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An Architect Builds a House with the Same Feeling as that with which a Criminal Commits a Crime!
The evening sky was a deep shining blue, as it is often in this part of the World, as incandescent as it can be over Cresleigh Homes Rocklin Trails, and the soft white clouds made the same clean and dramatic panorama on the far edge of the gleaming sea. Entrancing, and this was but one tiny part of the golden state of California. Why do I ever wander in other climes at all? The plain truth is that the more any being is exposed to middle-class values, the more sophisticated one becomes. Many people feel resigned to their fate, however. They are furiously angry at themselves for what they were doing, or desperately hunting other work that would pay as well and in addition offer some variety, some prospect of change and betterment. Some opportunity to obtain the American Dream of owning a beautiful home, having a wife and kids and two nice automobiles, and a saving account to help pay for college, medical bills, home repairs, and maintenance and for family vacations. Beings are sick of being pushed around by harried foremen (themselves more pitied than hated), sick of working like blinkered donkeys, sick of being dependent for their livelihood on maniacal production-merchandising setup, sick of working in a place where there is no spot to relax during the twelve-minute rest period. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
The mature people stay put and wait for their vacations. However, since the corporations demands young blood (if you are over thirty-five, you have a hard time getting hired), the corporation in which I work is aswarm with new faces every day; labor turnover was so fantastic and absenteeism so rampant, with the young people knocking off a day or two every week to hunt up other jobs, that the company is forced to over-hire in order to have sufficient workers on hand at the starting siren. Nevertheless, white-collars commuters, too, dislike their work, accept it only because it buy their family commodities, and are constantly on prowl for other work, I can only reply that for me at any rate this is proof not of the disappearance of the working class but of the proletarianization of the middle class. Perhaps it is not taking place quite in the way that Marx envisaged it, but the alienation of the white-collar being (like that of the laborer) from both their tools and whatever one produces, the slavery that chains the exurbanite to the commuting timetable (as the worker is still chained to the timeclock), the anxiety that sends the white-collar being home with one’s briefcase for an evening’s work (as it degrades the working being into pleading for long hours of overtime), the displacement of the white-collar slum from the wrong side of the river to the suburbs (just as the working-class slum is moved from old-law tenements to skyscrapers barracks)—all these mean to me that the white-collar being is entering (though one’s arms may be loaded with commodities) the gray World of the working being. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
Three quotations from beings with whom I worked may help bring my view into focus: Before starting work: “Come on, suckers, they say the Foundation wants to give away more than half a billion this year. Let us do and die for the old Foundation.” During rest period: “Ever stop to think how we craw here bumper to bumper, and crawl home bumper to bumper, and we have got to turn out mere every minute to keep our jobs, when there is not even any room for them on the highways?” At quitting time (this from the mature foremen, whose job is not only to keep things moving, but by extension to serve as company spokesmen): “You are smart to get out of here…I curse they day I ever started, now I am stuck: any man with brains that stays here ought to have his head examined. This is no place for an intelligent human being.” Such is the attitude towards work. And towards the product? On the one hand it is admired and desire as a symbol of freedom, almost a substitute for freedom, not because the worker participated in making it, but because our whole culture is dedicated to the proposition that the automobile is both necessary and beautiful. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
On the other hand the automobile is hated an disposed—so much that if your new car smells bad it may be due to a banana peel crammed down its gullet and sealed up thereafter, so much that if your dealer cannot locate the rattle in your new car you might ask him or her to open the welds on one of those tail fins and vacuum out the nuts and bolts thrown in by workers sabotaging their own product. Sooner or later, if we want a decent society—by which I do not mean a society glutted with commodities or one maintained in precarious equilibrium by over-buying and forced premature obsolescence—we are going to come face to face with the problem of work. Apparently the Russians have committed themselves to the replenishment of their labor force through automatic recruitment of those intellectually incapable of keeping up with severe scholastic requirements in the public educational system. Apparently we, too, are heading in the same direction: although our economy is not directed, and although college education is as yet far from free, we seem to be operating in this capitalist economy on the totalitarian assumption that we can funnel the underprivileged, undereducated, or just plain underequipped, int a factory, where are can proceed t forget about them once we have posted the minimum fair labour standards on the factory wall. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
If this is what we want, let us be honest enough to say so. If we conclude that there is nothing noble about repetitive work, but that it is nevertheless good enough for the lower orders, let us say that, too, so we will at least know where we stand. However, if we cling to the belief that other beings are our brothers and sisters, not just Egyptians, or Israelis, Canadians, or Hungarians, but all beings, including millions of Americans who grind their lives away on an insane treadmill, then we will have to start thinking about how their work and their lives can be made meaningful. That is what I assume the Hungarians, both workers and intellectuals, have been thinking about. Since no one has been ordering us what to think, since no one has been forbidding our intellectuals to fraternize with our workers, should not it be a little easier for us to admit, first, that our problems exist, then to state them and then to see if we can resolve them? Competitive power is power against another. In its negative form, it consists of one person going up not because of anything one does or any merit one has, but because one’s opponent goes down. There are many examples of this in industry and in universities, such as the appointing of a president or chairman when there is only one desire position and many applicants. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
Competitive power may also be the kind of power present in student rivalry due to the grading system, which promotes destructive personal influences directly counter to whatever impulses students have toward mutual caring and cooperation. It causes college students to hate transfer students from junior colleges because they believe they are better prepared to handle the curriculum. The chief criticism of this kind of power is its parochialism: it continuously shrinks—although not as drastically as manipulation—the area of human community in which one lives. However, at this point we note a very interesting shift from destructive to constructive power. For competitive power can give zest and vitality to human relations. I refer to the kind or rivalry that is stimulating and constructive. A football game in which one side immediately establishes its superiority is simply not interesting. We want our opponents to test our mettle; pure ease at winning is boring. This kind of competition is much more present in the business World than most people assume; that the achievement (which I include in the realm of power) of businessmen is possessed in their own satisfaction in getting better results, more efficient activity, to which their competition pushes them. #RandolpHarris 6 of 16
