled with other people’s teachings, it may give no attention to God’s teachings, leading, and intuitions. There is a teaching principle in every mortal which can provide one with whatever spiritual knowledge one needs. However, one must first take suitable measures to evoke it. These include cleansing of body and mind, aspiration of feeling and thought, silencing of intellect and ego. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
As an expression of the divine life-power, one is unique. In the end, one will always have to take one’s guidance from within, that is to say, direct from that life-power which has made one what one is. The independent seeker, uncommitted to any cult, may be a sheep without a fold but one is not necessarily without a shepherd. The inner voice can guide and care for one no less than a mortal in the flesh. A therapist colleague of mine was seeing regularly a patient whose manner was generally bombastic and insolent. One day the therapist’s daughter had been seriously hurt. Nothing was said by the therapist in the session about the accident, but the patient that day, as we heard on the tape, was tender, kind, and completely without his usual bombast, as though he were aware of the therapist’s tragedy—which he could not have known. Does this presuppose some degree of mental telepathy in therapy or some capacity to pick up the tiny cues such as the sound of one’s voice? I believe both are probably true. Dr. Freud was right, in my judgment, in his mortal theory of telepathy, stating that he had learned not to lie in therapy because he hand often enough experienced the fact that the patient would see through the lie n matter how hard Dr. Freud tried to cover it up. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Some refuse to claim unity exists or does not exist. One who has passed though all the trials of immersion will persist in unity after death or one will not persist in it. This refusal, this noble silence, has been explained in two way. Theoretically: because perfection is said to elude the categories of thought and assertion. Practically: because the unveiling of such truths would not assist salvation. In truth both explanations belong together: whoever treats being as the object of an assertion, pulls it down into division, into the antitheses of the It-World—in which there is no salvation. When the view prevails that soul and body are identical, there is no salvation; when the view prevails that the soul is one and the body is another, then also there is no salvation. In the envisaged mystery, even as in lived actuality, neither this it is nor thus it is not prevails, neither being nor not being, but rather thus-and-otherwise, being and not-being, the indissoluble. To confront the undivided mystery undivided, that is the primal condition of salvation. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
We may follow the faithful to the truth of our encounter; going further would involve a betrayal of the actuality that we do not fetch from our own depths but that has been inspired in us and apportioned to us, we know: if this is merely one of the foals, then it cannot be ours; and if it is the goal, then it has been misnamed. And: if it is one of the goals, then the path may lead all the way to it; if it is the goal, then the path merely leads closer to it. Jesus says, “I came into this World, that those who do not see may see.” And the apostle says, “That which we have seen with out eyes, which we have looked upon—we proclaim to you.” Both speak not about the future, but about something they have seen and still see. And they certainly do not feel as do old and new theologians that there is a conflict between seeing and hearing, between seeing and believing. “That which we have seen and heard,” writes the apostle. “Everyone who see the Son and believes in him,” says Jesus. And most important and surprising: That which we have seen with our eyes according to our gospel is the Word, the eternal Word or Logos in whom God speaks, who can be seen through the words of creation and who is visible in the man Jesus. The Word can be seen, this is the highest unity of hearing and seeing, that is the truth which can bridge the Protestant and the Catholic half-truths. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
The technique of treatment must be in yourself for the best therapist is one who has problems one’s self, but is aware of them and is working on them. In psychotherapy one cannot have compassion for another if one never has experienced psychological problems of one’s own. Note that I do not ay the same psychological problems as the clients—that is not necessary. However, the therapist must know what the struggle between self and soul really feels like through one’s own experience. This is why, in interviewing and selecting candidates for two different psychoanalytic training institutes, I would never consider the candidate who was “well adjusted” and who had not endured the wresting with one’s own destiny. I assumed—and I believe rightly so—that such persons would not empathize with and feel compassion for the patient or client. The two greatest therapists I ever knew personally, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and Harry Stack Sullivan, had, individually, almost every problem you can imagine, and both had fantastic insight into the problems of their patents and corresponding compassion. One of the obvious and central functions of the didactic therapy that the trainee is required to go through is to sensitize oneself to the problems within oneself in order to have compassion for the other persons one is to work with. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
The person who lack compassion does not grasp the whole circuit in one’s human relationships. When we speak of the importance of art, poetry, religion, and other right-brain functions, unassisted consciousness must always tend toward hate; not only because it is good common sense to exterminate the other fellow, but for the more profound reason that, seeing only arcs of circuits, the individual is continually surprised and necessarily angered when one’s hardheaded policies return to plague inventor. The inadequacy of a solely ration point of view, for reason is pliable to every sense, and in practice reason is often a matter of truth on this side of the Pyrenees, error on that. It is our destiny to live always in some form of community. Even the frontiersman who counted it a matter of pride that all of twenty miles separated one from one’s nearest neighbor was still bound to that neighbor by a language no matter how rarely one spoke it, by one’s memory, by every thought, ad infinitum. The wolf child is an anomaly and, indeed, is a proof of what I am saying in that one became human only when one exhibited a communal morality. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
The fact that we belong to a community as well as being individual persons requires that we acknowledge this destiny and relate to each other with compassion. Compassion limits our freedom, but it renders freedom human at the same time. As we have seen, the refusal to admit destiny is to cut ourselves off from other. And now we can see its cruelty. Surely it is relevant: If I do not take care of myself, who else will? However, if one takes care only of oneself, one’s freedom can become cruelty to others. Love, of which compassion is the first step, keeps freedom from becoming tyrannical. The universality of evil also makes necessary human mercy, the gentle virtue, as Shakespeare, in The Merchant of Venice, rightly insisted. Mercy not only drops like a soft Spring rain, but it is like forgiveness in that it blessed one who gives and one wo takes, Mercy is the attribute to awe and majesty, wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings; but mercy is above this sceptered sway, it is enthroned in the hearts of kings, it is an attribute to God himself, and Earthly power doth then show likest God’s when mercy seasons justice. Evil will not disappear of shrink away during the night. We will never wake up in the morning to find that evil has vanished from the face of the Earth. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
The purpose of human life is not to avoid mistakes, nor to show an unblemished escutcheon, but to rise to meet the challenges as our destiny reveals itself and to search out in freedom the challenges we wish to engage in. As I read the human tragicomedy, we will go on struggling, avoiding complete nuclear catastrophe by the skin of our teeth, trying to become aware of the pitfalls in ourselves and our society, so that we can make constructive choices whenever possible. In this tragicomedy forgiveness and mercy will season justice and make life bearable with the presence of beauty, the emotion of love, and the occasional experience of joy. Seeing is the most astonishing of our natural powers. It receives the light, the first of all that is created, and as the light does it conquers darkness and chaos. It creates for us an ordered World, things distinguished from each other and from us. Seeing shows us their unique countenance and the larger whole to which they belong. Whenever we see, a piece of the original chaos is transformed into creation. We distinguish, we recognize, we give a name, we know. I have seen—that means in Greek I know. From seeing, all science starts, to seeing it must always return. We want to ask those who have seen with their eyes and we ourselves want to see with our eyes. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
Only the human eye is able to see in this way, to see a World in every small thing and to see a Universe of all things. Therefore the human eye is infinite in reach and irresistible in power. It is the correlate to the light of creation. However, seeing means more than the creation of a World. Where we see we unite with what we see. Seeing is a kind of union. As poetry has described it, we drink colors and forms, forces and expression. They become part of ourselves. They give abundance to the poverty of our loneliness. Even when we are unaware of them they stream into us; but sometimes we notice them and welcome them and desire more of them. Those bewildered by the doctrinal differences between the established or traditional creeds, theologies, liturgies, and customs, yet still seeking some mental satisfaction, finding similar differences between the religious heresies, the non-established or modern cults, have a way out of their problem. This is to apply themselves to direct personal practices which can give them their own experience, their own teaching, from within. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
These standard practices include self-purification and prayer. For this inner work they do not have to join any group or organization, do not have to search for, follow or cling to any guide. The God within them becomes, with faith, patience, persistence, and practice, the light on their path. If one finds the same tenet in ten different religious creeds or metaphysical codes one is glad to get their repeated confirmation. However, in the end one must get it for oneself from within one’s own self—God. It is the firmest base of life. Although it is quite true that each quester must travel the path for oneself, must move on one’s own two feet, this does not mean that one is travelling completely along, or on one’s own. If one has no personal guide to accompany one, God is still there, within one, pulling, drawing, leading, or pointing, if only one can learn how to recognize it. One wants to be faithful to the Glowing Light within, not subjected to or obstructed by an outside authoritarianism. If the Infinite Power is everywhere present, it can surely make itself known to is ardent seeker in any place, even though that place be bereft of masters. “It is by faith that miracles are wrought; and it is by faith that Angels appear and minister unto mortals; wherefore, if these things have ceased wo be unto the children of mortals, for it is because of unbelief, and all is vain,” reports Moroni 7.37. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Heartbreakingly Innocent He Seemed in the Midst of the Crowd–Is there an Empty Space in Your Soul?
Yes, perfect mortal raiment, and yet he seemed all the more supernatural, his face too dazzling, his eyes fathomless and just for a split second glinting as if they were windows to the fires of hell. When you are powerful enough that no one can ever take the knowledge from you against you will, you will help me with what I have to do, but only when you are ready for the knowledge, when you have shown that you truly wish to know. However, a millennium of nights will be yours to see light as no mortal has even see it, to snatch from the distant stars as if you were Prometheus an endless illumination by which to understand all things. I am as one whom the Earth has given back. The spiritual and the carnal came together, and it was the spiritual, I am convinced that survived. Holy Communion it seems to be the case, The Blood of the Children of Christ serving only to being the essence of life itself into my understanding for the spit second in which death occurred. Only the great saints of God are our equals in this spirituality, this confrontation with mystery, this existence of prayer and denial. Yet, we have seen the greatest of our companions vanish, bring destruction upon themselves, go mad. We have witnessed the inevitable dissolution of covens, seen immortality defeat the most perfectly made Children of Darkness, and it seems at times some awesome punishment that it never defeated us. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
The time has come to proclaim to a nobler humanity, the freedom of the spirit, and no longer to have patience with mortal’s tearful regrets for their lost chains. We are miracles or horrors, depending upon how you wish to see us. And when you first know about us, whether it is through the dark blood or promises or visitations, you think anything is possible. However, that is not so. The World closes tight around this miracle soon enough; and you do not hope for other miracles. That is, you become accustomed to the new limits and the limits define everything once again. So they say Aaliyah continues. They all continue somewhere, that is what you want to believe. Not a single one remains in the coven in Rome from those nights when I was taught the ritual; and maybe the coven itself is no longer even there. Years and years have passed since there was any communication from the coven. However, they all exists somewhere, do they not? After all, we cannot die. God knows the future because God is the possessor of all the facts. Freedom is an absolute force…flowing up from a spring of boundless depth. Freedom is the power to create out of nothing, the power of the spirit to create out of itself. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
What is there to know? What is there to give? We are the abandoned of God. And there is no Devil’s Road spinning out before me and there are no bells of hell ringing in my ears. Freedom bandied about with salutes and holiday flags, and the crowds are inspired by a pretty word which the eye deadens and thought enfeebles. What is freedom then? Obviously not merely to send mortals to parliament every three years to sit there dully, wings of thought clipped like inert prisoners behind a sea of prejudices. Freedom, rather, is life’s finest treasure. Only one is free who boldly aspires forward, whose deepest craving is the deed, whose goal is an heroic act of the spirit. And is it anything more than words and sound, if we hail the rosy dawn of freedom, and not understand that its finest fruit can ripen only in the light of the spirit? This was for three centuries, this darkness, this nothingness. The radiant auburn-haired child by the fire could open his mouth again and out would come blackness like ink to cover the World. However, it is just as truth that the human spirit is made possible only by freedom. Without freedom, there is no spirit; and without spirit, no freedom; and without freedom, no self. Mortals are spirit. However, what is spirit? Spirit is the self. However, what is the self? #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
Mortals are a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temperal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity. In our day the word spirit has become less respectable because of its association with ghosts, apparitions, specters, fairies, and other forms of spiritualism. “I have the spirit” is the prelude to speaking in tongues and other practices in fundamentalist churches. It is significant that all of these are endeavors to leave behind our humdrum existence and get free by leaping immediately into a spiritual existence. Crossing the boundaries from material to spiritual existence so easily is a sign of magic rather than spirit. Whatever one my think of these apparitions, I am not talking of this usage of spirit. I use the word spirit in it etymological sense of the nonmaterial, animating principle of human life. Its root is spirare, which also means “breath” and is the root of aspire, aspiration, inspire, and inspiration. Thus, spirit is the breath of life. God breathes the spirit into Adam, as the creation myth puts it, and from then on Adam shares this capacity to pass on the life-giving principle to his own descendants in ways that are still a mystery to us. Spirit is that which gives vivacity, energy, liveliness, courage, and ardor to life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
We speak of the Spartans fighting at Thermopylae with great spirit. When one is high-spirited, one is lively, active in the sense that is meant when we describe the free person as active and not passive. Or one has lost all spirit meaning that the person is in deep despondency and at the point of giving up life entirely. We borrow from the French the phrase “esprit de corps,” implying the confidence that comes from participating in the spirit of everyone else in one’s group. Spirit increases as it is shared, and decreases as one’s freedom is blocked off. Spirit has its psychological roots in each individual’s inner freedom. We see this identity between freedom and spirit as nature commanding every being, and the beings obey. Mortals feel the same impetus, but one realizes one is free to acquiesce or resist; it is above all in the consciousness of this freedom that the spirituality of the soul is shown. Spirit can be powerful—indeed, so powerful that it can transcend natural law. For fate has put a spirit in his heart that drives one madly on without a pause, and whose precipitate and rash behest O’erleaps the joy of Earth and natural laws. The spirit here is described as part of fate, of destiny—or as we would say in contemporary language, it is both born in us and developed as our culture influences us from birth. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
The description of the spirit can be seen in our day in the patients who come for psychotherapy who are workaholics, driven by ambition, who not only push themselves into a heart attack, but also miss what joys of Earth en route. Spirit is also an epistemological capacity: one can see into things, get insights, perceive things that were covered before. This capacity is partially intuition. Spirit is a special perspicacity, a keenness, a lucidity. One seems to exist on a higher level; one transcends the mundane and the boundaries of the mundane. I hope you prosper. I wonder if any of you, with all your Dark Ways and Dark Rituals, have ever really wanted this nightmare that we all share. Many have been drawn into it as I have, really. And we are all Children of Darkness now, for better or worse. However, be wise in what you do here. Be clever and keep your hiding place safe. You put terror into their hearts. The language of spirit is image, symbol, metaphor, myth; and these also comprise the language of freedom. This is a language that points toward wholeness; a half image, for example, is still a whole image. Each one of these terms, whether it be image, symbol, metaphor, or myth, deals wit the whole circuit. This points toward the totality of the event. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
Hence, these terms in the language of spirit deal with quality, which by its very nature is a wholeness, rather than quantity, which by its very nature is a wholeness, rather than quantity, which by its very nature is partial. We speak, for example, of a painting as being sensitive, powerful, communicating a richness of color to us—all terms that deal with qualities. The quantity of a painting or piece of music—say, the size of the canvas of Picasso or the number of notes in a concerto—is silly when we are talking of works of art. This whole circuit indicates that our logical left-brain thinking deals in arcs—for instance, parts of the circuit rather than the whole. One is thus confined, limited, unfree as one sees only part of the reality one is looking at. This confinement is, of course, necessary in empirical thinking. However, when freedom and the spirit enter our discourse, we find ourselves bursting out of these limits and dealing with a symbol of the whole, the universality of a myth, or a metaphor which stands for the totality. This is why we insists on the inclusion of right-brain thinking as part of our description and why we put so much emphasis on the contests in which one does one’s thinking. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Mere purposive rationality unassisted by such phenomena as art, religion, dream, and the like, is necessarily pathogenic and destructive of life; and its virulence springs specifically from the circumstances that life depends upon interlocking circuit of contingency, while consciousness can see only such short arcs of such circuits as human purpose may direct. That is the sort of World we live in—a World of circuits structures—and love can survive only if wisdom [for instance, a sense of recognition of the fact of circuity] has an effective voice. I curse you. Remember that when your dark children strike out at you, when they rise up against you. Remember me. I showed you my power to understand. You made pictures. And rather childish pictures. You have done this all along. And here, when there is a respite in the struggle, what do you do but try to sow dissension between me and my people. The things I have spoken here are true. The individual need to escape from rigid formalism into intellectual freedom comes only to a minority. However, it is from this minority that the real truth-seekers emerge. Taking no theoretical position, not committed to any beliefs, not wearing any labels, not putting oneself in any categories, the philosophical student starts one’s search for truth in intellectual freedom and ends it in personal inner freedom. One is then what one is. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
The independent self-reliant attitude of Saint Paul set an example which, had it been followed by succeeding generations, might have changed the history of one’s religion. One refused money gifts and followed one’s craft of tent-making throughout one’s wide travels. To become a follower of this quest there is no master or organization whose permission one must ask: one is free to do so just so far as one’s aspiration and capacity permit one to. Has one refused to submit to one’s own ego only to submit to society’s? Shall one conform to the World and its ways out of fear of the World’s opinion of one? Is one to have courage enough to reject one’s neighbour’s religious ideas but not to resist one’s neighbour’s foolish habits? If one cannot find in society or surroundings the standards which suit one’s character, then one must find one’s own. It is this that makes one a quester. A mortal must stay in one’s own orbit and take one’s directives from within. If through fear of loneliness, intimidation, or suggestion, one joins the marching groups of one’s time, one will not reach one’s best. Those who said it—the Church and its servants in all periods—made it a matter of law and tradition, of habit and convention. They made it into something we believe we know and have tried to follow. It does not cut any more into our ordinary World. It has become part of our ordinary World. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
Christianity, as it has become in its organized and institutionalized state, presents the good citizen as its model. However, as long as society is itself ignorant of where it is going wrong in its appraisal of the nature of mortals and mesmerized by institution prestige while neglectful of inner light, so long ought its demand for conformity to be treated with cold reserve will be asserted. So long as so many mortals live in error or compromise with wrong, merely because both have been established by tradition or custom, so long must a few among them do the greater and nobler thing by following a bold nonconformity. Without making any fuss and avoiding unnecessary friction, one my purse one’s independent path and choose one’s own goals. The average, the normal, is not to be taken as the true standard. One must walk at one’s own pace, not society’s hasty trot. One must choose one’s own road, not the most trodden one. The way of life which one’s neighbours follow does not suit one, so one must alter it. One hold the desire to fashion oneself creatively into something better than one is at present, something nobler, wiser, and more perceptive. However, they hold no such desire, are content with static existence. One must be willing and even determined to think and feel differently from those around one. How can it be otherwise when one’s goal is different from theirs, too? #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