It is worthwhile to remind ourselves that the great drama of The Queen of the Damned, The Vampire Lestat, Tale of the Body Thief, and Interview with the Vampire and many of the works of Anne Rice were produced in competitions. The implication is that it is not competition itself that is destructive but only the kind of competitive power. The competition between America and China, in the race to the Moon or to produce more cost efficient and better forms of technology (mousetraps), drains off a great deal of tension that would otherwise go to warfare. This kind of competition in sports is a counteraction to the competitive power that might otherwise lead America and Russian to tear at each other’s throats. Even if such assertions presuppose a too simplistic view of international aggression, they nevertheless do illustrate a beneficial form of competitive power. To have someone against you is not necessarily a bad thing; at least one is not over you or under you, and accepting one’s rivalry may bring out dormant capacities in you. For example, Lestat in The Tales of the Body Thief switched bodies with a human, but found he was unhappy because it was not natural for him. He thought he missed blue skies, green grass, Sunlight, and blue oceans, but being human almost killed him. It brought out the weakness in him and made he see that in his vampire body he was happy, a superior being, and knew that his human adventure had failed. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
Fear and anxiety are both proportionate reactions to danger, but in the cause of fear the danger is a transparent, objective one and in the case of anxiety it is hidden and subjective. That is, the intensity of the anxiety is proportionate to the meaning the situation has for the person concerned, and the reasons why one is thus anxious are essentially unknow to one. The practical implication of the distinction between fear and anxiety is that the attempt to argue a neurotic out of one’s anxiety—the method of persuasion—is useless. One’s anxiety concerns not the situation as it stands actually in reality, but the situation as it appears to one. The therapeutic task, therefore, can be only that of finding out the meaning certain situations have for one. Having qualified what we mean by anxiety we have to get an idea of the role it plays. The average person in our culture is little aware of the importance anxiety as in one’s life. Usually one remembers only that one had some anxiety in one’s childhood, that one had one or more anxiety dreams, and that one was inordinately apprehensive in a situation outside one’s daily routine, as, for instance, before an important talk with an influential person or before examinations. The information we get from neurotic persons on this score is anything but uniform. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Some neurotics are fully aware of being hounded by anxiety. Its manifestations vary immensely: it may appear as diffused anxiety, in the form of anxiety-attacks; it may be attached to definite situations or activities, such as heights, high rise buildings, low income housing, school, streets, public performances; it may have a definite content, such as apprehension about getting married, becoming insane, growing out of your teenage body as an adult, getting cancer, swallowing pins. Others realize that they have anxiety now and then, with or without know the conditions that provoke it, but they do not attribute any importance to it. Finally there are neurotic persons who are aware only of having depressions, feelings of inadequacy, disturbances in pleasures of the flesh, and the like, but they are entirely unaware of ever having or having had anxiety. Closer investigation, however, usually proves their first statement to be inaccurate. In analyzing these persons one invariably finds just as much anxiety beneath the surface as in the first group, if not more. The analysis makes theses neurotic persons conscious of their previous anxiety and they may recall anxiety dreams or situation in which they felt apprehensive. Yet the extent of anxiety acknowledged by them usually does not surpass the normal. This suggests that we may have micro anxiety without knowing it. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
When it is put in this way the significance of the problem involved here does not show. It is part of a more comprehensive problem. We have feelings of affection, anger, suspicion, so fleeting that they scarcely invade awareness, and so transitory that we forget them. These feelings may really be irrelevant and transitory; but they may just as well have behind them a great dynamic force. The degree of awareness of a feeling does not indicate anything of its strength or importance. Concerning anxiety this means not only that we may have anxiety without knowing it, but that anxiety may be the determining factor in our lives without out being conscious of it. In fact, we seem to go to any length to escape anxiety or to avoid feeling it. There are many reasons for this, the most general reason being that intense anxiety is one of the most tormenting affects we can have. Patients who have gone through an intense fit of anxiety will tell you that they would rather die than have a recurrence of that experience. Besides, certain elements contained in the affect of anxiety may be particularly unbearable for the individual. One of them is helplessness. One can be active and courageous in the face of great danger. However, in a state of anxiety one feels—in fact, is—helpless. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
To be rendered helpless is particularly unbearable for those persons whom power, ascendancy, the idea of being master of any situation, is a prevailing ideal. Impressed by the apparent disproportion of their reaction they resent it, as if it demonstrated a weakness or a cowardice. Why is creativity so difficult? And why does it require so much courage? Is it not simply a matter of clearing away the dead forms, the defunct symbols and the myths that have become lifeless? No. It is as difficult as forgoing in the smithy of one’s soul. We are faced with a puzzling riddle indeed. Having attended a concert given by Aaliyah, Sully Erna wrote the following letter when he got home:
My dear Mrs. Aaliyah Haughton,
My wife and I were overwhelmed by your beauty and your voice during your concert. If you continue to sing with such grace and beauty, you will certainly die young. No one can sing with such perfection and look so beautiful without provoking the jealousy of the gods. I earnestly implore you to sing something badly every night before going to bed…. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Beneath Sully Erna’s letter there was a profound truth—creativity provokes the jealousy of the gods. This is why authentic creativity takes so much courage: an active battle with the gods is occurring. I cannot give you any complete explanation of why this is so; I can only share my reflections. Although the film Queen of the Damned is based on the legend, one can see the intimidation and disdain when Queen Akasha played by Aaliyah when she walked into the bar. And if you read the novel The Queen of the Damned, by the description of Akasha, you can tell that role was meant for Aaliyah. Her life’s work is probably more significant than most can truly understand. That was a powerful role. It is akin to Meghan Markle being made a duchess, and the struggles she faces carrying and giving birth to a royal heir. Down through the ages, authentically creative figures have constantly found themselves in such a struggle. An architect builds a house with the same feeling as that with which a criminal commits a crime. In Judaism and Christianity the second of the Ten Commandments adjures us, “You shall not make yourself a graven image, or any likeness of anything that is in the Heavens above or that is in the Earth beneath, or that is in the water under the Earth.” I am aware that the ostensible purpose of this commandment was to protect Jewish people from idol worship in those idol-strewn times. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
However, the commandment also expresses the timeless fear that every society harbors of its artist, poets, entertainers and saints. For they are the ones who threaten the status quo, which each society is devoted to protecting. It is clearest in the struggles occurring in American to usurp power from President Trump and the republican party. Yet in spite of this divine prohibition, and despite the courage necessary to flout it, countless Jews and Christians through the ages have devoted themselves to painting and sculpting and entertaining and have continued to make graven images and produce symbols in one form or another. Many of then have had the same experience of a battle with the gods. That is because genius and psychosis are so close to each other. Also, creativity carries such an inexplicable guilt feeling. So many entertainers and artist experience death by suicide, or assassination and often at the very height of their achievement, much like Aaliyah. We burn with desire to find a steadfast place and an ultimate fixed basis whereon we may build a tower to reach the infinite. However, our whole foundation breaks up, and Earth opens to be abysses. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
As result, we have witnessed an explosion of interest in the transcendental dimension of human experience. The recent collapse of traditions has brought an even greater sense of desolation to many clients and even greater impulse to compensate for and deny that desolation. Some have turned to drugs to provide that compensation, others to materialism, and still others to relationships and religion. We have also witnessed an avalanche of studies extolling the transcendental (or transpersonal) dimension of human experience. They have provided a necessary counterweight to the smug, antiseptic traditional psychological theorizing on this topic. Transpersonal psychologist encourage their clients to take guidance not from observed reality or rational thinking, but rather from their intuitive minds and other intangible sources. Some transpersonal theorists, on the other hand, are equally insistent about the virtues of transcendental experience. Such theorists as Ken Wilber unqualifying embrace the notion of an ultimate or godlike human consciousness, totally unrestricted by time and space. The film Queen of the Damned was supervised like no other film anyone knew of. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
It appeared to be one of Warner Brothers most important projects, and they obsessed with every detail. Queen of the Damned (2002) is also considered by some—for example, the British critic Robin Wood—to be one of the finest, if not the finest, motions pictures ever made alone with Interview with the Vampire (1994). The theological strict and rigid doctrines that God can take on the nature of living beings constitutes a mystery beyond human understanding. It is unintelligible and unacceptable to philosophy, which can limit God’s unbound being to no particular place, no here or there. The moment we give to finite human beings that which we should give to infinite God alone, in that moment we place Earthen idols in the sacred shrine. We must not give to finite human beings the attributes of Divinity as we must not give to Divinity the attributes of individual beings. There is metaphysically no such thing as a human appearance of God that we know of, as the Infinite Mind brought down into finite flesh. God cannot be born in the flesh, cannot take a human incarnation. If God could so confine himself, he would cease to be God. For how could the Perfect, the Incomprehensible, and the Inconceivable become the imperfect, the comprehensible, and the conceivable? I guess this is why the legend of vampires, who have godly powers, have flaws and are evil by nature. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
From time to time, someone is born predestined to give a spiritual impulse to a particular people, area, or age. One is charged with a special mission of teaching and redemption and is imbued with special power from the universal intelligence to enable one to carry it out. One must plant seeds which grow slowly into trees to carry fruit that will feed millions of unborn people. In this sense one is different from and, if you like, superior to anyone else who is also inspired by the Overself. However, this difference or superiority does not alter one’s human status, does not make one more than a being still, however divinely used and power-charged one may be. All of this is not to be misunderstood to mean that we suggest that everyone ought to acquire every item of one’s spiritual knowledge afresh through one’s own personal experience, ignoring all the experience of the whole race. On the contrary, we would strongly suggest that one avail oneself of this experience through the form it has taken in great literature throughout the World. A competent spiritual director of one’s way is certainly worth having, but unfortunately the problem of where to find such a being seems insuperable. If an aspirant is lucky enough to solve it without becoming the victim of one’s own imagination one will be lucky indeed. If not, let one exploit one’s own inner resources. Let one appeal to the divine soul within oneself for what one needs. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Why Does He Have to Weep to Have His Love? Why Can He Not Enjoy His Love?
Deep drifts of snow lay everywhere. The streets were clearly impassable to traffic, and there were times when I fell on my knees again, arms going deep into the snow, and Nacho liked my face as though he were trying to keep me warm. But I continued, struggling uphill, whatever my state of mind and body, until at last I turned the corner, and saw the lights of the familiar Cresleigh Homes Rocklin Trails House ahead. In the year 1619 the bakers of London applied to increase the price of bread. The pâtissiers sent in support a complete description of a bakery and of its weekly costs. Thirteen people there were in such an establishment: the baker and his wife, four paid employees who were called journeymen, two maid-servants, two apprentices, and the baker’s three children. Food cost more than anything else, more than raw materials, and nearly four times as much as wages. Clothing was charged up, too, not only for man, wife, and children but for the apprentices as well. Even school fees were included in the cost of baking bread for sale. A London bakery was undoubtedly what we should called a commercial or industrial undertaking, turning out loaves by the thousand. Yet it was carried on in the house of the baker himself, an ordinary house with a few extra sheds. #RandolphHarris 1 of 24
All these people, moreover, took their meals in the house, every meal of the day. They even slept there at night; indeed they were obliged to do so, expect for the journeymen. In short, universal custom and law of the land obliged these thirteen people to live together as a family. They only word ever used at that time to describe such a group of people was the word “family.” The man at the head of the group, the man we should call the entrepreneur, or the employer or the manager, was then known as the master, or head of the family. He was father in fact to some of its member, in place of father to the rest. There was no distinction between his domestic and his economic functions. His wife was both his partner and his subordinate, a partner because she ran the family, took charge of the food and managed the women servants, a subordinate because she was woman and wife, mother and in place of mother to the rest. The paid servants had their specified and familiar position in the family, as much part of it as the children, but not quite in the position of the children. The apprentices were well fed, obliged to obedience and forbidden to marry, unpaid and absolutely dependent until the age of twenty-one. And if apprentices were workers who were also children, the children themselves, the sons and daughters of the master and mistress, were workers too. #RandolphHarris 2 of 24