So far as a convention is reasonable and helpful, one will respect it, but when it becomes a hollow formality or stuffy pomposity, one will not. Like the prophets with whom Jeremiah fights in our text, the ministers of the word have ceased to ask, to cry for, a word from the Lord. They claim to have it as their possession, and since the Word of God can never be a possession, the words they say are not a word from the Lord. We have received it. However, as it has been distorted in the mouths of the preachers, so it has been resisted in the ears of the listeners, that is, in all of us. We hear it, but we cannot perceive it. As Christians we do not reject it, but it has lost its voice, that voice with which Jahweh poke into the hearts of the prophets, that voice with which the Spirit spoke into the hearts of the disciples. We hear the words which have been said before. However, we do not feel that they speak to our situation, and out of the depth of our situation. They may even produce torturing doubts and drive us to task passionately for a word from the Lord against what we have received as the Word of God, in the Bible, and Church. For there is no word from the Lord except the word which is spoke now and is spoken by us? There is only one answer: By keeping ourselves open when it comes to us! This is not easy. We try to resist it, and if it is too strong for us we try to falsify it. We may be in a situation out of which we cannot extricate ourselves. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
A great cycle has ended, and even years ago one has felt it closing without understanding it was a cycle at all. So the word from the Lord comes as a word of judgment and we cannot take it. Or the word which comes to us requests a radical change in our ways of life and thought. However, this we cannot achieve, and we back into our habits of good and evil, of right and wrong. Or we are in doubt and guilt and despair, and the word comes to us and tells us that we can say yes to ourselves because an eternal yes has been said to us and of us. However, we resist the word which demands of us the courage to say yes to ourselves because we are in love with out doubt and out guilt and our despair. We go into the fire or we go into the legend. Some choose to memorize the laws, perfect their performance of the ceremonial incantations, the rituals, and the prayers. Some see the greatest Sabbats one has ever been witness to. And they learn the most powerful and skillful and beautiful beings one is ever to know. Many learn so well that one has become a missionary sent out to gather the vagrant Children of Darkness into covens, and guide others in the performance of the Sabbat, and the workings of the Dark Trick when the World and the flesh of the Devil call for it to be done. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
In Spain and in Germany and in France, I had taught the Dark blessings and Dark Rituals, and I had known savage and tenacious Children of Darkness, and dim flames had flared in me in their company and in those moments when the coven surrounded me, comforted by me, deriving its unity from my strength. I had learned to summon those who truly wished to die. Dazzling visions I have, if they should want to receive, but I did not move towards them nor even close my arms around them. Drawn inexorably towards me, it was they who embraced me. It seemed to me in the best of these moments my way was profoundly spiritual, uncontaminated by the appetites and confusion that made up the World, despite the carnal rapture. It is not easy to keep oneself open for a word from the Lord. And nobody can make it easier for us by giving us the direction in which to listen. No fixed place can be named, either in our religious tradition or in our cultural creations, or in the depth of our souls. However, for this very reason, no place is excluded from communicating to us a word from the Lord. It is always present and tries always to be perceived by us. It is like the air, surrounding us, omnipresent, trying to enter every space. It is the empty space in our souls into which it tries to enter here and now. So the last question is: Is there any empty space in your soul? #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
Without a soul opened for it, no word from the Lord can be received. Listening with an open soul, keeping an empty space in our inner life, sharpening our spiritual hearing: this is the only thing we can do. However, this is much. And blessed are those whose minds and hearts are open. Do devils love each other? Do they walk arm in arm in hell saying, “Ah, you are my friend, how I love you,” tings like that to each other? It was a rather detached intellectual question I was asking, as I did not believe in hell. However, it was a matter of a concept of evil, was it not? All the creatures in hell are supposed to hate one another, as all the saved hate the damned, without reservation. I had known that all my life. It had terrified me as a child, the idea that I might go to Heaven and my neighbour might go to hell and that I should hate her. I could not hate her. And what if we were in hell together? I now know, whether I believe in hell or not, that we can love people who dedicate themselves to evil, that in being dedicated to evil, one does not cease to love. Or so it seemed for that brief instant. However, do not start crying again. I cannot abide all this crying. So far conformity connotes pretense and insincerity and timid blind imitation, one is not one to favour it; but so far as it connotes decency in behaviour, consideration for others, and experience-tested proven standards, one is for it. One must accept the fact that one is not, and does not want to be, like the majority of people. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
I speak the truth and you know. And what you will never know is the full depth of each other’s hatreds and resentments. Or suffering. Or love. The superior person always has a choice facing one: is one to live in that way others live in order to please them or is one to live in the way one’s own standards call for? If one lets them pull one down one loses what has taken one many, many years to develop. Somewhere at some point one must take one’s stand, must plant one’s feet and refuse to budge any farther. The ideal World will be one in which the seeker can live without becoming Worldly, where one can fulfill one’s social obligations without becoming a slave to social conventions. The philosopher’s brake defiance of stuffy herd thought has a beneficial spirit behind it and not a negative one. When mortals falls away from the false standards set by materialism, one falls into conflict with the crippling conventions of one’s time. Therefore, let us keep open our ears and let us keep open our hearts, and ask with great seriousness and great passion: Is there a word from the Lord, a word for me, here and now, a word for our World in this moment? It is there, it tries to come to you. Keep open for it! Who can love us, you and I, as we can love each other? #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
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Oh Brave New World that Has Such Robots in it?
Hell’s Bell ringing, my secret music. However, another sound was coming to me. I knew it as I went up the stairs. And I marveled at its power to reach me. It was like a song arching over an immense distance, low and sweet. Once years ago, I had heard a young farm boy singing as he walked along the high road out of Cresleigh Rocklin Trials to the north. He had not known anyone was listening. He had thought himself alone in the open country, and his voice had a private power and purity that gave it unearthly beauty. Never mind the words of his song. This was the voice that was calling to me now. The lone voice, rising over the miles that separated us to gather all sounds into itself. Hubris in psychology is the refusal to acknowledge destiny. Some believe that psychology has no limits at all. There are a number of people who are crying to be told that freedom is an illusion and they need worry about it no longer. Some capitalize with a vengeance on the widespread feelings of powerlessness and helplessness, which are the underlying anxiety of our time; and these individuals insure others that personal responsibility is demode and that they do not need to trouble their consciousness—if they have any left—about it. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Many in behavioral sciences believe that we must develop a technology of behavior, but that our belief in freedom and human dignity stands in the way. It is thought that this new technology will not solve our problems, however unit is replaces traditional prescientific views, and these are strongly entrenched. Freedom and dignity illustrate the difficulty. They are the possessions of the autonomous mortal of traditional theory, and they are essential to practices in which a person is held responsible for one’s conduct and given credit for one’s achievements. A scientific analysis shifts both the responsibility and the achievement to the environment. We would be the last to argue that the environment does not influence—to a considerable extent—the development of the person. Indeed, I would argue that the environment has an even more varied effect than most experts admit: anyone in psychoanalysis knows that the environment is important even on unconscious levels and in dreams. Any viewpoint that leaves out the environment—like the extreme forms of the human-potential movement, where it is argued that only the inner potentials are significant—is equally wrong. However, there are other points related to responsibility and freedom that concern us here. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
When people attack the traditional belief that a mortal can be held responsible for what one does, a scientific analysis shifts the credits as well as the blame to the environment. When we place all the blame for human behavior on the environment and try to design better environments as the only remedy to solve society’s problems, we forget that we also have methods to design better mortals. Now we would all agree that ideally all citizens should strive and it is their responsibility to correct the flaws in the environment, say, of school children, the less affluent, and those with special needs. Indeed, there are times we should proceed to the design of better environments by outright uniting and standing against the cruel and unfair laws in our society. However, what, pray tell, is the environment composed of except other human beings like you and me? And how can an environment be responsible? True, when a society is formed, there develops a group force which makes for conformism; to keep people in line is one of the functions of the group, as we have said. However, if we surrender our individual responsibility, what leverage, what power, do we have against the force of the group? #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Some people believe that the environment is some holy form made in Heaven and superimposed by some god or demigod upon us mortals. Completely absent is the wisdom that we have met the enemy and it is us. Autonomous mortals possess miraculous powers. A scientific analysis of behavior dispossesses autonomous mortals and turns the control one has been said to exert over to the environment. One is henceforth to be controlled by the World around one, and in large part by other mortals. However, we know that wise use of agency keeps our choices open and improves our ability to choose correctly. True freedom comes from choosing disobedience. While we are free to choose our course of action, we are not free to choose the consequences. Whether for good or bad, consequences follow as a natural result of the choices we make. “Verily I say, mortals should be anxiously engaged in a good cause, and do many things of their own free will, and bring to pass much righteousness,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 58.27. When we use the term moral agency, we are appropriately emphasizing the accountability that is an essential part of the divine gift of agency. We are moral beings and agents unto ourselves, freed to choose but also responsible for our choices. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Again, what kind of psychoengineering is this which turns the control over to the environment, holds that the World around us does the controlling, and this consist largely of other mortals? This seems to me to lack the logic that we have a right to expect of engineers of behavior. It sounds like the following lines from Goethe “For each, incompetent to rule one’s own internal self, is all too fain to sway one’s neighbor’s will, even as one’s haughty mind inclines.” When it comes to psychoengineering, there is a fundamental confusion of values in the system: toward whose values is the environment going to be changed? Who are the other people who will do the controlling? The problem is that either alternative—to blame the environment for everything or to locate everything within oneself as the human-potential movement used to do—is wrong. Both deny freedom. However, human beings have another possibility: they can choose when and whether they are to be acted upon or are to do the acting. When I fly in a plane, I let myself be acted upon. I nap a little; I look out the window and daydream. The pilot entirely controls the success or failure of my flight. When I get off the plane, however, to make a speech at a college or university, I choose the opposite alternative. I seek to persuade the audience; I want to get my viewpoint across. I am now assumedly the controller, I am on a deeper level of freedom—the freedom of being. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
One of the saddest things about psychology today is that so many of its better minds are forced to cope with the cant, error and falsehood generated by the discipline itself. The problem is that so many people are on the edge of panic these days and yearn for some rationalization for dumping their responsibility someplace outside themselves. Since it promises a way out and reinforces their desire to escape from a World that so baffles them, such a simplistic gospel of the environment being in control of human behavior greatly appeals to many. The gospel is especially seductive to those against sin: they oppose the things that ought to be opposed, such as aversive control and destructive punishment. Thus, people dump their environment the very responsibility that would be needed if they are effectively to influence their environment. What about the high-school student who finds looming up before one problems that one cannot possibly solve in the political and economic World, who is struggling with drugs and alcoholism and all the conflicts that occur in adolescence? Then one hears that one has no responsibility, that the environment will take over, that an impersonal science of engineering should take the blame and the credit. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
In a situation where someone is unaware of their personal responsibility not to sin and their free will, when they are mislead to believe that the environment is in control of their and they are not morally at fault for anything they do, how is one going to experience oneself and one’s life? One does not need to blame psychologist for the problems of juvenile delinquency like drugs, crimes, violence. No single mortal can be expected to answer for the exigencies of history, to state the obvious. However, if they are continually told that they are powerless and all in influence is exercised by the environment, young people are scarcely going to take responsibility for their actions or lives. It is surprising, then, that they resign from life, become the uncommitted, go to such films as A Clockwork Orange, mumbling the while a paraphrase from Shakespeare: Oh brave new World that has such robots in it? When people talk about cultural technology, they also talk about the greater happiness of humankind as the goal of one’s engineering. If one can turn stones into a delicious meal, humankind will run after thee like a flock, grateful and obedient, though forever trembling, lest thou withdraw thy hand and deny them the delicious cuisine, and they are left with nothing to consume. When there is no crime, there is no sin. Therefore when we shift environment to the environment, people do not need incarceration, but rather treatment, rehabilitation. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
If we recognize obedience as a cardinal virtue (prudence, the ability to discern the appropriate course of action to be taken in a given situation at the appropriate time), mortals seeks not so much of God as the miraculous, and comes forth with one’s triumvirate, miracle, mystery and authority. Psychology likewise presents that miracle and authority and the concepts of science, as they are believed to be rational and clear. However, in psychology, people seem to be unaware that scientific concepts are the most miraculous and mysterious of all concepts of our age. We cannot regard freedom as the central enemy, as that is an expression of fear of freedom, which will cause people to flee from freedom and to rationalize and justify that flight and turn control of their lives over to the government. Freedom is not an illusion. Much of our actions seem to be freely chosen and performed, but one could easily demonstrate that all our behavior is the result of previous conditioning. Some people believe that behaviorism already has control of 80 percent of all the Psychology Departments in the country and will soon have control of all of them. And many in psychology are taught to join with the ideas of behaviorist or they will be buried and forgotten. However, many people still believe that if we put our mind to it, there is nothing we cannot do. So this demonstrates the people still understand that they have free will. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
The people who argue freedom is an illusion usually have already given up their own freedom in their very strict and rigid doctrines, but may they are doing this to get people to surrender control of their lives to the government, which would make it easier to control the World. People become more helpless the more they doubt their own truth and get closer to the point of collapse. This is a flight from destiny and an escape from the dizziness of anxiety in freedom. Behaviorism tends to dominate when we are faced with vast social problems such as nuclear fission, concentration camps, the aftermath of World War and the agonizing endurance of a recession, when inflation and unemployment occur simultaneously, when there is an energy crisis, and so on endlessly. When society is facing a distraught age, behaviorism offers a simple gospel, promising escape from responsibility, from confusion, and especially from such difficult problems as freedom. Certainty is in the saddle, even though it is a false certainty. In such behaviorism there is no sense of the freedom of uncertainty. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
This alone can explain why there is such a great segment of our population who not only succumbs to behaviorist viewpoints, especially the democratic part because they rely on more government resources and advocate removing right as they do not want to be held responsible for their behavior by pushing for things like gun control, soda tax. I believe that this flight from destiny includes a frank refusal to let oneself see any of the aspects of life—such as responsibility, limits in science, and so on—that require us to understand our destiny. A vicious circle gets started in any strict and rigid doctrines. The person’s security is bolstered by the strict and rigid doctrines, and the strict and rigid doctrines are, in turn, reinforced by the security. True anxiety can be avoided by such strict and rigid doctrines, but there are clear penalties. The person reinforces the stockade around oneself and one’s ideas; one blocks out the anxiety by cutting off one’s possibility and one’s maneuverability. The anxiety is escaped, but the person is a prisoner in one’s own stockade. This, by definition, is the loss of freedom. And the constant expansion that characterizes freedom is blocked. If we were to peel off the defensive cover of the strict and rigid doctrines, we would almost always find a trembling person imprisoned with the walls one one’s self has created. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Whether scientist or religious, the person who adheres to strict and rigid doctrines is one who fear secretly that one must crystallize one’s beliefs or they will evaporate. One is afraid that any pause would be thrown into panic. One fear that one’s truth will disappear unless one puts a firm stockage around it. Some truths we embody and do not know, which covers a great deal of experience, and it totally ignore by people who are not willing to expand their consciousness. One knows everything has, has an answer for everything; no question can make one ponder. Such persons are boring to others precisely because there is no freedom in what they are saying or standing for. In extreme forms and in clinical terms such a person becomes the compulsive-obsessional. All this has great bearing upon freedom. Freedom is the capacity to increase our theories, to look about ourselves to find more possibilities. Freedom means that we can see many different forms of truth, some from the West and others from the East, some from our technology and others from intuition. They very existence of theories and our dependence upon them are on the side of freedom. Then we achieve the mark of the mature intelligence, and we can hold in the mind two opposing thoughts without undermining either one of them. So the inescapable uncertainty of human life is accepted as our destiny from which we do not flee. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
The shadows cast upon the wall in Plato’s legend of the cave are one degree removed from reality. However, if we know they are shadows, we are saved from the shackles of strict and rigid doctrines. And knowing we live in a cave can also turn our imaginations loose in new freedom. This confrontation with destiny releases us to experience a sea change in the realm of possibility. We can find new forms, new ways of relating to each other, new styles of life. The soul senses of the mortal who is in one’s relationship to society experiences the disappointment of the change into freedom, and aspires beyond conditions and barriers to reach the eternal soul. When we seek something in truth, there is God-seeking because we go where we can find him. However, even if we gain all the wisdom of solitude and the power of concentration, if we leave our life’s way, we will miss God. It is rather as if a mortal went out of one’s way and merely wised that it might be the way; one’s aspiration find expression in the strength of one’s wish. Every encounter is a way station that grants one a view of fulfillment; in each one thus fails to share, and yet also does share, in the one because one is ready. Ready, not seeking, one goes one’s way; this gives one the serenity toward all things and the touch that helps them. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
However, once one has found, one’s heart does not turn away from them although one now encounters everything in the one. One blesses all the cells that have sheltered one as well as all those where he will still put up. For this finding is not an end of the way but only its eternal center. It is a finding without seeking; a discovery of what is most original and the origin. The soul sense that cannot be satiated until in finds the infinite soul sensed its presence from the beginning; this presence merely had to become wholly actual for it out of the actuality of the consecrated life of the World. It is not as if God could be inferred from anything—say, from nature as its cause, or from history as its helmsman, or perhaps from the subject as the self that thinks itself through it. It is not as if something else were given and this were then deduced from it. This is what confronts us immediately and first and always, and legitimately it can only be addressed, not asserted. The essential element in our relation to God has been sought in a feeling that has been called a feeling of dependence or, more recently, in attempt to be more precise, creature-feeling. While the insistence on this element and its definition are right, the one-sided emphasis on this fact lead to a misunderstanding of the character of the perfect relationship. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
My God—What Have We Done?
Torches blazed ahead, and over a chorus of mourful wails, there came other cries, distant but filled with pain. Yet something beyond these puzzling cries had caught my attention. Amid all the foulness, I sensed a mortal was near. It was Nicolas and he was alive and I could hear him, the warm, vulnerable current of his thoughts mingled with his scent. And something was terribly wrong with his thoughts. They were chaos. Also, when I exercised my freedom and vice versa the anxiety engulfed me like a tidal wave. The anxiety came in the person of this figure whom I identified as my enemy-friend, a kind of figurative devil. It is the anxiety that comes, in varying intensity, whenever one leaps into the field of new possibilities, whenever one moves into the area of new idea or new compositions in music or a new style in art. It comes after such subconscious thoughts as “Ah, there is a new vision—nobody ever painted a scene like this before.” Then there comes the feeling “Do I want to venture out so far?” And I remind myself of all the dangers in venturing into that no man’s land. In such situations the person finds oneself adjuring oneself to calm down, not to get too excited, when getting excited in the sense of becoming inspired is exactly what, on the deepest level, one wants. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Freedom and anxiety are two sides of the coin—there is never one without the other. The anxiety is part and parcel of the vision or an idea that, in the particular form it comes to us, no one has ever thought of before. This anxiety—or dread, if we wish to translate angst that way—is a function of the freedom of imagination we must exercise in order to get any idea of significance. The dread comes with the new possibility and the risk that this leap requires. We might, like the scientists who split the atom, break through into a new land, where the usual mooring places by which we have oriented ourselves no longer even exist. Hence, the sense of alienation and bewilderment—and even the experience of intense human aloneness—that such a breakthrough brings in its train. I am told that when the scientists stood behind their glass barrier near Los Alamos and saw the first atomic explosion, the faces of a number of them turned white. One cried aloud, “My God, what have we done?” There is a rational explanation for this anxiety. We must keep in mind that the anxiety comes not from the possibility that the new idea or discovery might be wrong and useless (then it can simply be discarded), but from the possibility that it might be true, as it was, for example, with atomic fission or with Armin van Buuren’s new idea about musical harmonies. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Then one’s colleagues, the professors at one’s university, will be jolted, will be required to change their lecture notes because the possibility that there are new truths has been proven to be correct. This causes upset, which was very great indeed with the splitting of the atom. Or if one is a Nicolas Copernicus with new theory that the Earth moves around the Sun, or a Karl Marx with a radically new approach to the economic life of humankind, the uproar that accompanies the shaking of the foundations will be that much more catastrophic. Although the examples above are of great mortals, we are illustrating something that we all experience, though to a lesser degree. When he or she exercises the freedom to move out into the real World of possibility, every human being experiences this anxiety. Only by not venturing—that is, by surrendering our freedom, we can escape the anxiety. I am convinced that many people never become aware of their most creative ideas since their inspirations are blocked off by this anxiety before the ideas even reach the level of consciousness. A pressure toward conformism infuses every society. One function of any group or social system is to preserve homeostasis, to keep people in their usual positions. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The danger of freedom to the group is possessed exactly at that point: that the nonconformist will upset the homeostasis, will use one’s freedom to destroy the tired and true ways. Sokratis was condemned to drink hemlock because, so the good citizens of Athens believed, he taught false daimones (moral philosophy that defines right action as that which lead to the well-being of the individual, thus holding good behavior as an essential value) to the youth of Athens. Jesus was crucified because he upset the accepted religion of his day. Joan of Arc heard voices and was burned at the stake. Aaliyah choose the material and images she liked best and perished in a mysterious plane crash. These extreme examples are of person whose idea later become the cornerstones of our civilization. However, the fact only confirms my point. The persons whose insights are too disturbing, who bring too much of the anxiety that accompanies freedom, are put to death by their own generation, which suffers the threat caused by the Earthquake of the news ideas. However, when their ideas are crystallized into the strict and rigid doctrines of the new age and there is no chance of the dead figures rising from their silent graves to disturb the peace a new, they are worshipped by subsequent generations. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
The prototype of the person who produces something new is found in Prometheus, who created fire—or, as the myth presents it, stole it from the gods—and gave it to humankind as the beginning of human civilization. No one envies his punishment in being chained to a mountainside, where an eagle would eat away at his liver all day. At night, the liver would grow back, and the same grisly process would begin all over again the next day. This accompanies his great act of defiance, which was one aspect of Prometheus’ personal freedom. The denying of the dizziness of freedom is shown in the phrase pure spontaneity. For no one can seek that without succumbing to the dreadful implications of freedom. Even John Lilly, in his experiencing pure spontaneity in one’s stimulus-free tank, describes the great dangers therein, and one’s own great anxiety in one’s experience hovering on the edge of nonbeing, death. One may envy one’s colleagues who claim to exist in pure spontaneity and who seem to be on a perpetual high. Yes, we may envy them, but we do not love them for that. We love them for their vulnerability—which means their accepting and owning the dizziness of their freedom, their destiny which always stalks their freedom. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The legend of Icarus presents a picture of a young man refusing to accept the dizziness, or the anxiety, of freedom. Icarus that day must have felt a sense of great adventure—to be the first person who could sail high and taste the ecstasy, the sheer freedom from the bonds of the Earth, with no limits at all. For this one afternoon he was completely subject, not limited even by the distant reaches of the sky. One could order one’s Universe as one wished, could live out one’s whim and desire born in one’s own imagination. Here, indeed, was pure spontaneity. No longer part of the World, no longer subject to the laws of Earth or its destiny or the requirements of community. What exhilaration there must have been in the young man’s heart! A great dream comes true, an experience of complete freedom, pure spontaneity at last. One needs only the self-preoccupation, the refusal to consider compromise. He is like humanists of previous decades who insisted that there was no evil they need bother to consider. Human kind had done such great things in the past; why could we not overcome any and all difficulties in the future? Icarus remained as spontaneous as a child and burst into the sea to drown not as a young man, but as a child. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
When they hear these truths concerning the inward life and Universal laws, how sad, how foolish that so many people turn their heads away in indifference, in apathy, and in inertia! They believe that, even if there were any truth in them, these ideas are only for a handful of dreamers, for an esoteric cult with nothing better to do with its times and thought than to entertain them. There does not seem to be any point of contact between these ideas and their own lives, no applicability to their personal selves, and hence, no importance in them at all. How gross this error, how great this blindness! The mystic’s knowledge is full of significance for every other mortal. The mystic’s discoveries are full of value for one. Mortal’s hope for a happier existence and need of faith in Universal meaning has led one to try so many wrong turnings which brought one only father from them, that it is understandable why cynicism or indifferentism should claim so many votaries. However, this is not yet the end result. The few who today have found both hope and need adequately satisfied are presages of what must happen to the others. Even those mortals who do not believe in God are unknowingly seeking to find him or waiting for him. Every mortal has within one this divine possibility. However, if one refuses to believe it, or puts one’s faith in a hard materialism, or fails to seek for it, it will remain only latent. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
It is the thought of attaining happiness in some way which induces mortals to commit most crimes, just as it is the thought of attaining truth which induces them to hold the most materialistic beliefs. Although they see both happiness and truth from a wrong angle and so are given this deceptive result, still the essential motivation of their lives is the same as that of the questers. The segregation in thought of a spiritual elite as being the only seekers is valid only for a practical view, not for an ultimate one. Like people who are visually impaired, they seek the unseen. Like mystics they want the unknow centre of their being, but the conscious mind does not yet share in this desire. Everything else they try must in the end fail them, since life itself fails them at death. Those who do not choose to tread the path of mysticism need not therefore tread the path of mysticism need not therefore tread the path of misunderstanding it. This wisdom is latent in the bad as well as the good mortal. Any moral condition will suffice as a starting point. Jesus spoke to sinners as freely as to those of better character. One’s words were not wasted as the sequence showed. Even to those who had committed great crimes, as they as they repent and understand what repentance entails, Jesus promised salvation. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Was it for the sake of a small withdrawn spiritual elite that Jesus walked in Galilees, that Buddha wandered afoot across India, that Sokratis frequented the Agora in Athens? There is hope for all, benediction for the poor and the rich, the good and the bad, for every mortal may come into this great light. However—some mortals may come more easily, more quickly, while others may drag their way. “If anyone among you thinks that one is wise in this age, let one become a fool that one may become wise. For the wisdom of this World is folly with God,” reports 1 Corinthians 3.18-19. When a speaker in a morning chapel service used this as his text, I got a written question in class: “What do you think about this morning’s sermon?” And this was the implication: How can philosophy stand in view of Paul’s deprecating words? I want to answer by trying to interpret what I believe Paul means, not only in the passage above but in the whole context. At the end of his discussion he gives the key by saying: Let no one boast of mortals. For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the World or life or death or the present of the future, all are yours; and you are Christ’s and Christ is God’s. (I Corinthians 3.21-23.) #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Paul has asked, “Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the World?” And now he exclaims, “World and life and Apollos are yours.” This means that the wisdom of the World is ours also. How could it be otherwise? We could not even read Paul’s words without the wisdom of the World which enables us to understand ancient texts, which gives us the technical tool to spread the Christian message all over the Earth, which produces and sustains the political and educational and artistic institutions which serve and protect the Church. All this is ours. And even the different theologies are ours: the more dialectical one of Paul, the more ritualistic one of Peter, the more apologetic one of Apollos. There is only one type of theology which Paul dislikes—that which wants to monopolize the Christ and call itself the party of Christ. For each of these theologies wisdom of the World is needed; scribes are needed, debaters are needed, philosophers are needed, a language is needed to which everybody contributes. It is impossible to deny all this. However, it is possible to discredit through loose talk what one cannot avoid using at the same time. There is a deep dishonesty in the accusation against the use of historical research and philosophical thought in theology. In daily life one calls somebody dishonest who bring defamation upon those whom one uses. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
We should not commit this dishonesty in our theological work. And we cannot escape using the wisdom of this World. If we say “let us use a little of it, but not much in order to escape the dangers implied in it, this is no escape. This is certainly not what Paul means. The whole World is yours, he says, the whole life, present and future, not parts of it. These important words speak of scientific knowledge and its passion, artistic beauty and its excitement, politics and their use of power, eating and drinking and their joy, pleasures of the flesh and its ecstasy, family life and its warmth and friendship with its intimacy, justice with its charity, nature with its might and restfulness, the mortal-made World above nature, the technical World and its fascination, philosophy with its humility—daring only to call itself love of wisdom—and its profundity—daring to ask ultimate questions. In all of these things is wisdom of this World and power of this World and all these things are ours. They belong to us and we belong to them; we create them and they fulfill us. However, and this “but” of Paul’s is not one of those prepositions in which everything is taken back that was given before. The great preposition to the World which is ours gives both the foundation and the limit of the World that is ours: “And you are Christ’s,” namely, that Christ whose Cross is foolishness and weakness to the wisdom of the World. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
The wisdom of this World in all its forms cannot know God, and the power of this World with all its means cannot reach God. If they try it, they produce idolatry and are revealed in their foolishness which is the foolishness of idolatry. No finite being can attain the infinite without being broken as one who represented the World, and its wisdom and its power, was on the Cross. This is the foolishness and the weakness of the Cross which is ultimate wisdom and which is the reason that Christ is not another bearer of wisdom and power of this World but that he is God’s. The Cross makes him God’s. And out of this foolishness we win the wisdom to use what is our, the wisdom of the World, even philosophy. If it be unbroken, it controls us. If it be broken, it is ours. “Broken” does not mean reduced or emaciated or controlled, but it means undercut in its idolatic claim. Paul’s courage in affirming everything given, one’s openness towards the World, his sovereignty towards life should put to shame each of us as well as all our Churches. We are afraid to accept what is given to us: we are compulsive self-seclusion towards our World, we try to escape life instead of controlling it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
We do not behave as if everything were ours. And the Churches do so even less. The reason for this is that we and out Churches do not know as Paul did what it means to be Christ’s and because of beings Christ’s, to be God’s. Those who feel no call to develop themselves spiritually, no obligation to follow the quest, are nevertheless unwittingly doing both. Only, they are doing so at so sow and imperceptible a pace that they do not recognize the activity and the moment. All the experience of life are in the end intended to induce us to seek wholeheartedly for God. That is, to lead us to the very portal of the Quest. The vision of the tree of life shows us how the effects of casualness can lead us away from the covenant path. Consider that the rod of iron and the strait and narrow path, or the covenant path, led directly to the tree of lie, where all the blessings provided by our Savior and his Atonement are available to the faithful. If we are not careful in living our covenants with exactness, our casual efforts may eventually lead us into forbidden paths or to join with those who have already entered the great and spacious building. If not careful, we may even drown in the depths of a filthy river. “The Spirit of Christ is given to every mortal, that one may know good from evil and is sent forth by the power and gift of Christ; wherefore ye may know with a perfect know it is of God,” reports Moroni 7.16. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Blessed are the Eyes Which See the things that We See–We Can Exercise Our Freedom Even Against Destiny!