At the end of the century John Locke laid it down that when they reached three, the children of the poor must begin work for some part of the day. We may see at once, therefore, that the World we have lost, as I have called it, was no paradise, no golden age of equality, tolerance, and loving-kindness. It is so important that I should not be misunderstood on this point that I will say at once that in my view the coming of industry cannot be shown to have brought economic oppression and exploitation with it. It was there already. The patriarchal arrangements which I have begun to describe were not new in the England of Shakespeare and of Elizabeth. These arrangements were as old as the Greeks, as old as European history, and they abused and enslaved people quite as remorselessly as the economic arrangements which had replaced them in the England of Blake and Victoria. However, there were differences in the manner of oppressing and exploiting. The ancient order of society which gave way before the coming of industry was felt by those who supposed, enjoyed, and endured it to be eternal and unchangeable. There was no expectation of reform. #RandolphHarris 3 of 24
When economic relationships were domestic relationships, and domestic relationships were rigidly regulated by the social system, by the content of Christianity itself, how could there be expectation of reform? This is in sharp contrast with social expectations in Victorian England, and in all industrial society since. Since the coming of industry, societies have been far less table than their predecessors. They lack the extraordinary influence for cohesiveness which familiar relationships carry with them, that power of reconciling the frustrated and the discontented by emotional means. You have noticed that the roles we have allotted to all the members of the extended family of the master baker of London in 1619 are all, emotionally, highly symbolic and highly satisfactory. In a whole society organized like this, everyone belongs, everyone has one’s circle of affection, every relationship can be seen as a love relationship. It may indeed well be a love relationship. Not so with us. Even if he were a bully and a beater, a usurer and a hypocrite, who could love the name of a limited company as an apprentice could love one’s superbly satisfactory father-figure master? However, if a family is a circle of affection, it can also be the scene of hatred. The true tyrants among beings, the villains and the murderers, are jealous husbands and resentful wives, tyrannical fathers, deprived children. #RandolphHarris 4 of 24
Concerning aggression, I mean, in contradistinction to the attitudes of self-assertion, acts of going against someone, attacking, disparaging, encroaching, or any form of hostile behavior—disturbances of this kind show themselves in two entirely different ways. One way is a propensity to be aggressive, domineering, over-exacting, to boss, cheat or find fault. Occasionally persons who have these attitudes are aware of being aggressive; more often they are not in the least aware of it and are convinced subjectively that they are just being honest or merely expressing an opinion, or even being modest in their demands, although in reality they are offensive and imposing. In others, however, these disturbances show themselves in the opposite way. One finds on the surface an attitude of easily feeling cheated, dominated, scolded, imposed on or humiliated. These persons, too, are frequently not aware that this is their own attitude, but believe sadly that the whole World is down on them, imposing on them. Peculiarities of another kind, those in the pleasures of the flesh sphere, may be classified roughly as either a compulsive need for activities to please the flesh or inhibitions toward such activities. Inhibitions may appear at any step leading to satisfaction of the flesh. They may set in at the approach of persons of the other gender, in wooing, in the functions of the pleasures of the flesh themselves or in the enjoyment. All the peculiarities describe in the preceding groups will appear also in the attitudes dealing with pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 5 of 24
In the traditional patriarchal society of Europe, which I am trying to describe, where everyone lived one’s whole life in a family, often in the same family, such tension must have been incessant and unrelieved, incapable of release except in crisis. Men, women, and children have to be very close together and for a very long time indeed to generate the emotional power which can give rise to a tragedy of Sophocles, or Shakespeare, or Racine. Conflict then was between individual people, on the personal scale. Clashes between whole groups, such as those which go to make our twenty-first century society the scene of perpetual revolution as we call it, could arise far less often then. This can only have been so if the little knot of thirteen people making bread was indeed the typical social unit of the old World, typical in size, in scale, in composition. In fact we can take the bakery to be the limiting case for the family which was sovereign in the society of our ancestors, the society of these days before the industrial revolution. We shall see in a moment what form the family took over the great expanse of society which lived on the land. However, our chosen example has other things to tell us. We may notice, for one thing, that our folk-memory of the World we have lost is in much these terms, rather than in rural terms. #RandolphHarris 6 of 24
We still talk to children about apprentices who marry their master’s daughter, of bakers who really bake, in their houses, in their homes, of spinster who really sit by the fire and spin. Nursery rhymes and fairy tales preserve the language pretty well unaltered. In fact a reliable guide to the subject in hands is Grimm’s Fairy Tales, even Walt Disney. Which means that it is already half known to the historian before one starts, known by rote and not by understanding. Therefore one has neglected it, and neglecting it has failed to set up the correct contrast with the social order which has now succeeded. Without contrast there cannot be understanding, and I submit that we are unable to comprehend our industrial society because the historian whose job it is has not told us what society was like without industry. However, we do know that being a housewife is the true oldest profession in the World, it dates all the way back to the very first human beings, Adam and Eve. The working family of the London baker vividly illustrates the scale of life under the antiquated social order: no group of persons larger than a family, fifteen or twenty at most; no object larger than the London Bridge or St. Paul’s Cathedral; no workaday building larger than an ordinary house. Everything physical was on the human scale. #RandolphHarris 7 of 24
The death of the head of a family in the World of commerce and industry which we have been describing was almost certainly the end to its existence. The hope was that a son would succeed, or, if there was no son, an apprentice instead, which was why I was important that he should marry the master’s own kin. Often, surprisingly often, the widow would herself carry on, though it could not be for long. Anne Rice’s Interview with the Vampire paints accurate picture of what it was like in the eighteenth century for women, when Lestat kills the Freniere boy who was master of the plantation. With the death of Freniere, the plantation would collapse because it was a fragile economy, a life of splendor based on the perennial mortgaging of next year’s crop, and it was in his hands alone. After the death of the Freniere boy, the five Freniere sisters were agonizing. However, another Vampire called Louis convinces Babbette that she can save the plantation as long as she was confident. He told her, “Stop at nothing until you have the answers. And take my visitations to you to be your courage whenever you waver. You must take the reins of your own life. Your brother is dead.” However, later on Babette became the scandal of the neighborhood because she chose to run the plantation on her on. She had scandalized the coast by remaining alone on the plantation without a man in the house, without even an older woman. #RandolphHarris 8 of 24
Babette’s greatest problem was that she might succeed financially only to suffer the isolation of social ostracism. She has such a sensibility that wealth itself meant nothing to her; family, a long…this meant something to Babette. Though she was able to old the plantation together, the scandal was wearing on her. She was giving up inside. However, as you know jealous people will use your life as if it were oil for a lamp. This, then, was not simply a World without factories; it was a World without firms, a World without economic continuity. Since every activity was limited by what could be organized within a family, and within the lifetime of a family, there as an unending struggle to manufacture continuity, to provide an expectation for the future. “One hundred and twenty family uprising and downlying, whereof you may take out six or seven, and all the rest were servants and retainers”: this was the household of the Herberts, Earls of Pembroke in the years before the Civil War, and it illustrates the symbolic function of the aristocratic family—to defy the limitation on size, to build big, to raise up a line which should remain forever. However, what do these words mean? Who was England in, say the year 1650? Not every single person living then within our boundaries no one with historical sense would claim that. #RandolphHarris 9 of 24
However, only a recognition that people came no in individuals but in clots, in families of the sort I have described, only that recognition makes clear that England in its final definition meant only those grown males who were heads of households, who were literate and who had some degree of individuality. This at once excludes all women, all those under the age of nearly thirty, for all these persons were caught up, so to speak—subsumed is the ugly word I shall use—in the personalities of the heads of the families to which they belonged. England, in fact, meant a far, far smaller number off persons even than this would imply. Historians have not, it seems to me, tended to talk about important qualifications as to the use of the word. However, they seem, of recent years anyway, to be fairly confident that they know what it was that transformed this patriarchal World into the World we live in now. Capitalism did a great deal of it, they say, and it is capitalism which we must contrast with the patriarchal society: capitalism with its new spirit, whatever that dangerous word may be doing in the historian’s vocabulary, was the great disruptive force which broke up the World we have lost and dethroned the family from its sovereignty in society. However, by the seventeenth century capitalism was at least 300 years old, and perhaps much older. #RandolphHarris 10 of 24
We have seen, in the example of the way in which the putting-out system of industry came to the rescue of the laborer on the land, that capitalism was perfectly compatible with family economic arrangements. Capitalism, we shall conclude, is an incomplete description: it simply cannot do the historian’s work which has been thrust upon it. The historical distortions which have risen from the word capitalism are a result, I believe, in some degree to a faulty sense of proportion, which we can only bow begin to correct. With the “capitalism-changed-the-World” way of thinking goes a division of history into the ancient feudal, and bourgeois eras or stages. I think that the contrast which we have been trying to draw here between the World we have lost and the World we now inhabit makes all other divisions into subdivisions. European society is of the patriarchal type, and with some variations, of which perhaps the feudal variation went furthest, it was patriarchal in its institutions right up to the coming of the factories, the offices, and the rest. It is now patriarchal no longer, except in a vestigial way, and in its emotional predisposition. It is now time that we divided up history up again in accordance with what is really important. #RandolphHarris 11 of 24
The word alienation is part of the cant of the twenty-first century, and it began as an attempt to describe the separation of the worker from a World of work. We need not accept all that this expression has come to convey in order to recognize that it does point us the way to realizing something of the first importance to us all in relation to our past. Time was, and it was all time up to 260 years ago, when the whole of life went forward in the family, in a circle of loved, familiar faces, known and fondled objects, all to human size. That time has gone forever. It makes us very different from our ancestors. However, there still remains a therapeutic problem; many people possess a sense of emptiness that some clients feel—even when they are convinced that they are full. What they are actually full of are false highs, dreams with no substance, hypomanic reactions, and an array of compulsions. These extravagances lead inexorably to collapse—and the cycle repeats once again. Client need to pause over their emptiness, to explore it, in order to break their dysfunctional cycle. They may be less affluent than other, or deprives or deflated, but they do not have to collapse or overreach. One can find possibilities within their restrictedness, to wonder, for example, and to consciously transcend their despair. #RandolphHarris 12 of 24
Many beings believe that they can recreate themselves, deny their parentage and their roots and build a new identity. In their imaginations, some have never really accepted their parents as their parents because they are ashamed of where they come from. The heart of the problem this generation faces is that they are haunted by a sense of Sin and Fall, and assume all the weakness and depravity of human nature. While it is important to accept your roots and where you come from as apart of your identity, have complete faith, in typical American fashion, that you can transform your dreams into action. Acknowledging your roots will help to fortify this foundation, and makes it easier to transform dreams into action. Let people see that there is something gorgeous about you, some heightened sensitivity to the promises of life. It is important to gave an extraordinary gift for hope, a romantic readiness such as no one has never found in any other person and which they know they likely shall never find again. Believe unconditionally in the powerful American myth of the Green Light, a symbol that represents dreams, hopes, and desires. It means we have the clearance to reach our goals. The Green Light is like a symbol from God that he has blessed the path we are on. Everything is ahead; we make anything we choose of life. #RandolphHarris 13 of 24
The Green Light beckons us onward and upward with a promise of bigger and better things in higher and higher skyscrapers, interminably rising into infinity. The Green Light turns into our greatest illusion, covering over our difficulties, permitting us to depend on the Light and Power which is there and which, with enough patience, will be found there. Many beings believe that the important thing in the American Dreams has been to get rich, and then those very riches give a sanction to your situation. The fact of your being successful is supposedly proof that God smiles on you and that you are among the saved. It is not hard to see how this, in true Calvinistic tradition, drifted into getting rich as the eleventh commandment. The success and the money may flesh out the vast dream which many hold in its thrall and they take that as the reality of life. Money can buy the vast parties, the glitter of mansions, the freely flowing spirits, the smooth jazz music which floats from the orchestras as the hundred of people flock to the lights like moths at night. These things are important to some because sooner or later these accoutrements of Babylon will draw in true love. Yet we must also keep purity of heart in mind. We must be people who possess complete integrity. Preserving one’s fundamental integrity, one’s spiritual intactness is an essential part, maybe even the very key to life. Glorify God in your body, and in your spirit, which are God’s. We are created in the image of God and are given something of that Godliness, but under the most serious and sacred of restrictions. #RandolphHarris 14 of 24