I was too anxious and miserable to play with them! I was too dazed. I shouted the old questions, “Who are you, speak to me!” The glass panes rattled in the nearby windows. Mortals stirred in their little chambers. There was no cemetery here. “Answer me, you pack of cowards. Speak if you have a voice or once and for all get away from me!” And then I knew, though how I knew, I cannot tell you, that they could hear me and they could answer me, if they chose. And I knew that what I had always heard was the irrepressible evidence of their proximity and their intensity, which they could not disguise. However, their thoughts they could cloak and they had. I mean, they had intellect, and they had words. I let out a long low breath. I was stung by their silence, but I was stung a thousand times more by what had just happened, and as I had done so many times in the past, I turned my back on them. The length of time of the pause is, in principle, irrelevant. When we look at what actually happens in people’s experience, we note that some pauses can be infinitesimally small. When I am giving a lecture, for example, I select one word rather than another in a pause that lasts for only a millisecond. In this pause a number of possible terms flash before my mind’s eye. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
If I want to say the noise of loud, I may consider in this fraction of a second such words as deafening, startling, or overwhelming. Out of these I select one. All this happens so rapidly—strictly speaking, on the preconscious level—that I am aware of it only when I stop to think about it afterward. Note in this last sentence I say “stop to think.: This habitual phrase is another proof of the importance of pause. There is a necessity of stopping to think—in other words, pausing is essential to the process of reflection. However, something else, even more interesting, occurs in those small, multitudinous pauses as one speaks. This is the time when I “listen” to the audience, when the audience influences me, when I “hear” its reaction and ask silently, What connotations are they taking from my words? For any experienced lecturer the blank spaces that constitute the pauses between the words and sentences is the time of openness to the audience. At such times I find myself noting: There someone seems puzzled; here someone listens by tipping his head to one side so as not to miss any word; there in the back row—what every speaker dreads to see—is someone nodding in sleep. Every experienced speaker than I know is greatly helped by the cultivation of one’s awareness of facial expressions and other subtle aspects of unspoken communication from the audience. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Walt Whitman once remarked that “the audience writes the poetry,” and in an even clearer sense the audience gives the lecture. Hence, a lecture delivered from the same notes, sat once to a social club and then again to graduate students at a large university, will often seem to be two entirely different speeches. The pause for milliseconds while one speaks is the locus of the speaker’s freedom. The speaker may mold one’s speech this way or that, one may tell a joke to relax the audience, or—in a thrilling moment of which there cannot be too many in a lecturer’s career—one may even be aware of a brand-new idea coming to one from Heaven knows where in the audience. Cassandra, we are told in Aeschylus’ drama, foretold the doom of Mycenae. A prophetess, she was sensitive to communications on many different levels of which the average person is unaware. This sensitivity caused her much pain, and if she could have, she would gladly have given up her role. She was doomed, or destined to listen on these different levels; she could not escape hearing the messages coming in her pauses. Quite apart from the roles of prophetess or mystic—which we see also in Tiresias and Jeremiah and Isaiah—it would seem that multitudes of us have such capacities, but we train ourselves (a process abetted by much contemporary education) to suppress this sensitivity to the pauses. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
And we may suppress the sensitivity to the pause in the hope of avoiding the pain. The difference between the charlatan and the genuine prophet may well be the sense of pain the latter experiences in one’s prophecies. The pause may be longer, for instance, wen one is answering questions after a lecture. In response to a question, I may silently hem and haw for a moment while different possible answers flash through my mind. At that time I do not usually think of Soren Kiekegaard’s proclamation “Freedom is possibility,” but that is what I am living out in those moments of pause. The thrilling thing is that at such a time a new answer that I have never thought of may suddenly emerge. It is often said that intellectually creative people—like John Dewey, for example—are a strain to listen to and are not good public speakers, because the time they pause to consider different possibilities requires a capacity to wait that most people find tedious. One’s freedom may involve still larger pauses. When one is making important decisions like buying a house, “Let me sleep on it” is a not infrequent remark. These are the situation in which a longer interval between stimuli is desired; there may be many different houses available, or one can decide not to buy at all. The decision then requires complex consideration, pondering, setting up the possibilities for choice, and playing “as if” games with oneself to assess various factors like view and design and so on. Freedom consists of these possibilities. The pauses are the exercise of one’s freedom to choose among them. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
We recall that Jesus Christ, following his own inner guidance, went off into his separate wilderness to engage in his quest. If the records are to be believed, he paused for forty days. These were assumedly times of intense concentration, times of considering possibilities, of listening to whatever voices were available on deeper levels within themselves, voices from nature, voices from what we now term archetypal experiences, voices from what Jesus called God, and I would call Being. These assumedly were periods in which they experienced their visions and integrated themselves around their message. However, students tell me that they have professors who pause permanently. These teachers make a career our of pausing. The pause is then not a preparation for action but an excuse for never acting at all. It has been remarked that the academic profession is the only one in which you can make your living by questioning things. How much it is still true in academia that persons substitute talking for decision or rationalize lack of commitment by calling it “judicious pausing” I do not know. Nevertheless this is a tendency that confronts us all: to use pausing as a substitute for committed action. In our action-oriented life in America this misuse of pausing is a not infrequently found neurotic reaction. However, this dilemma is not overcome by acting blindly, without consciousness and without reason. When it is necessary to act if one’s freedom is to be actualized at all, to be free obviously requires the courage to act. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
A person may ponder for months and years or all life long, never finding satisfactory answers. This occurs particularly with the question of death. When he stated his concerns with what might happen beyond death, Hamlet spoke for many of us. “When we have shuffled off this mortal coil, it must give us pause.” However, in our personal freedom can be actualized regardless of whether we find satisfactory answers or not, or even if there are no answers at all. We can exercise our freedom even against destiny. Indeed, in the long run to “know that he dies,” as Blaise Pascal said, is the most essential and triumphant experience of freedom possible for a human being. In the It-World causality holds unlimited sway. Every event that is either perceivable by the senses and physical or discovered or found in introspection and psychological is considered to be of necessity caused and a cause. Those events which may be regarded as purposive form no exception insofar as they also belong in the continuum of the It-World: this continuum tolerates a teleology, but only as a reversal that is worked into one part of causality without diminishing its complete continuity. The unlimited sway of causality in the It-World, which is of fundamental importance for the scientific ordering of nature, is not felt to be oppressive by the mortal who is not confined to the It-World but free to step out of it again and again into the World of relation. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Here I and You confront each other freely in a reciprocity that is not involved in or tainted by any causality; here mortals finds guaranteed the freedom of one’s being and of being. Only those who know relation and who know of the presence of the You have the capacity for decision. Whoever makes a decision is free because one has stepped before the countenance. The fiery matter of all my capacity to will surging intractably, everything possible for me revolving primevally, intertwined and seemingly inseparable, the alluring glances of potentialities flaring up from every corner, the Universe as a temptation, and I, born in an instant, both hands into the fire, deep into it, where the one that intends me is hidden, my deed, seized: now! And immediately the menace of the abyss is subdued: no longer a coreless multiplicity at ply in the iridescent equality of its claims; but only two are left alongside each other, the other and the one, delusion and task. However, now the actualization commences within me. Having decided cannot mean that the one is done while the other remains lying there, an extinguished mass, filling my soul, layer upon layer, with its dross. Only one that funnels all the force of the other into the doing of the one, absorbing into the actualization of what was chosen the undermined passion of what was not chosen, only one that serves God with the evil impulse, decides—and decides what happens. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
Once one has understood this, one also knows that precisely this deserves to be called righteous: that which is set right, toward which a mortal directs oneself and for which one decides; and if there were a devil he would not be the one who decided against God but one that in all eternity did not decide. The mortal to whom freedom is guaranteed does not feel oppressed by causality. One knows that one’s mortal life is by its very nature an oscillation between You and It, and one senses the meaning of this. It suffices one that again and again one may set foot on the threshold of the sanctuary in which one could never tarry. Indeed, having to leave it again and again is for on an intimate part of the meaning and destiny of this life. There, on the threshold, the response, the spirit is kindled in one again and again; here, in the unholy and indigent land the spark has to prove itself. What is here called necessity cannot frighten it; for there one recognized true necessity: fate. Fate and freedom are promised to each other. Fate is encountered only by one that actualizes freedom. That I discovered the deed that intends me, that, this movement of my freedom, reveals the mystery to me. However, this, too, that I cannot accomplish it the way I intended it, this resistance also reveals that mystery to me. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
One that forgets all being caused as one decides from the depths, one that puts aside possessions and cloak and steps bare before the countenance—this free human being encounters fate as the counter-image of one’s freedom. It is not one’s limit but one completion; freedom and fate embrace each other to form meaning; and given meaning, fate—with its eyes, hitherto severe, suddenly full of light—looks like grace itself. No, the mortal who returns into the It-World, carrying the spark, does not feel oppressed by causal necessity. And in healthy ages, confidence flows to all the people from the mortals of the spirit; to all of them, even the most obtuse, the encounter, the presence has happened somehow, if only in the dimension of nature, impulse, and twilight; all them have somewhere felt the You; and now the spirit interprets this guarantee to them. However, in sick ages it happens that the It-World, no longer irrigated and fertilized by living currents of the You-World, severed and stagnant, becomes a gigantic swamp phantom and overpowers mortals. As one accommodates oneself to a World of objects that no longer achieve any presence for one, one succumbs to it. Then common causality grows into an oppressive and crushing doom. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
The freezing temperature of those snowy peaks of thought frightens away some who might otherwise venture on the Quest. It is the ego which is so frightened, knowing that its own end would come with the end of the journey into this elevated region. A mortal may stay at one’s present level or try to rise in character to a better one than one was born with. It ideals and values do not stir one, if one is ruled by undisciplined animal appetites, these truths will not appeal to one. Even if one is qualified to receive truth one may not be in the mood to do so, that is, one is not ready and willing to meet the cost. One’s interest or one’s desire or one’s emotions at that particular time as elsewhere possessed. When they learn the price—disciplining and reducing the fattened ego—that will have to be paid for this higher consciousness, they are more hesitant to embark on the Quest. Mortals who are uninterested in affairs other than their own personal ones, in matters other than their own work and pleasure, position and fortune, mortals who are preoccupied with the trivial round of external, selfish activities only, will naturally regard the study of philosophy as a waste of time, the practice of meditation as a form of indolence, and the endeavour after self-improvement as a needless trouble. No higher yearings enter their hearts, no reverent feelings touch them. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Because of their unwillingness either to look within or to think more deeply for any higher purpose or obligation that they might have, people live largely in delusion and deception, especially self-deception. “Why am I here on Earth?” is a question for which they can only find one answer: to satisfy their own material desires. This question is as old as the Christian message itself and the answer is equally old, as our text indicate. Jesus takes his disciples aside and speaks privately to them when he praises them because they see what they are seeing. The presence of the Messiah is a mystery; it cannot be said to everybody, and it cannot be seen by everybody, but only by those like Simeon who are driven by the Spirit. There is something surprising, unexpected about the appearance of salvation, something which contradicts pious opinions and intellectual demands. The mystery of salvation is the mystery of a child. So it was anticipated by Isaiah, by the ecstatic vision of the sibyl and by the poetic vision of Virgil, by the doctrines of mysteries and the rites of those who celebrated the birth of a child. A child is real and not yet real, it is in history and not yet historical. Its nature is visible and invisible, it is here and not yet here. And just this is the character of salvation. Salvation has the nature of a child. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
As Christendom remembers every year, in the most impressive of its festivals, the child Jesus, so salvation, however visible it may be, remains always also invisible. One who wants a salvation which is only visible cannot see the divine child in the Manger as one cannot see the divinity of the Man on the Cross and the paradoxical ways of all divine acting. Salvation is a child and when it grows up it is crucified. Only one who can see power under weakness, the whole under the fragment, victory under defeat, glory under suffering, innocence under guilt, sanctity under sin, life under death can say: Mine eyes have seen thy salvation. It is hard to say this in our days. However, it always has been hard and always will be hard. It was and is and will be a mystery, the mystery of a child. And however deep the World might fall, even into utter self-destruction, as long as there are mortal they will experience this mystery and say: “Blessed are the eyes which see the things that we see.” Not everyone is prepared by temperament, or past history, to seek the higher truth, much less has the time and will for it. Not everyone among the seekers is ready to make the sacrifices that a conscientious re-adjustment of character and behavior wants from one. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
I believe in a high power behind the Universe. I call it God. I believe this same higher power is behind mortals. Call it the soul, if you like to. Such beliefs do not appeal to the cocktail-soaked cynics and sophisticates of our era. Such teachings are ignored or rejected as being of interest only to dreamers, idlers, or misfits. There is some truth in this criticism, some basis for this attitude. Plain normal people who have to make a living, who are body with the World’s work, politics, and economics, who have personal and family problems most of the time, find all this to be unrealistic out of touch with things as they are, humanity as it is and has been. So long as the objects of their existence remain small and circumscribed, selfish and materialistic, so long will the meaning of their existence be denied them. It is not that they are contemptuous of truth but that they are indifferent to it. The opinions of most people about mysticism are either totally or partially worthless. This is because they are not informed either by accurate or by sufficient knowledge of the subject. They know next to nothing of its true history, nature, and results. Lack of concern for higher values reveals mortal’s frailty or malice. To the diseased mentality, mysticism is an attempt to cripple progress by weakening intellect and inhibiting needed action. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Age of No Mystery—It is So Nice to be in Love for I am Tired of Doing it for My Complexion!