The only control placed on us is self-control—self-control born of respect for the divine sacramental power this gift God has given us represents. Do not be deceived and do not be destroyed. Unless such powers are controlled and commandments kept, your future may be burned; your World could go up in flames. Penalty may not come on the precise day of transgression, but it comes surely and certainly enough. And unless there is true repentance and obedience to a merciful Go, then someday, somewhere, the morally cavalier and unclean will pray like the rich man who wished Lazarus to “dip my finger in water, and cool my tongue; for I am tormented in this flame.” Our bodies are therefore and extension of our spirit and eternal existence and is something to be kept pure and holy. Do not be afraid of soiling its hands to do honest labor. This is not just the Age of Information that we are feeling, but we do not want to lose the old warm World, and pay a high price for living too long with a single dream. Achieving the American Dream takes time and it make mean to progress our lives seem to be a repetition, every day and every act being forever the same in a perpetual monotonous toil and sweat. But that is the crucial meaning, we are in control of our fate. #RandolphHarris 15 of 24
With many a weary step, and many a groan, up the high hill we heave a huge round stone: the huge round stone, resulting with a bound, thunders impetus down. Nothing can be more important for human life than these circular journeys of the Sun. For we face monotony in all we do; we draw in and exhale breath after breath in ceaseless succession through every moment of our lives, which is monotony par excellence. However, out of this repetitiveness of breathing many have formed their life plan and found a way of achieving their goals. We then become a model of a hero who always is devoted to creating a better kind of life; one who presses on in spite of his or her despair. Without such a capacity to confront despair we would not have Beethoven, Rembrandt, Michelangelo, Dante, Goethe, William and Sarah Winchester, William Randolph Hearst, Harriet Tubman, Richard Aoki, Joan Baez, Tawakkol Karman, Anne Rice, Chris Rice, Reese Witherspoon, Aaliyah, Meghan Markle, and Tee Grizzly or any others of the great figures in the development of culture. This is why we are taught the imagination, the purpose of human faiths which we construct, as it gives us courage to move beyond the rock, beyond the monotony of day-to-day experience. If you reply on an external teacher you rely on something which you may have to drop tomorrow or on somebody you may have to change the day after. #RandolphHarris 16 of 24
This brings us to the most important kind of courage of all. Whereas moral courage is the righting of wrongs, creative courage, in contrast, is the discovering of new forms, new symbols new patterns on which a new society can be built. Every profession can and does require some creative courage. In our day, technology and engineering, diplomacy, business, and certainly teaching, all of these profession and scores of others are in the midst of radical change and require courageous persons to appreciate and direct this change. The need for creative courage is in direct proportion to the degree of change the profession is undergoing. However, those who present directly and immediately the new forms and symbols are the artists—the dramatists, the musicians, the painter, the dancers, the poets, and those poets of the religious sphere we call saints. They portray the new symbols in the form of images—poetic, aural, plastic, or dramatic, as the case may be. They live out their imaginations. The symbols only dreamt about my most human beings are expressed in graphic form by the artists. But in our appreciation of the created work—let us say a Mozart quintet—we also are performing a creative act. When we engage a painting, which we have to do especially with modern art if we are authentically to see it, we are experiencing some new moment of sensibility. #RandolphHarris 17 of 24
Some new vision is triggered in us by our contact with the painting; something unique is born in us. This is why appreciation of the music or painting or other works of the creation person is also a creative act on our part. If these symbols are to be understood by us, we must identity with them as we perceive them. In Beckett’s play Waiting for Godot, there are no intellectual discussions of the failure of communication in out time; the failure is simply presented there on the stage. We see it most vividly, for example, when Lucky, who, at his master’s order to “Think,” can only sputter out a long speech that has all the pomposity of a philosophical discourse but is actually pure gibberish. As we involve ourselves more and more in the drama, we see represented on stage, larger than life, our general human failure to communicate authentically. We see on the stage in, Beckett’s play, the lone, bare, tree, symbolic of the lone, bare relationship the two men have as they wait together for a Godot who never appears; and it elicits from us a similar sense of the alienation that we and multitudes of others experience. The fact that most people have no clear awareness of their alienation only makes this condition more powerful. In Eugene O’Neill’s The Iceman Cometh, there are no explicit discussions of the disintegration of our society; it is shown as a reality in the drama. The nobility of the human species is not talked about, but is presented as a vacuum on the stage. #RandolphHarris 18 of 24
Because this nobility is such a vivid absence, an emptiness that fills the play, you leave the theater with a profound sense of the importance of being human, as you do after have seen Macbeth or King Lear and after have reading Interview with the Vampire and Tales of the Body Thief by Anne Rice. O’Neill’s capacity to communicate that experience places him among the significant tragedians of history. Artists can portray these experiences in music or words or clay or marble or on canvas because they express the collective unconscious. This phrase may not be the most felicitous, but we know that each of us carries in buried dimensions of our being some basic forms, partly generic and partly experiential in origin. It is these the artist expresses. Thus the artists—in which term I hereafter include the poets, musicians, dramatists, plastic artists, as well as saints—are a dew line; they give us a distant early warning of what is happening to our culture. In the art of our day we see symbols galore of alienation and anxiety. However, at the same time there is form amid discord, beauty amid ugliness, some human love in the midst of hatred—a love that temporarily triumphs over death but always loses out in the long run. #RandolphHarris 19 of 24
The artists thus expresses the spiritual meaning of their culture. Our problem is: Can we read their meaning aright? The teaching of a higher individual needs to be correctly understood. It is not that a separate one exists for each physical body. The consciousness which normally identifies itself with the body—that is, the ego—when looking upward in highest devotion or inward in deepest mediation, comes to the point of contact with universal beings, World-Mind. This is its own higher self, the divine deputy within its own being. However, if devotion or prayer is carried still further, to the very utmost possible stretch of consciousness, the point itself merges into its source. At this moment the being is one’s source. However, “Man shall not see My face and live!” One returns eventually to Earth-consciousness, where one must follow out its requirements. Yet the knowledge of what one is in essence remains the presence of the deputy is always there meanwhile, always felt It may fittingly be called one’s higher individuality. The uniqueness of each person, one’s difference from every other person, may be metaphysically explained as due to the effort of Infinite Mind to express itself infinitely within the finite limitations of time and space, form and appearance. #RandolphHarris 20 of 24