And yet my grief was not entirely gone from me. It lingered like an idea, and the idea had a pure truth to it. I believe that this masking of dating without something to strive for, is an expression of narcissism, that it is also a rationalization for fear of intimacy and closeness in interpersonal relations, and that is arises from the alienation in our culture and adds to this alienation. Intimacy is the sharing between two people not only of their dreams, visions, goals, aspiration, values and religion, but also their personal space and thoughts. Intimacy is sensation blooming into emotion. Love is a state of being. That relation is intimate which is enriched by sharing our nature, in which one longs to hear the other’s fantasies, dreams, and experiences and reciprocated by sharing one’s own. Having lived for three years in a country in which the carnival season was built into the yearly calendar, I can testify to the great relief and pleasure in attending champagne parties that went on all night long and that ended only when the Sun was rising. For most people the carnival season is a time to dream dreams that my never come into reality. A patient from Germany, shy man among whose problems was a fear of intimacy, told how he had gone regularly to the masked balls in Berlin after the way, always hoping to meet some mysterious great love. However, of course, he never found anybody. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Dating without intimacy is sometimes helpful for adolescents, when deal with their peer group, for they are still navigating their way into the mysterious World and do not want to get trapped. Yet another use is for the divorcees in healing the wounds of separation, abandonment, and rejection. Dating without intimacy is said by some therapists to be a stage in getting emotionally free from the estranged spouse and launching oneself into the stream of life again. Other therapists add that a period of friendships can be a way of avoiding marrying on the rebound or getting too deeply involved with a partner before one has lived through the inevitable mourning period of the previous abandonment. Now we note that each of these is clearly a freedom from. Serial dating is supposedly free from tension; masked balls are freedom from the perpetual burden of too much consciousness; adolescents dating their peers is a freedom from bewilderment; divorcees’ dating is a freedom from the pain of wounded self-esteem. If dating without intimacy cannot enhance freedom of being itself, at least it can prepare the ground for later enhancement. Reading about these truths has a revelatory effect upon certain minds but only a boring or irritating effect upon others. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Why might learning about the truth be boring or irritating? It is because the first have been brought by the experience or reflection to a sufficiently sensitive and intuitive condition to appreciate the worth of what they are reading, whereas the second, comprising for the most part an extroverted public, will naturally be impatient with such mystical ideas and contemptuous of their heretical expounder. Indeed, some of these writings must seem as incomprehensible to a Western ear as the babblings of a man just awakening from the chloroformed state. The masses would show no interest for they possess insufficient mental equipment to understand it. How can large principles find a resting place in such little persons? The incomprehensions of the undeveloped minds and unrefined hearts puts up a barrier between them and philosophy. To ignore it is first to bewilder and then to frustrate them. It is not fair to ask them to accept and believe in teachings which seems to be contradicted by all their experiences and by all the experience of the society around them. How can we demand that they violate their own thinking and their own feeling by doing so? #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
They are not necessarily more materialistic. It is simply that they have not begun to think about life, to question its meaning and ask for its purpose. The call to a higher kind of life may sound absurd to the lower kind of mind. It is often said in the criticism that its doctrines are unreasonable and its techniques impracticable. It is a subject which the arrogant intellectuals of our time, being unable to cope with it, find irritating or bewildering. The seeming failure to get these truths accepted more widely, still more to get them practiced, is no failure at all. Mortals are what they are as a result of what they were in the past. It is easier for most persons to lay down their distressing burdens at the door of faith in formal religion than turn to the quest which explains the very presence of these burdens and prescribes the technique to remove them. Too many people who are ordinarily supposed to be good people with some religious side to their character, hide behind their duties and responsibilities to avoid the Quest for truth of God. They find in these two things sufficient excuse to disregard the larger questions of life. They keep themselves busy supporting themselves and their family or keeping up a position in the World of activity, following an occupation, or maintaining a business. In this way they are able to ignore any self-questioning about why they are here on Earth at all or what will happen to them after death or whether these practical duties and responsibilities are that is required from them by the God they profess to believe in. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
However, when dating without intimacy is made into one’s overall way of life a la Playboy or Playgirl a very different thing occurs. This is a compartmentalization of the self, an amputation of the important parts of one’s being. In one’s fascination with the mystery in masked balls or dating without intimacy, one wakes up, in our twenty-first century “age of no mystery,” to find oneself with the mechanical counterpart to the masks, the love machines, literally or in the form simply of feelingless people. It is so nice to be in love. I am tired of doing it for my complexion. Sometimes relations or serial dating, without a real connection, is boring. Many people have an aim to learn to be in relationships without sensation or without emotion. The strange thing is that these same clients sometimes come for therapy on the advice of their partner. A young woman in her first session stated that she wanted a monogamous relationship with her partner and she was entirely happy with her partner and did not want to see other people, but her partner persuaded her that something was wrong if she could not date other men. And this is what she, at his urging, had come to learn to do. One woman tells of a quarrel she has with her spouse in which he expressed his irritation that she confined herself to a monogamous relationship with him. She found herself crying out, “If I want to be faithful to you, what bloody business is it of yours?” #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
In such men we see the fear of intimacy, often stimulated by their general fear of women. They may be afraid that too much responsibility will be dumped on them by the woman, afraid of enchainment to the woman’s emotions, afraid of being encroached upon by the woman’s needs. Obviously, women have similar fears of men: fear that they will be enveloped by the man, fear that they will not be able to express themselves, that they will lose their autonomy—fears made all the stronger by the cultural emphasis, at least until recently, on the woman’s role as subordinate to men. The fears are understandable. Being in a committed relationship requires momentous acts of trust and intimacy. And for tens of thousands of years before the last few decades, this has meant the man’s leaving his pearl with her with the possibility of her carrying a fetus for none months and then having another mouth to feed and child to take responsibility for. What arrogance makes us think we can change that cultural inheritance of tens of thousands of years’ duration in a couple of decades? All the World complains nowadays of a press of trivial duties and engagements which prevents their employing themselves on some higher ground they know of; but undoubtedly, if they were made of the right stuff to work on that higher ground, they would now at once fulfill their superior engagement and neglect all the rest, as naturally as they breathe. They would never be caught saying that they had no time for this when the dullest man knows that this is all that he has time for. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
There are now so many activities calling for one’s interest and energies that modern mortals thinks one has no time to devote to finding one’s soul. So one does not seek it: and so one remains unhappy. The joining of two people in a loving relationship is, psychologically and physiologically, the most intimate of all relationships to which the human being is heir. It is a uniting of the most sensitive parts of ourselves, our soul, mind, heart, finances, secrets, identity, and emotions with an intimacy greater than is possible than with anyone else. A loving relationship is the ultimate way we become part of each other; the throb of the other’s heart and pulse are then felt as our own. It is not the fear of intimacy I am questioning—there is no wonder we yearn for freedom from intimacy in carnivals and occasional flings. However, I am questioning the rationalization of this fear into a principle that ends up amputating the self. Another rationalization is the idea that, since dating is at times recreation, it is noting but recreation; and one does not get intimate with one’s partner in tennis or bridge. This ignores not only the meaning of love, but the power of the soul. No wonder true love in our society is being steadily replaced by pornography. However, in these days, pleasures of the flesh without intimacy in the extreme, leads ultimately to one’s own death. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
The discomfort of being confronted by the fundamental questions which we must at some time, early or late, ask of life can be evaded—as all too many persons do evade it—by deliberately turning to more activity, or reinforced narcissism. Some reject the whole system for such reasons as “I do not want to become a saint,” or “I have to earn my livelihood.” This is an unwise attitude. Their minds are mostly occupied by personal matters, both petty and large, leaving little or no space in them for thoughts about life in general. How then can there be interest in the quest for truth? They dismiss the teachings in a few seconds under the erroneous belief that it is expounder is just another cultist. It is easy to fall into such gross misconceptions since they know nothing about it, or about the ancient tradition behind it. The fact is that, in the ordinary consciousness, many people are not interested in the question of truth, nor in the discovery of what seems without personal benefits of a Worldly kind; they are certainly not willing to practice various controls of thoughts, emotion, speech, and passion. Considering these factors, it will not come as a surprise when I state that, on the basis of my psychotherapeutic experiences, the people who can best function in a system of dating without intimacy are those who have little capacity for feeling in the first place. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
It is the persons who are compulsive and mechanical in their reactions, untrammeled by emotions, the persons who cannot experience intimacy anyway—in short the ones who operate like nonsentiment motors—that can most easily carry on a pattern of dating without intimacy. One of the saddest things about our culture is that this nonloving, compulsive—obsessional type seems to be the fruit of the widespread mechanistic training in our schools and life, the type our culture cultivates. The danger is that these detached persons who are afraid of intimacy will move toward a robotlike existence, heralded by the drying up of their emotions not only on personal levels, but on all levels, supported by the motto “my love don’t cost a thing.” Little wonder, then, that in the story which cites what the women of different nationalities say after dating, the American woman is portrayed saying “What is your name, darling?” I have noticed that in detached relationships with women, some male patients, not uncommonly intellectuals, are very competent with having modern relationships. They not only exemplify serial dating, but they also think and live without intimacy; and their yearnings, hopes, fears have been so strait-jacketed as to be almost extinct. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Then in therapy they begin to make process. Suddenly they find themselves impotent. This troubles them greatly, and they often cannot understand why I regard it as a gain that they have become aware of some sensibilities within themselves and can no longer direct their pleasures of the flesh on command as one would a computer. They are beginning to distinguish the times when they really want to have an intimate, monogamous relationship and the times they do not. This impotence is the beginning of a genuine experiences of pleasures of the flesh with intimacy. Now their adult life ideally can be built on a new foundation of relationship; now they can be monogamous partners, instead of serial dating. In contrast, the new narcissist is permissive about promiscuity, but this has given those types of individuals no true peace. What happens is that a premium is placed upon not feeling. Susan Stern, in describing how she gravitated toward the Weathermen, confesses an “inability to feel anything. I grew more frozen inside, more animated outside.” Some women who encourage their male partners to explore with other woman admit they would be hurt only if they felt too much, for instance, developed some intimacy with the other woman along with pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Enlightenment has suffered miscomprehension in its own land by its own people and many are unfamiliar or unable to cope with righteous intuitive perceptions. The pleasures of the flesh without intimacy trend in our culture goes hand in hand with the loss of the capacity to feel. His is a trend I saw developing in patients in therapy as early as the 1950s. Speaking of some new moments in our culture, our of a pervasive dissatisfaction with the quality of personal relations, many are taught not to make too large an investment in love and friendship, to avoid excessive dependence on others, live out loud, and to live for the moment—the very conditions that created the crisis of personal relations in the first place. Our society has made deep and lasting friendships, love affairs, and marrieds increasingly difficult to achieve. Some of the new therapies dignify this combat as assertiveness and fighting fair in love and marriage. Others celebrate impermanent attachments under such formulas as open marriage and open-ended commitments. Thus they intensify the disease they pretend to cure. Too many quacks, incompetents, fanatics, charlatans, tools, or lunatics have brought reproach and opprobrium on them. Only a small handful of persons employ them deliberately to express the lofty, the admirable, and the honorable meanings. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Few are willing to undergo the philosophical discipline because few are willing to disturb their personal comfort or disrupt their personal ease for the sake of a visionary ideal. The eagerness to improve oneself, the willingness to cultivate noble qualities are uncommon. If some joyfully recognize the truth as soon as they meet with it, others shudderingly turn away from it. The materialistically minded persons are too sceptical to take up this training and re-education of the mind; the self-indulgent ones are too lazily unwilling to disturb their comfort with it and come out of the groove in which they have sunk; while the narcissistic are too uninterested in merely long-range, far-off, and tangible benefits to se any value in it. Many people, especially in the working and the petty bourgeious classes, find their felicity at the beer and bacon table or the television, in idle chatter or in the particular successes of ambition. The notion that anyone could find it by means of nothing that can be measured in materialistic terms would seem foolish to them, while the Quest of God would seem the highest point of all foolishness. They accept the futility of materialism because they have never known the vitality of transcendentalism. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
This is not the atmosphere in which those minds are satisfied with the shackles of strict doctrines or the pretensions of mere opinion can thrive: hence few glances at philosophy are often enough to keep them away. Most people devalue themselves, although they do not know it. A part of them is divine, but it is ignored and neglected. The improvement of the ability to experience and use generally involves a decease in mortal’s power to relate. The mortal who sample the spirit as if it were spirits—what is one to do with the beings that live around one? “Tempting to place in coherent collage the bee, the mountain range, the shadow of my hoof—tempting to join them, enlaced by logical vast and shining molecular thought-thread thru all Substances—Tempting to say I see in all I see the place where the needle began in the tapestry—but ah, it all looks whole and part—long live the eyeball and the lucid heart,” reports Stan Rice from “Four Days in Another City” Some Lamb (1975). First problem with us today is that we have not enough faith in God; the second is that we have become too soft and will not submit our lives to God. Amusements, sports, gossip, even pleasures of the flesh protect the thoughtless masses from having to confront the higher challenges of life, from having to let into the minds basic questions. It allows them to escape all through the length of their incarnation from the one thing they were put here on Earth to face. In short, they hide from the Quest. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Justice Without Love is Always Injustice Because it Does Not Do Justice to the Other One, Nor to Oneself, Nor to the Situation in Which We Meet!
I stood on the hilltop in the Moonlight and I tried not to see this paradise. I tried to picture those I loved. Were they gathered still together in that fairy-tale wood of beautiful trees? If only I could see their faces or hear their voices. I looked on these verdant green valley, now patched with beautiful contracted Cresleigh homes, a picture book World with flowers blooming in profusion, the red poinsettia as tall as trees. And the clouds, ever changing, borne like the tall sailing ships on brisk winds. What had the first Europeans thought when they looked upon this fecund land surrounded by the sparkling sea? That this was the Garden of God? Even the most uneducated people would not dare to affirm that compassion, gratitude, love of the beauty of the World, love of religious practices, and friendship belonged exclusively to those centuries and countries that recognize the Church. These forms of love are rarely found in their purity, but it would even be difficult to say that they were met with more frequently in those centuries and countries than in the others. To think that love in any of these forms can exist anywhere Christ is absent is to belittle him so grievously that it amounts to an outrage. It is impious and almost sacrilegious. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
These kinds of love are supernatural, and in a sense they are absurd. They are the height of folly. So long as the soul has not had direct contact with the very person of God, they cannot be supported by any knowledge based either on experience or reason. They cannot therefore rest upon any certainty, unless the word is used in a metaphorical sense to indicate the opposite of hesitation. In consequence it is better that they should not be associated with any belief. This is more honest intellectually, and it safeguards our love’s purity more effectively. On this account it is more fitting. In what concerns divine things, belief is not fitting. Only certainty will do. Anything less than certainty is unworthy of God. During the period of preparation, these indirect loves constitute an upward movement of the soul, a turning of the eyes, not without some effort, toward higher things. After God has come in person, not only to visit the soul as he does for a long time beforehand, but to possess it and to transport its center near to his very heart, it is otherwise. The chicken has cracked its shell; it is outside the egg of the World. These first loves continue; they are more intense than before, but they are different. One who has passed through this adventure has a deeper love than every for those who suffer affliction and for those who help one in one’s own, for one’s friends, for religious practices, and for the beauty of the World. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
However, one’s love in all these forms had become a movement of God himself, a ray merged in the light of God. That at least is what we may suppose. These indirect loves are only the attitude toward beings and things here below of the soul turned toward the Good. They themselves have not any particular good as an object. There is no final good here below. Thus strictly speaking we are no longer concerned with forms of love, but with attitudes inspire by love. In the period of preparation the soul loves in emptiness. It does not know whether anything real answers its love. It may believe that it knows, but to believe is not to know. Such a belief does not help. The soul knows for certain only that it is hungry. The important thing is that it announces its hunger by crying. If we suggest to a child that perhaps there is no bread, the child does not stop crying. It goes on crying just the same. The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry. It can only persuade itself of this by lying, for the reality of its hunger is not a belief, it is a certainty. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
We all know that there is no true good here below, that everything that appears to be good in this World is finite, limited, wears out, and once worn out, leaves necessity exposed in all its nakedness. Every human being has probably had some lucid moments in one’s life when one has definitely acknowledged to oneself that there is no final good here below. However, as soon as we have seen this truth we cover it up with lies. Many people even take pleasure in proclaiming it, seeking a morbid joy in their sadness, without ever having been able to bear facing it for a second. Mortals feel that there is a mortal danger in facing this truth squarely for any length of time. That is true. Such knowledge strikes more surely than a sword; it inflicts a death more frightening than that of the body. After a time it kills everything within us that constitutes our soul. In order to bear it we have to love the truth more than life itself. Those who do this turn away from the fleeting things of time with their souls. They do not turn toward God. When they are in total darkness, how could they do so? God himself sets their faces in the right direction. He does not, however, show himself to them for a long time. It is for them to remain motionless, without averting their eyes, listening ceaselessly, and waiting, they know not for what; deaf to entreaties and threats, unmoved by every shock, unshaken in the midst of every upheaval. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
If after a long period of waiting God allow them to have an indistinct intuition of his light or even reveals himself in person, it is only for an instant. Once more they have to remain still, attentive, inactive, calling out only when their desire cannot be contained. If God does not reveal this reality, it does not rest with the soul to believe in the reality of God. In trying to do so it either labels something else with the name of God, and that is idolatry, or its belief in God remains abstract and verbal. Such a belief prevails wherever religious doctrines are taken for granted, as is the cause with those centuries and countries in which it never enters anyone’s head to question it. The state of nonbelief is then what Saint John of the Cross calls a night. The belief is verbal and does not penetrate the soul. At a time like the present, if the unbeliever loves Go, if one is like the child who does not know whether there is bread anywhere, but cries out become one is hungry, incredulity may be equivalent to the dark night of Saint John of the Cross. When we are eating bread, and even when we have eaten it, we know that it is real. We can nevertheless raise doubts about the reality of bread. Philosophers raise doubts about the reality of the World of the senses. Such doubts are however purely verbal; they leave the certainty intact and actually serve only to make it more obvious to a well-balanced mind. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
In the same way one to whom God has revealed his reality can raise doubts about this reality without any harm. They are purely verbal doubts, a form of exercise to keep one’s intelligence in good health. What amounts to criminal treason, even before such a revelation and much more afterward, is to question the fact that God is the only thing worthy of love. That is a turning away of our eyes, for love is the soul’s looking. It means that we have stopped for an instant to wait and to listen. Queen Akasha did not seek Lestat, she waited for him. When she was convinced that he no longer existed, and that nowhere in the whole World was there anything that could be Lestat, she did not on that account return to her former associates. She drew back from them with greater aversion than ever. She preferred the absence of Lestat to the presence of anyone else. Lestat awakened her from her statue state, from her cold slumber. She no longer hoped for that. However, never for an instant did dream of employing another method which could obtain a luxurious and honored life for her—the method of reconciliation with her kith and kin. Akasha did not want wealth and consideration unless they came with Lestat. She did not even give a thought to such things. However, she wanted to turn Earth into a Heaven. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
At that moment Lestat could hold out no longer. He could not help declaring himself. He gave certain proof that he was Lestat. Akasha saw him, she heard him, she touched him. There would be no more question for her not as to whether her savior was in existence. One who has had the same adventure as Akasha, one whose soul has seen, heard, and touched for itself, one will recognize God as the reality inspiring all indirect loves, the reality of which they are as it were the reflections. God is pure beauty. This is incomprehensible, for beauty, by its very essence, has to do with the senses. To speak of an imperceptible beauty must seem a misuse of language to anyone who has any sense of exactitude: and with reason. Beauty is always a miracle. However, when the soul receives an impression of beauty which, while it is beyond all sense perception is no abstraction, but real and direct as the impression caused by a song at the moment it reached our ears, the miracle is raised to the second degree. Everything happens as though, by a miraculous favor, our very sense themselves had been made aware that silence is not the absence of sound, but something infinitely more real than sounds, and the center of a harmony more perfect than anything which a combination of sounds can produce. Furthermore there are degrees of silence. When compared with the silence of God, there is a silence in the beauty of the Universe which is like noise. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
God is, moreover, our real neighbor. The term of person can only be rightly applied to God, and this is also true of the term impersonal. God is one who bends over us, afflicted as we are, and reduced to the state of being nothing but a fragment of inert and bleeding flesh. Yet at the same time he is not some sort of victim of misfortune as well, the victim who appears to us as an inanimate body, incapable of thought, this nameless victim of whom nothing is known. The inanimate body is this created Universe. If we were able to attain it, the love we owe to God, this love that would be our crowning perfection is the divine model both of gratitude and compassion. God is also the perfect friend. So that there should be between him and us, bridging the infinite distance, something in the way of equality, he had chosen to place an absolute quality in his creatures, the absolute liberty of consent, which leaves us free to follow or swerve from the God-ward direction he has communicated to our souls. He has also extended our possibilities of error and falsehood so as to leave us the faculty of exercising a spurious rule in imagination, not only over the Universe and the human race, but also over God himself, in so far as we do not know how to use his name aright. He has given us this faculty of infinite illusion so that we should have the power to renounce it out of love. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
In fact, contact with God is the true sacrament. We can, however, be almost certain that those whose love of God has caused the disappearance of the pure loves belonging to our life here below are no true friends of God. After the soul has had direct contact with God, our neighbor, our friends, religious ceremonies, and the beauty of the World do not fall to the level of unrealities. On the contrary, it is only then that these things become real. Previously they were half dreams. Previously they had no reality. “In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of Heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all peoples, nations, and mortals of every language worshipped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed,” reports Daniel 7.11. Could God possibly forgive people without at least demanding their conversation and some ritual observances? People, at any time, can return and be accepted by God. God can at any time forgive those who repent. Many people say we live in a sick society—and the quality of life might be changed radically by the development of a new sense of community. If every person returns from one’s evil way and from the violence on one’s hands, who knows, God may return. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
Modern mortals are voracious readers who have never learned to read well. Part of the trouble is that one is taught to read drivel that is hardly worth reading well. (There was a time when children learned to read by reading the Bible.) One ends up by reading mainly newspapers and magazines—ephemeral, anonymous trash that one scans on its way to the garbage can. One has no wish to remember it for any length of time; it is written as if to make sure that one will not; and one reads it in a manner that makes doubly sure. There is no person behind what one reads; not even a committee. Somebody wrote it in the first place—if one can call that writing—and then various other people took turns changing it. For the final result no one is responsible; and it rarely merits a serious response. It cries out to be forgotten soon, like the books on which one is learned to read, in school. They were usually anonymous, too; or they should have been. In adolescence students are suddenly turned loose on books worth reading, but generally do not know how to read them. And if, untaught, some instinct prompts them to read well, chances are that they are asked completely tone-deaf questions as soon as they have finished their assignment—either making them feel that they read badly after all or spoiling something worthwhile for the rest of their lives. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
We must learn to feel addressed by a book, by the human being behind it, as if a person spoke directly to us. A good book or essay or poem is not primarily an object to be put to use, or an object of experience: it is the voice of You speaking to me, requiring a response. “So whatever you wish that mortals would do to you, do so to them; for this is the law and the prophets,” reports Matthew 7.12. Recently I have had to think about the relation of love to justice. And it occurred to me that among the words of Jesus there is a statement of what is called the “Golden Rule.” The Golden Rule was well known to Christians and Greeks, although mostly in a negative form: What you do not want that mortal should do to you, do not so to them. Certainly, the absolute for is richer in meaning and nearer to love, but it is not love. It is calculating justice. How, then, is it related to love? How does it fit the message of the kingdom of God and the justice of the kingdom as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount where the Golden Rule appears? Let us think of an ordinary day in our life and of occasions for the application of the Golden Rule. We meet each other in the morning, we expect a friendly face or word and we are ready to give it although our minds are full of anxious anticipation of the burdens. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
Somebody wants a part of our limited time, we give it, having asked somebody else to give us a part of one’s time. We need help and we give it if we are asked, although it includes sacrifice. We are frank with others, expecting that they will be frank with us even if it hurts. We are fair to those who fight against us expecting fairness from them. We participate in the sorrows of our neighbors, certain that they will participate in ours. All this can happen in one day. All this is Golden Rule. And if somebody has violated this rule, consciously or unconsciously, we are willing to forgive as we hope to be forgiven. It is not astonishing that for many people the Golden Rule is considered as the real content of Christianity. It is not surprising that in the name of the Golden Rule criticism is suppressed, independent action discouraged, serious problems avoided. It is even understandable that statesmen ask other nations to behave toward their own nations according to the Golden Rule. And does not Jesus himself say that the Golden Rule is the law and the prophets? However, we know that this is not the answer of the New Testament. The great commandment as Jesus repeats it and the descriptions of love in Paul and John’s tremendous assertion that God is love, infinitely transcend the Golden Rule. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
The Golden Rule must be transcended, for it does not tell us what we should wish that mortal would do to us. We wish to have freedom from heavy duties. We are ready to give the same freedom to others. However, someone who loves us refuses to give it to us, and one oneself refuses to ask us for it. And if one did, we should refuse to give it to one because it would reduce our growth and violate the law of love. We wish to receive a fortune which makes us secure and independent. We would be ready to give a fortune to a friend who asks us for it, if we had it. However, in both cases love would be violated. For the gift would ruin us and the other individual. We want to be forgiven and we are ready to do the same. However, perhaps it is in both cases an escape from the seriousness of a personal problem, and therefore against love. The measure of what we shall do to mortals cannot be our wishes about what they shall do to us. For our wishes express not only our right but also our wrong and our foolishness more than our wisdom. This is the limit of the Golden Rule. This is the limit of calculating justice. Only for one who knows what one should wish and who actually wishes it, is the Golden Rule ultimately valid. Only love can transform calculating justice into creative justice. Love makes justice just. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
Justice without love is always injustice because it does not do justice to the other one, nor to the oneself, nor to the situation in which we meet. For the other one and I and we together in this moment in this place are unique, unrepeatable occasion, calling for a unique unrepeatable act of uniting love. If this call is not heard by listening love, it is not obeyed by the creative genius of love, injustice is done. And this is true even of oneself. One who loves listens to the call of one’s own innermost center and obeys this call and does justice to one’s own being. For love does not remove, it establishes justice. It does not add something to what justice does but it shows justice what to do. It makes the Golden Rule possible. For we do not speak for a love which swallows justice. This would result in chaos and extinction. However, we speak for a love in which justice is the form and structure of love. We speak for a love which respects the claim of the other one to be acknowledged as what one is, and the claim of ourselves to be acknowledged as what we are, above all as persons. Only distorted love, which is a cover for hostility or self-disgust, denies that which united love. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
Love makes justice just. The divine love is justifying love accepting and fulfilling one who, according to calculating justice, must be rejected. This justification of one who is unjust is the fulfillment of God’s creative justice, and of God’s reuniting love. Knowing that the ultimate meaning of freedom will elude us, let us still endeavor to define the term as best we can. The first definition is on the psychological level, the domain of everyday actions: Freedom is the capacity to pause in the face of stimuli from many directions at once and, in this pause, to throw one’s weight toward this response rather than that one. This is the freedom we experience in a store when we pause over the purchase of a necktie or a shirt. We summon up in our imaginations the image of how we will look in this or that tie, what so-and-so will say about it, or how the color will fit such and such a suit. And then we buy the tie or we move on to something else. This is freedom of doing, or existential freedom. This freedom is shown most interestingly in the supermarket, when we push our carts through the aisles between the tumultuous variety of packages and cans of food on the shelves, each one silently shouting through its bright-colored label “Buy me!” We see the shoppers with expressions of hesitancy, vacuity, wonder, pausing for some inspiration as to which of all these foods will be good for dinner tonight. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
The shopper seems hypnotized, charmed, preoccupied. Like patients on a ward in a mental hospital, they do not see me as I walk directly across their line of vision. The expressions of wonder and hesitancy are a readiness, an invitation, an openness to some stimulus on the shelves to persuade them to throw the balance this way of that in making their choice. This first freedom is experienced by each of us hundreds of times every day. It is decked up in respectable terms like decision/choice when we discuss freedom in psychology classes—if we ever discuss freedom in psychology classes at all. The most profound illustration of this kind of freedom is our ability to ask questions. Take, for example, my asking a question after listening to a lecture. The very fact that the question comes up in my mind at all implied that there is more than one answer. Otherwise there would be no point in asking the question in the first place. This is freedom; it implies that there is some possibility, some freedom of selection in what I ask. The speaker then pauses for a few seconds after I have asked it, turning over in his or her mind the possible answers. We sense that there is, in asking and answering questions, a good deal more going on, and it is of a richer nature, than the mere responding to various stimuli and selecting a response. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Each person who lights this candle within one’s own mind will soon begin to attract other mortals like moths to a flame burning by a fire—not all mortal nor many mortals but only those who are groping for a way out of their darkness. Can a scrupulously impartial search through World-thought and experience lead to discovery of truth? “Wilt thou be made whole?” asked Jesus. Questioning implies some value judgment, some investment of the person’s life, some invitation to share, to make contact, some challenge to consider a new idea. Regrettably, in recent decades our very idea of freedom has been diminished and grown shallow in comparisons with previous ages; it has been relegated almost exclusively to freedom from outside pressure, to freedom from state coercion—to freedom understood on the juridical level, and no higher. Only when this search for a higher life has becomes an absolute necessity to a mortal, has one found even the first qualification needed for the Quest. “And the Lord God doth work by means to bring about his great and eternal purposes; and by very small means the Lord doth confound the wise and bringeth about the salvation of many souls,” reports Alma 37.7. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
One Who Knows the Secrets of All Hearts Alone Knows the Secret of the Different Forms of Faith—One Has Never Revealed this Secret
It is no longer good for you to be around us. I fear we have all become too enamored of you and would sweep you off your feet and take you away from these things which you have set out to do. You will forgive us for leaving so suddenly. I am confident that this is best for you. I have arranged for the car to take you to the airport. Be assured I love you more than words can say. In all departments of life, love is not real unless it is directed toward a particular object; it becomes universal without ceasing to be real only as a result of analogy and transference. It might be said in passing that the knowledge of what analogy and transference are, a knowledge for which mathematics, the various branches of science, and philosophy are a preparation, also has a direct relationship to love. Many people find their way into some form of psychotherapy or counseling as a way of interrupting the rejection cycle. They seek professional help for all kinds of reasons, of course. Some are aware, at least vaguely, of their lack of self-acceptance and how it interferes with their relationship with other people and are not content to live out their lives on that level. More often individual find their way into psychotherapy because of some symptom of their self-hate and its corollary fear of love. They may be having marital problems of issues dealing with pleasures of the flesh, anxiety attacks, vocational problems, physical illness caused by emotional factors, or any numerous symptoms. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
When it is effective in helping a person achieve a more satisfying life, what takes place in psychotherapy? This is a profoundly significant question to which many answers have been given, each involving differing theories of the human personality and its development. Although there is room for disagreement about many details of the process, one change that appears to occur in successful psychotherapy is that the person has a growing sense of one’s own worth as a person. And it seems likely that one of the best ways to describe the process behind this growing sense of one’s value is to see it as a cycle of acceptance. The therapist working with Jesse in his own unique way somehow coveys to her his feelings that she is a person of worth with intensely green eyes and the thick curly red hair pouring down over her shoulders. Jesse then gradually comes to feel that she is basically accepted and respected as an individual. She begins to understand that the therapist sees through whatever annoying traits she has and the things she does that tend to destroy herself and others. She grasps that he recognizes that all of these things are symptoms of her self-hate and have nothing to do with her basic worth. She begins to sense that he cares for her. This does not mean that the therapist remains benignly acquiescent to every reaction of the client. He may become annoyed and express his annoyance; he may feel hurt or angered by something the client says or does and express his feelings. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
However, the very fact that the therapist is willing to enter into the relationship this honestly and intensely, revealing his own humanness, will be an expression of trust in the client’s basic ability to handle the situation. And through it all he somehow conveys the feeling, perhaps not expressed directly, that he values the client for the individual one is because everyone is unique. In such a relationship the client is gradually freed to be aware of more and more of one’s feelings that one has not allowed oneself to fully experience. One becomes more free to reveal facets of one’s personality to this accepting human being that one has hitherto revealed to no one for fear of experiencing further rejection. Gradually, with the assistance of the therapist’s teachings, and encouraged by the feeling of acceptance, the client discovers oneself being more honest and open as an individual and with the therapist. As one discovers that nothing destroys the therapist’s basic attitude toward one, one begins to allow oneself to have glimmerings of one’s own value as a person. This is often a discouraging process. The fear of emotional intimacy is ever-present and there will be frequent setbacks as the clients begins to reveal oneself, becomes frightened, and withdraws into the shell of one’s defenses against closeness. Later, as one gives up one defense against intimacy one is likely to adopt another in its place, with little or nor awareness of what one is doing. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
The client is almost certain to have doubts about the genuineness of the therapist’s acceptance. If these doubts remain unexpressed, they constitute a serious block to the therapeutic process. When they are expressed openly they can often be dealt with effectively. They take many forms. One person may say, “It is your job to accept me when no one else would possibly do so.” Another may say, “I cannot help feeling that sooner or later you will find out something about me that will cause you to have nothing more to do with me.” Such ideas are very persistent because our feelings of self-hate are so persistent. One woman had been in therapy for many months and had made many gains in growing self-acceptance, which were reflected in much more satisfying relationships with people. Even so, on one occasion just before a session with her therapist, when she was feeling particularly low, she rose from her chair, from which she had been talking with a group of friends, and blurted out, “I am going to the one person in the World who accepts me, and I pay him to!” However, as the client’s confidence in the therapeutic relationships grows, one can begin to deal directly with one’s self-hate and its sources. In one therapy session, a young woman, Maharet, was making remarks that indicted she was feeling critical of herself. In order to help her experience her emotions more intensely, the therapist asked her to imagine that the self she was criticizing was sitting in the chair opposite her and to talk directly to the self. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
Maharet paused for a few moments, and then said, “The first thing that comes to my mind is that I want to gradually think about what I want to say and let it dawn on my how I feel about myself.” She then said with deep feeling, “I guess I really want to tell you I love you, but it seems somehow selfish.” As she finished, she was crying as the relief of knowing that she could care for herself flooded over her. At the same time tears rolled won the therapist’s cheeks, for he knew the same feeling from his own experience. For many moments, thereafter, Maharet and the therapist sat in silence, enjoying their sense of closeness to each other and to themselves. As the individual in therapy gradually develops this sense of self-acceptance, one will have less need to escape into the various defenses one has used in the past. One will gain ability to be more open and self-revealing to the therapist as another human being who consistently care for one regardless of whatever emotional interchanges they may experience together. Sometimes one will become very frightened, but gradually the awareness of the satisfactions of being one’s self will be so rewarding and so productive of growing feelings of self-worth that former patterns of living will seem too unrewarding to continue. No attempt is being added here to explain every movement in the direction of emotional health that can occur in psychotherapy. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