Take Giotto, as a creator to further illustrate this point, in what is called the “little Renaissance” which burgeoned in the fourteenth century. In contrast to the two-dimensional medieval mosaics, Giotto presents a new way of seeing life and nature: gives his paintings three dimensions, and we know see human being and animals expressing and calling forth from us such specific human emotions as care, or pity, or grief, or joy. In the previous, two-dimensional mosaics in the churches of the Middle Age, we feel no human being is necessary to see them—they have their own relationship to God. However, in Giotto, a human being viewing the picture is required; and this human being must take one’s stance as an individual in relation to the picture. Thus the new humanism and the new relation to nature that were to become central in the Renaissance are here born, a hundred years before the Renaissance proper. In our endeavor to grasp these symbols of art, we find ourselves in a realm that beggars our usual conscious thinking. Our task is quite beyond the reach of logic. It brings us to an area in which there are many paradoxes. Take the idea expressed in Shakespeare’s four lines at the end of Sonnet 64: Ruin hath taught me thus to ruminate, that time will come and take my love away. This thought is as a death, which cannot choose, but weep to have that which it fears to lose. #RandolphHarris 21 of 24
If you have been trained to accept the logic of our society, you will ask: “Why does he have to weep to have his love? Why can he not enjoy his love?” Thus our logic pushes us always toward adjustment—and adjustment to a crazy World and to a crazy life. And worse yet, we cut ourselves off from understanding the profound depths of experience that Shakespeare is here expressing. We have all had such experiences, but we tend to cover them over. We may look at an autumn tree so beautiful in its brilliant colors that we feel like weeping; or we may hear music so lovely that we are overcome with sadness. The craven thought then creep into our consciousness that it would have been better not to have seen the tree at all or not to have heard the music. Then we would not be faced with this uncomfortable paradox—knowing that time will come and take my love away, that everything we love will die. However, the essence of being human is that, in the brief moment we exist on this spinning planet, we can love some persons and some things, in spite of the fact that time and death will ultimately claim us all. #RandolphHarris 22 of 24
That we yearn to stretch the brief moment, to postpone our death a year or so is surely understandable. However, such postponement is bound to be a frustrating and ultimately a losing battle. By the creative act, however, we are able to reach beyond our own death. This is why creativity is so important and why we need to confront the problem of the relationship between creativity and death. Exploitative power is the simplest and, humanly speaking, most destructive kind of power. It is subjecting persons to whatever use they may have to the one who holds the power. Slavery is, of course, the obvious example—when one person has the power over the bodies and, indeed, over the whole organisms of many persons. Exploitative power identifies power with force. In pioneer America the use of bullets to transform others into lifeless hulks, as well as most other example of physical force, fall into this category. In this sense the use of firearms, when employed at the whim of the person who happens to possess a gun, is a form of exploitative power. In everyday life this kind of power is exercised by those who have been radially rejected, whose lies are so barren that they know no way of relating to other people except exploitation. It is sometimes rationalized as the masculine way of dealing with women during pleasures of the flesh. #RandolphHarris 23 of 24
It is interesting that courtly love in the Middle Ages guarded against this kind of power—which would otherwise have been rampant in the society of knights and maidens—by the rule that force was never to be used in love. Exploitative power always presupposes violence or the threat of violence. In this kind of power there is, strictly speaking, no choice or spontaneity at all on the part of the victims. It is true that the subject in consciousness cannot make an object of itself, cannot perceive itself, but there is a being another self which knows the subject, is aware of the subject although the subject is not aware of it. However, there is an important difference to be noted here. First, the transcendental self does not know in the same way that the thinking self knows (by thinking self I mean the subject) for its knowledge is immediate, swifter than the swiftest computing machine. Secondly, it is part of the universal mind, the World Mind, yet mysteriously connected with a limited human mind. Union wit the Overself is not the ultimate end but a penultimate one. What we look up to as the Overself looks up in its own turn to another higher entity. God will strengthen you when you waver. He will be your light when it seems most dark. He will take your hand and be your hope when hope seems to have left. God’s compassion and mercy, with all their cleansing and healing powers, are freely given to all who truly wish to complete forgiveness and will take the steps that lead to it. #RandolphHarris 24 of 24
God’s Gift to His Sorrowing Creatures is a Joy Worthy of their Destiny for Harmony is Next to Godliness!
How many people do you think have the stamina for immortality? They have the most dismal notions of immortality to begin with. For in becoming immortal they want all the forms of their live to be fixed as they are and incorruptible: cars made in the same dependable fashion, clothing of the cut which suited their prime, people attired and speaking in the manner they have always understood and valued. When, in fact, all things change except the individual; everything except the person is subject to constant corruption and distortion. Soon, with an inflexible mind, and often even with the most flexible mind, this immorality becomes a penitential sentence in a madhouse of figures and forms that are hopelessly unintelligible and without value. One evening some people rise and realize what they have feared perhaps for decades, that they simply want no more of life at any cost. That whatever style or fashion or shape of existence made immortality attractive to one has been swept off the face of the Earth. And nothing remains to offer freedom from despair except their children. Otherwise they will have ceased long ago to speak of themselves or of anything. They will vanish. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
I sat back impressed by the obvious truth of it, and yet at the same time, everything in me revolted against that prospect. I became aware of the depth of my hope and my terror; how very different those feelings were from the alienation that he described, how very different from that awful wasting despair. There was something outrageous and repulsive in that despair suddenly. I could not accept it. The alienated being, unable to achieve oneself or reach others, uneasily asks, “Who am I?” What this means in a society like ours is we need tremendous faith, for we have to rely upon the infinite life-power to sustain us henceforth. In taking the vow of obedience, one shows forth one’s great humility, for one confesses that one is unable to guide one’s own life and thought wisely, but will take our guidance henceforth from those who stand nearest to God. As a result, some people take a vow of celibacy, which makes a magnificent gesture of defiance to one’s own lower nature, against which one will henceforth fight and to which one will not willingly succumb. For many, the psychological effects of capitalism do not allow one to experience oneself as the active bearer of one’s own powers and richness, but as an impoverished thing, dependent on powers outside one’s self, unto whom one has projected one’s living substance. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
Under capitalism, much like any other economic system, alienation can become the fate not only of the workers but of managers (or bureaucrats) and owners or capitalists themselves. That is because we are not focused on spirituality, but our focus, primarily, is on money, which is an abstraction living beings use to acquire things we consume, and we are similarly alienated from each other. The relationship of beings to their fellows is one between two abstractions, two living machines, who use each other. Ultimately, therefore, beings are alienated from themselves since their aim is to sell themselves. However, things have no self and beings who have become things can have no self. The idea of being’s making a thing of themselves is the marketing orientation. This is closely linked with one’s sacrifice of all that is distinctive about themselves to win approval of the group. As a result, there is some spontaneous self which one is prevented from achieving. This leads to some people becoming neurotics, as they are unable to achieve a sense of self, and as a consequence accept a paper identity of personality as a substitute. However, this substitute offers little comfort. The central issue of the effects of capitalism on personality is the phenomenon of alienation. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