It is being suggested that perhaps the most important thing that can happen is that they cycle of rejection in the client’s life is broken and a cycle of acceptance is begun. This process is as follows: Feelings of rejection lead to feelings of worthlessness, self-hate, then escape into defenses against intimacy, and further feelings of rejection as others react to our defenses. However, with therapy, there is an interruption of cycle through psychotherapy, followed by feelings of unconditional acceptance by therapist who sees through client’s defenses against intimacy, growing feelings of self-worth, growing love of self, an increasing openness and genuineness and less need for escape hatches, and further feelings of acceptance as others react favorably to our openness. Not every therapist, of course, is equal in the ability to be authentic and genuinely accepting in relationship with clients. Therapists are human, too, an inevitably have experienced some degree of rejection and self-hate. Most of them have at one time been in therapy themselves in order to become more effective persons and more capable of direct and open relationships. However, in common with all of humanity, therapists remain somewhat afraid of love and only relatively able to be genuine. Perhaps it is likely to be a sign of the effective therapist that one can afford to experience one’s own humanness and limitations, freely admitting that one’s adventure with each client is one in which one, too, hopes to grow as a person. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
This discovery may take time. There may be emotions that take more effort to cope with. However, gradually awareness comes that the more depth of emotion they reveal to each other, the more similarity of feeling they find among themselves, and the more emotionally intimate they come to feel. The mutual acceptance and enjoyment they find in each other gradually translates itself into increased feelings of self-worth and growing courage to be one’s self with group members and with people in general in spite of the fears that still exist. Humans demean themselves by not caring for the dignity of their status the ideals they ought to honour. Our daily lives become mechanical, obedient to the World’s demands, and our daily activities a constantly turning treadmill; but this only happens if there are no spiritual aims, spiritual aspirations, and spiritual practices to provide a resistance to this course. In Europe today, and perhaps even the whole World, the knowledge of comparative religion amounts to just about nothing. People have not even a notion of the possibility of such a knowledge. Even without the prejudices which get in our way, it is already very difficult for us even to form an idea of it. Among the different forms of religion there are, as it were, partial compensations for the visible differences, certain hidden equivalents which can only be caught sight of by the most penetrating discernment. Each religion in original combination of explicit and implicit truths; what is explicit in one is implicit in another. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
The implicit adherence to a truth can in some cases be worth as much as the explicit adherence, sometimes even a great deal more. One who knows the secrets of all hearts alone knows the secret of the different forms of faith. One has never revealed this secret, whatever anyone may say. Because we trouble our heads with search for intangible reality, we are regarded as odd people. However, it never occurs to our critics that it is much more odd that they should go on living without pausing to inquire if there by any purpose in life at all. When one knows that one must put aside the trivialities of life and come to terms with the demands made upon one by one’s higher nature, a time comes in the intellectual growth of a mortal. To put one’s own purpose in harmony with the Universe’s purpose is the most sensible thing one can do. Therefore there is nothing unpractical, irrational, or eccentric in the Quest. Only the unthinking crowd, who suffer blindly and drift tragically, may believe so. No one who has felt the inner peace, received the deep wisdom, and touched the rocklike strength which mark the more advanced stages, could ever believe so. The virtue of religious practices is due to contact with what is perfectly pure, resulting in the destruction of evil. Nothing here below is perfectly pure except the total beauty of the Universe, and that we are unable to feel directly until we are very far advanced in the way of perfection. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Moreover, this total beauty cannot be contained in anything tangible, though it is itself tangible in a certain sense. Religious things are pure by right, theoretically, hypothetically, by convention. That is why it is perfect. If they are not connected with motives that impel people to observe them, human conventions are useless. In themselves they are simple abstractions; they are unreal and have no effect. However, the convention by which religious things are pure is ratified by God himself. Thus it is an effective convention, a convention containing virtue and operating of itself. This purity is unconditioned and perfect, and at the same time real. There we have a truth that is a fact and in consequence cannot be demonstrated by argument. It can only be verified experimentally. It is a fact that the purity of religious things is almost everywhere to be seen in the form of beauty, when faith and love do not fail. Thus the words of the liturgy are marvelously beautiful; the words of the prayer issued for us from the very lips of Christ are perfect above all, In the same way Romanesque architecture and Gregorian plain chant are marvelously beautiful. Some people like to believe that the architecture, singing, language, and even the words are chosen by Christ himself. The moment we become convinced that universal life has a higher purpose than the mere reproduction of the species, that moment our own individual life takes on a higher meaning, a glorious significance. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
It is this that gives our less affluent personal lives their meaning and rescues them from their foamlike character. Here is a concept on which the mind can linger, braces by its reminder of our human possibilities. Those who move through life hopeless and dreamless, who see none of its beauty and hear none of its music, who have lost most of its battles and won none of its prizes, these can console themselves only by adopting a new set of values or by applying one if they merely theorized before. If they do this, the end can be a new beginning. The discovery that there are higher concepts of human existence, that these have a validity not less than the meaner ones which are all that so many people know, may prove a turning point at any age. For the young it gives some guidance, for the mature it offers some hope. So short a time, so small a gain, so high a quest. For what is best, serves better in the end. The importance of this work is ignored by most people and unknown to many people. They believe it to be the preoccupation of time-wasting dreamers or ill-adjusted neurotics. If they do not treat it with such indifference they treat it either with open abuse or with contemptuous indulgence. However, if they could understand that it penetrates to the foundations of human living and affects the settlement of human problems, they might be less arrogant in their attitudes towards it. It is not less important to the individual than to society at all times but immeasurably more so in those grave, critical times. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
It may be asked of what social use are those who make this quest their primary occupation, and therefore make their Worldly occupation and way of life conform to it? First of all, they embody, and therefore carry on and keep alive, the very idea of the quest. Secondly, their very presence, by telepathic and auric existence, does touch the inner beings of those who come into contact with them and does leaven the mental atmosphere of those who do not—however minute the effect on any particular day. Thirdly, although each has to live and express the quest in the way referable to one’s temperament and circumstances, one does offer a model—in general terms—for others to see, an example from which to draw stimulation. In choosing this path, the aspirant has taken the first step toward a Divine Power whose possession, or rather whose possession of one, will ultimately, enable one to become a real healer of suffering humankind. Jesus declares that we are forgiven. Our state of mind, our ecstasy of love, show that something has happened to us. And nothing greater can happen to a human being than that one is forgiven. Forgiveness means reconciliation in spite of estrangement; it means reunion in spite of hostility; it means acceptance of those who are unacceptable, and it means reception of those who are rejected. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Forgiveness is unconditional or it is not forgiveness at all. Forgivenness has the character of in spite of, but the righteous ones give it the character of because. The sinners, however, cannot do this. They cannot transform the divine in spire of into a human because. They cannot show facts, because of which they must be forgiven. God’s forgiveness is unconditional. There is no condition whatsoever in mortals which would make one worthy of forgiveness. If forgiveness were conditional, conditional by mortals, no one could be accepted and no one could accept one’s self. We know that this is our situation, but we loathe to face it. It is too great as a gift and too humiliating as a judgment. We want to contribute something, and if we have learned that we cannot contribute anything beneficial, then we try at least to contribute something negative: the pain of self-accusation and self-rejection. And then we read our story and the parable of the Prodigal Son as if they said: These sinners were forgiven because they humiliated themselves and confessed that they were unacceptable; because they suffered about their sinful predicament they were made worthy of forgiveness. However, this reading of the story is a misreading and a dangerous one. If that were the way to our reconciliation with God, we should have to produce within ourselves the feeling of unworthiness, the pain of self-rejection, the anxiety and despair of guilt. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
There are many Christians who try this in order to show God and themselves that they deserve acceptance. They perform an emotional work of self-punishment after they have realized that their other good works do not help them. However, emotional works do not help either. God’s forgiveness is independent of anything we do, even of self-accusation and self-humiliation. If this were not so, how could we every be certain that our self-rejection is serious enough to deserve forgiveness? Forgiveness creates repentance—this is declared in our story and this is the experience of those who have been forgiven. The view that such an existence is selfish and unproductive, is a shallow one. It takes no account of the value of higher forces. For whoever, by this quest and practice, realizes the divine presence, does so not only for oneself but for all others in that little part of the World confided to one’s care. Who are the most important human beings in the World? Those who try to bring sanity to an insane World or those who try to perpetuate its condition? Our artist can find new sources of inspiration in it. Our dying religious hopes can receive an influx of unexpected new life from it. If we turn our faces to that direction where the Sun rises in red dawn, the phoenix of Divine Truth can rise again out of the ashes of materialism strewn around us. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
Yet since the spiritual is the deepest part of our nature, the process of our absorption of spiritual truths is a slow and not obvious one. Another perennial attitude is summed up in the words Us-Them Here the World is divided in two: the children of light and the children of darkness, the sheep and the goats, the elect and the damned. Every social problem can be analyzed without much study: all one has to look for are the sheep and goats. There is room for anger and contempt and boundless hope; for the sheep are bound to triumph. Should a goat have the presumption to address a sheep, the sheep often do not hear it, and they never hear it as another I. For the goat is one of Them, not one of Us. Righteousness, intelligence, integrity, humanity, and victory are prerogatives of Us, while wickedness, stupidity, hypocrisy, brutality, and ultimate defeat belong to Them. Those who have managed to cut through the terrible complexities of life and offer such a scheme as this have been hailed as prophets in all ages. In these five attitudes there is no You: I-I, I-It, It-It, We-We, and Us-Them. There are many ways of living in a World without You. There are also many World with the two poles I-You. I-You sounds unfamiliar. What we are accustomed to is I-Thou. However, mortal’s attitudes are not manifold, and Thou and You are not the same. Nor is Thou very similar to the German Du. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
German lovers say Du to one another, and so do friends. Du is spontaneous and unpretentious, remote from formality, pomp, and dignity. What lovers or friends say Thou to one another? Thou is scarcely ever said spontaneously. Thou immediately brings to mind God; Du does not. And the God of whom it makes us think is not the God to whom one might cry out in gratitude, despair, or agony, not the God to whom one complains or prays spontaneously; it is the God of the pulpits, the God of the holy tone. When mortals pray spontaneously or speak directly to God, without any mediator, without any intervention of formulas, when they speak as their heart tells them to speak instead of repeating what is printed, do they say Thou? How many know the verb forms Thou commands? The World of Thou has many mansions. Thou is a preachers’ word but also a dear to anticlerical romantic poets. Thou is found in Shakespeare and at home in the English Bible, although recent versiouns of the Scriptures have tended to dispense with it. Thou can mean many things, but it has no place whatever in the language of direct, nonliterary, spontaneous human relationships. If one could liberate I-Thou from affectation, the price for that would still involve reducing it to a mere formula to jargon. However, supposed a mortal wrote a book about direct relationships and tried to get away from the formulas of theologians and philosophers: a theologian would translate it and turn Ich und Du into I and Thou. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
One may be told contemptuously that that kind of truth and reality have no practical value for us living in the World as it is, active in the World and dealing with the facts as they are, not getting lost in dreams. That in several ways this is not so can be demonstrated without too much difficulty. However, let it be said that such a supreme knowledge or experience may possibly serve higher purposes which our small minds cannot yet glimpse. All that really matters is how one lives one’s life. However, relative-plane activities do not constitute all there is to living. Consciousness rises from the plane behind the mind, and this region, like the outer World, needs to be explored with competent guides—its possibilities and benefits fully revealed by each individual one thou. Living will begin to achieve its own purpose when one’s outer life becomes motivated, guided, and balanced by the fruits of one’s inner findings. When you show u and censure the oddities and charlatanries, you do not demolish the cause for mystics, the unreasons and fanaticisms of a few mystical cults. As the influences of the World increasingly embrace the evil, we must strive with all diligence to stay firmly on the path that leads us safely to our Savior. We do not lower our standards to fit in or to make someone else feel comfortable. #Randolpharris 16 of 16
If God and the Church Love Me So Much, I Must Be Worthwhile
The Sun was setting and the snow-covered range reflected and radiated its color from the rays of the Sun behind us. It was so breath-taking that we stopped our car to gaze at it for a while; we felt as though we were bathing in a Sky turned into sheer brilliance. The next morning, I sat in the windowsill of the large picture window of our hotel room, and for half an hour intensely concentrating on the mountain peak. I cleared my mind of everything and held my gaze for the first part of the half hour, Mt. Blanc remained a realistic mountain, pure ivory white, incredibly beautiful against the deep blue of the morning sky. Then, as I continued to concentrate on it, the mountain gradually changed before my eyes into another form. It became abstract. It was now, as the underlying form emerged, composed of disembodied squares and circles and planes. I loved it still, as I love the cubist paintings by Picasso and Braque. The mountain form seemed to be painted on canvas, it was disembodied, pure form with no weight or movement. Or one could as easily say, the mountain form was all weight and all movement; with living form it does not matter, as Brancusi illustrates in his sculptures of golden line soaring up from its base which he rightly calls “Bird in Flight.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
However, as I continued to concentrate steadily on it, this weightless form gradually changed again. The vast mountain took on a body, now organic, three-dimensional. It became a new being on a new level. Now I saw it in a living depth. The glowing ivory forms had come together again into an organism, not personal but neither was it impersonal. It seemed to be pure form. I felt more tan saw an embodied structure, now an ultimate form, part of the Universe as I was also. The mountain, like myself looking at it, embodied a Universe of beauty and meaning. Since that day, this experience of my concentration on Mt. Blanc has remained vivid in my mind. Leaving the Swiss border town and driving up through the foothills of the French Alps toward Chamonix and Mt. Blanc was a blessed experience. Back in New York, later, when I looked out the window of my office on the 25th floor high above the Riverside Drive, I saw in the delicate skyline of New York also a pure form—now pure lace. The clouds above the city likewise assumed the forms I had seen in Chamonix, and as I walked home at night the giant elm trees on Riverside Drive took on this same significant form, all part of the same Universe. This experience of living forms, this embodied being, took me out of myself. Whenever I called it out of the past into my mind again, it gave me a new experienced which was beyond living our dying. The feeling was oceanic; it was my participation in the Being of the Universe. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
Such an experience cannot be said to exist only in my imagination, nor is it solely a kind of telepathy emerging from Mt. Blanc. The experience is both inner and outer, both subjective and objective. It is a fusion of my imagination and the emanating form of the mountain. This is an illustration of ecstasy. The word comes from the Greek ex-stasis, meaning to stand outside of, or above. It is also self-transcendent. It gives one the experience of going beyond, or absorbing the old self, and a new self, or more accurately an enlarged self, takes its place. O put it in psychoanalytic language, my ego was not denied but absorbed. My self was enlarged by participation in a new being which happened in this case to be the form of Mt. Blanc. My letting go of my ordinary awareness, which I call my banal consciousness, permitted a new consciousness to be born in me. Eastern religion and philosophy speak of this as the experience of the Absolute, or cosmic experiences, a participation in a Universal awareness. One participates in a greater consciousness, temporarily as it may be. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
It may be clear that artists share this consciousness. Artists are the ones who are particularly sensitive to experiencing scenes in new forms. They have the capacity to look at a scene until it is born in their inner minds and imagination, born in their total consciousness. This may occur immediately, as the artists look at a scene for the first time, or it may be a new experience of a scene they have already seen many times, like Monet’s waterlilies. When they say, “I have looked at this many times, but this is the first time I have really seen it,” this is what people mean. I have looked at many trees in my life, but I never really saw one until I had seen Cezanne’s paintings of trees. Through participating in the Cezanne’s imagination, which so unforgettably finds the ground forms of trees, I was enabled to experience and create for myself the form of trees in a new and completely different way. This is one of the contributions artists make to the World: they experience these living forms, and through their art they enable the rest of us to see them—or better to experience them in our lives. The artist, including any and all of us who choose to create, to make imaginatively, as the ones who care themselves to this experience of essence. They are the ones who are caught up in greater or lesser ecstasy, and they hasten then to reproduce it on paper or on canvas or in music. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
The artists vocation is to communicate that experience of ecstasy to others. Not to communicate it is to surrender the vision to atrophy; the artist must paint, or write, or sculpt—else the vision withers away and he or she is less apt to have it again. There is also another accompaniment to this experience of ecstasy, and that is gratitude. I think I have never painted a watercolor, sketchy as it might have been, without feeling a strange gratification afterwards. I sometimes feel I have been invited in where Angels fear to tread, and for that would not be grateful? The wonder of being human is that any part of us who so choose may be privileged to participate in this experience of ecstasy, with its accompanying gratitude. Before beauty liberates one from free pleasure, and the serenity of forms tames down the savageness of life, what are mortals before beauty? It is not a subject for academic students of technical metaphysics or for professional followers of institutional religion—although they are welcome to all that it has to give them, to the richer form and the inspired understanding of their own doctrine. No—it is primarily for the ordinary person who is willing to heed to one’s intuitive feeling or who is willing to use one’s independent thinking power. It escapes pushing into recognizable and separate divisions, definitions, or groups. Let it be stated clearly that mysticism is an a-rational type of experience, and in some degree common to all mortals. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
It is an intuitive, self-evident, self-recognized knowledge which comes fitfully to mortals. It should not be confounded with the instinctive and immediate knowledge possessed by animals and used by them in their adaptations to environment. The average mortal seldom pays enough attention to one’s slight mystical experiences to profit or learn from them. Yet one’s need for them is evidenced by one’s incessant seeking for the thrills, sensations, uplifts, and so on, which one organizes for oneself in so many ways—the religious way being only one of them. In fact, the failure of religion—in the West, at any rate—to each true mysticism, and its overlaying of the deeply mystic nature of its teachings with a pseudo-rationalism and an unsound historicity may be the root cause for driving people to seek for things greater than they feel their individual selves to be in the many sensation-giving activities in the World today. Mysticism is not a by-product of imagination or uncontrolled emotion; it is a range of knowledge and experience natural to mortals but not yet encompassed by one’s rational mind. The function of philosophy is to bring these experiences under control and to offer ways of arriving at interpretations and explanations. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
Mysticism not so controlled and interpreted is full of pitfalls, one of which is the acceptance of confusion, sentimentality, cloudiness, illusion, and aimlessness as integral qualities of the mystical life—states of mind which go far to justify opponents of mysticism in their estimate of it as foolish and superstitious. The mystic should recognize one’s own limitations. One should not refuse the proffered hand of philosophy which will help one’s understanding and train one’s intuition. One should recognize that it is essential to know how to interpret the material which reaches one from one’s higher self, and how to receive it in all its purity. One of the realities of every historical era is that several generations coexist and inevitably find areas of conflict. Failure to resolve these conflicts may have a far-reaching and damaging effect on attempts to develop human potential beyond the level of the earlier generation. We must encourage people to take the time necessary to discover what it is like to be alive and human. By learning to really communicate with myself and other people, I have found that life has become much more worthwhile. I have emerged with the insight that life does not always have to remain a painful struggle. When an organization includes as part of its ongoing activities the quest to be better far than you are, and combines it with the knowledge of how to use the latest techniques for such growth, the organization is indeed facilitating and enhancing joy. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
What happens when significant personality changes do occur within the context of our religious communities? There is no question that remarkable changes in life occur in many individuals who pass through a crisis type experience, which the church may call a conversion or simply a religious experience. Perhaps it will be instructive to view such an experience through the eyes of William, a man now in his forties whose conversion occurred when he was in high school. William was the son of a small-town minister of one of the larger Protestant denominations in America. The father was by no means a fire and brimstone preacher. He was, in fact, a rather warm, gentle, and shy man who lacked the aggressiveness to attract the attention of larger congregations. Though reserved, one probably expressed one’s affection to William and his other children, especially when they were small. That he loved them and took pride in them there is no doubt. There was never any severe physical punishment in the family. He was, however, much concerned that his children behave properly. William recalls one incident in particular that illustrates this: “I was quite small at the time—maybe for our five. I was playing outside and was so engrossed in what I was doing that I did not want to stop and go inside when I needed to urinate. Besides, the idea of doing it outside as Dad and I did when we were on fishing trips appealed to me. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
“So I did it right there, which happened to be alongside the church and somewhat protected from view, so I thought. However, I was not safe at all! Dad came along just then and spotted me. I am sure no punishment was meted out, and I cannot remember what he said, but I do remember feeling I have done a pretty horrible thing by urinating outside!” William’s mother was very affectionate, as he remembers it. She appeared to enjoy cuddling her children, and especially him. However, she, too, was very concerned about matters of behavior. When he was no older than eight or nine, she extracted a promise from him that he would never smoke. The degree to which her own fears about herself were involved in her attitudes are revealed by something se said to him later as a teenager. At a moment when they were alone together she said, “Son, you and I are very sensitive people. We do not go in for thing halfway. Keep this in mind when you are an adult, as it can be an asset for your career aspirations.” When he was around twelve, the question of church membership arose. William’s parents did not tell him he had to join. They simply told him if he wanted to, he was old enough to join. William felt, however, that there was an expectation on their part and the congregation’s part that the minister’s son would become a church member. Yet he had many doubts and questions. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
William was not sure that God existed; and furthermore he was aware of anger and resentment that he did not think Christians should feel Furthermore, he was becoming more and more aware of the feelings of pleasures of the flesh, which were at the same time exciting and frightening. These, too, he felt were feelings that a Christian should not have. He felt very guilty about these doubts and feelings, but unfortunately he did not feel free to discuss them with his parents or anyone else. So he joined the church and felt guilty about that, too! Four or five year later William’s father become the minister of a struggling neighborhood church. The church was torn by internal struggles and the father, probably in an effort to unify the congregation, agreed to suggestions by the more conservative members that an evangelist be engaged. For William it was an emotional week of nightly meetings. The music was joyful and contagious, but he could enter in only half-heartedly, burdened down by the knowledge that he was not really a Christian. He wanted desperately to confess his hypocrisy, but could bring himself to do so. On the final evening of meeting and during the last call for those who want to accept the Lord Jesus as their personal Savior to hold up their hands whole every head is bowed, he held up his hand. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
Relief was not immediate. He went home and spent a restless night. The next morning, a Sunday, he sought out the evangelist at church and asked to speak to him. They went to a private room where he told the evangelist of his doubts and his feeling of sin. They prayed together, and the evangelist assured him of God’s love and desire to forgive him. It was then that William suddenly felt loved and accepted. A great sense of being right with God and humankind swept over him. He felt twelve feet high and the World suddenly seemed a wonderful place in which to be alive! William really felt like he was, as the evangelist might have put it, a new man in Christ Jesus. The congregation soon became aware of what has happened. And although William’s mother at first expressed some bewilderment that such an experience should have been necessary, family and congregation expressed their delight and approval at his new and wonderful awareness of the Christian faith. And William himself was filled with feelings of good will and love for all humankind. From a psychological standpoint, it would appear that this experience in William’s life could be described as an interruption in the rejection cycle. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
Having been filled with feelings of self-hate, guilt, and self-condemnation, he suddenly felt worthwhile and loved by God and the Christian community. He felt cleansed of sin, and born again, no longer an object of self-hatred but of God by adoption. Had William at the time been able to put his beliefs into words, William might have said something like this: “I now know that God loves me and forgives me for having been and for being the terrible person that I am. Therefore, I am released from the terrible burden of self-hate and guilt that has plagued me and am free to be more creative and more loving. In terms of the rejection cycle, what happened might look like this: Feelings of rejection by parents, feelings of worthlessness, self-hate, confession and conversion, overwhelming feeling of acceptance by God and the Christian community, new feelings of worth (“If God and the church love me so much, I must be worthwhile.”). However, prior to conversion there is a need to escape by attempting to please by joining the church. Unsuccessful attempts to suppress anger, pleasures of the flesh, doubt and so forth, which lead to feelings of further rejection (“God condemns me, and parents and the church people would if they knew me.”), producing feelings of worthlessness and self-hate. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
There is no denying that a remarkable change occurred in William’s life. Change in behavior may not have been particularly noticeable, since he had always done pretty much what was expected of him. However, one cannot listen to him describe the experience without being aware that a dramatic change did occur in his feeling of being condemned by God, a change that had significant effect on many of his attitudes. Many members of religious communities live of their lives at this level of understanding whether they reach it by a conversion experience, as William did, or by a gradual growth process in a religious home. And many people seem relatively happy in this life. It costs them something in spontaneity, for they go to considerable psychological effort to keep many of their feelings suppressed. And when they slip back and do things they should not do, say things they should not say, or feel things they should not feel, they again feel guilty, confess, and feel forgiven again for their sins. They rejoice in the amount of love they feel for others, although the sensitive outsider may feel they are more condemning than loving. The catch in William’s adjustment to his kind of religious community is that it is based on a view that regards mortals as inherently evil. And William’s conversation bear much resemblance to the escape hatch in which the person tries to escape feelings of self-hate by attempts to please. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
By saying in effect, “I have been an unworthy sinner who should be condemned, but I intend henceforth to lead a life of faith and dedication to the service of God, the individual often does win a favorable response from family, the religious community, and, he believes, from God. However, the hazards that go along with attempts to please are potentially attendant here also. The individual is likely to come to feel that the love he experiences is conditional upon one’s performance and therefore is not really directed toward one as a person. And, too, although he may keep his feelings of self-hate largely repressed, they are potentially increased, for in becoming a convent he had given up much of his freedom to be an individual in his own right. He is dedicated to hating and eradicating feelings that are an important part of oneself, particularly one’s anger and many of one’s feelings for pleasures of the flesh. To accomplish this one becomes more repressed and less spontaneous in one’s behavior. William eventually came to this conclusion: he entered seminary and followed his father into the ministry, but he found that he was not successful in suppressing the feelings he felt were wrong and for which he had sought forgiveness. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
William married while he was in college, but he fond that he felt attraction for pleasure of the flesh towards women other than his wife. This was sinful, so he felt guilt, embarrassed, and inept around women. There were many times when he felt depressed our sullen toward other people and helpless to do anything about it, for to be aware of anger would be a sin in itself. To express it directly would be unthinkable. He also found himself tending to be critical and condemning people for doing things he later realized were things he wanted to do but did not feel free to do. Eventually William found his way into a therapeutic program where he discovered he could be loved for himself as a person—not for what he presented to be. In this secular setting what might be described as an even more basic conversion occurred. In a process that will be descried more fully later, he experienced much more fundamental feelings of self-worth than he had ever experienced before. Was William religious conversation as a high school boy a negative experience in his life? He does not feel that it was. He says, “Although I no longer accept the view of mortals or God on which that experience was founded, nevertheless it was a turning point in my life. At a time when I needed it most, it gave me a feeling of being worth something, however shaky that feeling may have proved later. It is certainly not the route to self-acceptance that I would choose for others to follow. However, for me, at that time and in that environment, it may well have been the only way that held any hope for me.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
So for William it might be fair to say that religion was both a hinderance and a help. The belief that the neglect of actual life is the beginning of spiritual life, and that the failure to use clear thought is the beginning of guidance from God, belongs to mysticism in the most rudimentary stages—and had no truth in it. The World will come to believe in mysticism because there is no alternative, and it will do so in spite of mysticism’s historical weaknesses and intellectual defects. However, if those weaknesses and defects were self-eliminated, how much better it would be for everyone. He has also learned the art of living that the experiences of everyday life yield up their meaning to him, and the reflections of daily meditation endow him with wisdom. If it be asked, “What is the nature of mystical experience?” the answer given very tersely is, “It is experience which gives to the individual a slant on the universal, like the heart’s delight in the brightness of a May morning in England, or the joy of a mother in her newborn child, in the sweetness of deep friendship, in the lilt of great poetry. It is the language of the arts, which if approached only by intellectual ways yields only half its content. Whoever comes eventually to mystical experience of the reality of one’s own Higher Self will recognize the infinite number of ways in which nature throughout life is beckoning one. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
The higher mystical experience is not a sport of nature, a freak phenomenon. It is the continuation of a sequence the beginning and end which are as vast as the beginning and end of the great cycle of life in all the Worlds. No mortal can measure it. It is truth that there is little mention of the beauty of the World in the Gospel. However, in so short a text, which, as Saint John says, is very far from containing all that Christ taught, the disciples no doubt thought it unnecessary to put anything so generally accepted. It does, however, come up on two occasions. Once Christ tells us to contemplate and imitate the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, in their indifference as to the future and their docile acceptance of destiny; and another time he invites us to contemplate and imitate the indiscriminate distribution of rain and Sunlight. The Renaissance thought to renew its spiritual links with antiquity by passing over Christianity, but it hardly took anything but the secondary products of ancient civilization—art, science, and curiosity regarding human things. It scarcely touched the fringe of the central inspiration. It failed to rediscover any link with the beauty of the World. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
Become Better than You Are and Live More Beautifully than You Do!
We do not come into the World knowing how to build a house or speak a formal language. However, a bird is hardwired to build its nest. A cat is hardwired to hunt for food, and care for kitten. Therefore, it is essential for our fully realize mortal to have a well balanced and fully functioning body, to develop one’s creative abilities and personal functioning, and to learn to experience rich satisfying relations with others. However, one lives in a cultural context. One lives within a family, one works, one belongs to certain racial and religious groups, one is a member of a particular generation, and one functions within a political structure. Each of these memberships can inhibit or facilitate the human potential. The past few decades have been an upsurge of interest in using such organizational contexts for the greater development of individual personalities. Methods of handling conflict and encouraging understanding are being used and evolved in many context. One lives within a family, one is a member of a particular generation, and one functions within a political structure. Each of these memberships can inhibit or facilitate the human potential. The past few decades have seen an upsurge of interest development of individual personalities. Methods of handling conflict and encouraging understanding are being used and evolved in many context. #RandolphHarris 1 of 6
Freedom is now in a crisis so serious that its meaning is obscured, and those who use the word are called, often justifiably, hypocritical. In our day freedom is beset by paradoxes, many of which we find surfacing on all sides. Total war was being waged in the name of freedom and democracy. We were all mobilized to fight for the American Way of Life. Yet in the glare of the conflagration overseas we could see clearly how much unfreedom and inequality went into that way of life. Many victims of the Depression were still hungry and terrified; labor all over the country was bound to long hours and low wages. “Freedom’s just another word for nothin’ left to lose,” demonstrates that multitudes of people whose convictions are expressed by such music believe that the word “freedom” is used as bait to entice them down Heaven knows what primrose path. These people see the hypocrisies, the false dilemmas, the artificial decorations and gimmicks that now make this once noble word almost unusable. From its position as the most treasured word in our language, the most precious experience of humankind, freedom has now been reduced in many quarters to a synonym for mockery. #RandolphHarris 2 of 6
Like other erstwhile get words—truth, beauty, God—the word freedom may soon be usable only in irony, as the poet W. H. Auden illustrates in “The Unknown Citizen.” Auden describes a man against whom there can be no official complaint, who “held the proper opinions for the time of year; when there was peace, he was for peace: when there was war, he went.” And he concludes this picture of this completely conforming, normal man with: “Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd: Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard. The great danger of freedom is its susceptibility to hypocrisy, especially screwed information and blatant lies from the media, for under the guise of saving our liberty, the greatest suppression of our freedom can be perpetrated. How many tyrants throughout history have rallied their supporters under the banner of freedom! Much like freedom of the press. The press is supposed to be a tool used to bring us information, facts, and make the World a better place. However, lately they have been using their power to keep people in the dark about illegal antics used by one political power in particular to stay in power and they preach restricting our rights, as a way of protecting the people. #RandolphHarris 3 of 6
We are reminded of Jacques Ellul’s statement about a humanity, “One is most enslaved when one thinks one is comfortably settled in freedom.” Many Americans believe in manifest destiny, especially presidential candidate in the 1980s election, Eugene McCarthy, he stated his religious belief in manifest destiny when he said, “United States was strategically placed by God as an island of freedom between two continents in which freedom was either denied or un-recognized.” Some might say this is a holier-than-thou claim that seems a mockery of freedom, but others believe it because it is the reason they live in and migrate to the United States of America. This quest of the soul is ageless. Never has the human race been without it, never could it be without it. It is not a new thing in human experience, but rather one of the oldest. Its long history in many lands makes impressive reading. It is a method, a teaching, an ideal combined for those who seek a genuine inner life of the spirit. The quest means disciplined emotions and disciplined living, sustained aspiration and nurtured intuition. It is not an ideal so far off that those who have realized it have no human links left with us. On the contrary, because it is truly philosophic, it skillfully blends life in the kingdoms of this World with life in the kingdom of Heaven. The quest is an adventure as well as a journey: a work to be done and a study to be made, a blessing which gives hope and a burden of discipline which cannot be shirked. #RandolphHarris 4 of 6
There is another kind of exploration than that which traverses deserts, penetrates jungles, climbs mountains, and crosses continents. It seeks out the mysterious hinterlands of the human mind, scales the highest reaches of human consciousness, and then returns to report routes and discoveries, describe the goals to others so that they also may find their way thereto if they wish. The spiritual quest is not a romantic or dramatic adventure, but a stern self-discipline. Nevertheless there is an element of mystery in it which at times can be quite thrilling. The quest is spiritual mountaineering. It is not a path of anaemic joylessness for lean cadaverous votaries, as some think. It is a path of radiant happiness for keen optimistic individuals. Its ideals offer an invitation to nobility and refinement. “Become better than you are!” is its preachment. “Live more beautifully than you do!” is its commandment. It is an uncontentious teaching, knowing that it is, in practice, only palatable to those who come readily equipped for it. It is not a doctrine of life only for ageing hermits, but quite as much for young keen mortal who wish to do something in the World. If only they would accept and act on the psychological truth that thinking makes it so, it is a practical goal which could also be practicable one for millions who now think it beyond their reach. #RandolphHarris 5 of 6
This sort of mind over matter is the strengthening reassurance to minds awakening from the slavish dreams of lust that they need not stay slaves forever. It is not an asceticism that is happy only in making itself miserable, but a comprehension that weighs values and abides by the result. The quest is a continual effort of self-release from inward oppressions and self-deliverance from emotional obstructions. This quest is really a system of therapeutic training devised to cure evil feelings, ignorant attitudes, and wrong thinking. The high teachers of the human race have given us goals and taught us ways to approach them. It is true that there is little mention of the beauty of the World in the Gospel. However, in short a text, which, as Saint John says, is very far from containing all that Christ taught, the disciples no doubt thought it unnecessary to put anything to generally accepted. It does, however, come up on two occasions. Once Christ tells us to contemplate and imitate the lilies of the field and the birds of the air, in their indifference as to the future and their docile acceptance of destiny; and another time he invites us to contemplate an imitate the indiscriminate distribution of rain and Sunlight. “Fools mock, but they shall mourn; and my grace is sufficient for the meek, that they shall take no advantage of your weakness,” reports Ether 12.26. #RandolphHarris 6 of 6
Randolph Harris II International Institute 