By alienation is meant a mode of experience in which the person experiences one’s self as an alien. One has become, one might say, estranged from oneself. One does not experience oneself as the center of one’s World, as the creator of one’s own acts—but one’s acts and their consequences have become one’s masters, whom one obeys, or whom one may even worship. The alienated person is out of touch with one’s own being as one is out of touch with any other person. One, like the others, is experienced as things are experienced; with the sense and with common sense, but at the same time without being related to oneself and to the World outside productively. The older meaning in which alienation was used was to denote an insane person; aliene in French, alienado in Spanish are older words for the psychotic, the thoroughly and absolutely alienated person. (“Alienist,” in English, is still used for the doctor who cares for the insane.) In the last century the word alienation was used by Hegel and Marx, referring not to a state of insanity, but to a less drastic form of self-estrangement, which permits the person to act reasonably in practical matters, yet which constitutes one of the most severe socially patterned defects. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
In Marx’s system alienation is called that condition of a being where one’s own act become to one an alien power, standing over and against one, instead of being ruled by one. However, while the use of the word “alienation” in this general sense is a recent one, the concept is a much older one; it is the same to which the prophets of the Old Testament referred as idolatry. It will help us to a better understanding of “alienation” if we begin by considering the meaning of “idolatry.” The prophets of monotheism did not denounce heathen religious as idolatrous primarily because they worshiped several gods instead of one. The essential difference between monotheism and polytheism is not one of number of gods, but is possessed in the fact of self-alienation. Beings spend their energy, their artistic capacities on building an idol, and then one worships this idol, which is nothing but the result of one’s own human effort. One’s life forces have flown into a thing, and this thing, having become an idol, is not experienced as a result of one’s own productive effort, but as something apart from one’s own being, over and against one, which one worships and to which one submits. As the prophet Hosea says (XIV, 8): “Assur shall not save us; we will not ride upon horses; neither will we say any more to the work of our hands, you are our gods; for the fatherless finds love.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
Idolatrous beings bow down to the work of their own hands. The idol represents one’s own life-forces in an alienated form. However, human experience is characterized by freedom (will, creativity, expressiveness) and by limitation (natural and social restraints, vulnerability, and death). The dread of either freedom or limitation promotes extreme or dysfunctional counterreactions to that dread. These counterreactions often manifest themselves in either fanatical overreaching (if the dread centers on one’s limits) or banal timidity (if the dread centers on one’s freedom). The confrontation with or integration of the polarities promotes psychophysiological resilience. The philosopher is not to be advertised by outward signs. Yet if one feels a personal vocation to follow these customs, one is also free to do so. It is simply that there is no necessity in the general sense. There is a halfway stage in the disintegration of words. This is obscenity. It gets power from the using of words to do violence to our unconscious expectations, to destroy our mooring posts, and to undercut the forms of relationship we are used to. The words threaten us with the insecurity of formlessness. Obscenity expresses what has previously been prohibited, reveals what previously was not revealed. Thus it insists on and gets our attention. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
Obscenity is the process of attacking what has been sacred and occurs when the word is losing its holy character. It is often factually true that words have already lost all roots to their meaning and have become nothing but empty forms. The same is true in modern art. By showing blood and gore and using sensational colors that carry these impressions, many painters are crying out: “You must look, you must pay attention, you must see in a new way.” This can, indeed, teach us, shocked as we are, not just to look but to see. The breakdown in language has become very clear to many. Nobody really communicates with words anymore. Words have lost their emotional impact, intimacy, ability to shock and make love. However, there is one word Americans have not destroyed. One word which has maintained its emotional power and purity. As you have guessed already, that word is God. It has kept its purity only because it is a force we all call on in our time of need. People who do not believe in God also call on him in situation of extreme distress. The word God does have emotional power. It is connected with tenderness and gentleness, but can also be aggressive and vengeful. An act of God is usually used to describe a disaster beings are not directly responsible for. A miracle is often used to describe when God makes the impossible possible. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
However, a word becomes aggressive as a stage in its deterioration: it loses its original meaning, takes on the aggressive for in obscenity, and then may pass into oblivion, as when a person is upset and says, “God damn!” And that is one reason we are not supposed to take the Lord’s name in vein, we must never let the creator of the Universe pass into oblivion, or else we may cease to exist. When it is used to incite people’s aggressive emotions, language can be as violent as physical force. About 230,000 people recently attended a peaceful, graceful demonstration in Hong Kong, China to protest a bill that would allow Hong Kong people to be extradited to mainland China for criminal prosecution. People want the extradition bill terminated because legislation would mean there is no longer any difference between Hong Kong and China. Hong Kong was guaranteed autonomy until 2047. Because there is so much at stake, tensions did flare up and police had to disperse hundreds. Some are only concerned with getting the word out and are totally oblivious to the fact that if you keep chanting, people will get mad, and this rage will have nothing to do with the extradition bill. It will be because words people use in anger to get their points across. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Obscenity is a form of psychic violence and can be used with great effect, a weapon that can excite people to lethal physical violence. Once should know this when using language. It is a mark of our time that each side in a disagreement uses violent language. This amounts to using violence to defeat violence—which never words, whether it is done by police and administration or by young people themselves. In the stories of the crucifixion the agony and the death of Jesus are connected with a group of events in nature: Darkness covers the land; the curtain of the temple is torn in two; the Earth is shaken and the bodies of saints rise out of their graves. Nature, with trembling, participates in the decisive event of history. The Sun veils its head; the temple makes the gesture of mourning; the foundations of the Earth are moved; the tombs are opened. Nature is in an uproar because of something is happening which concerns the Universe. Since the time of the evangelists, wherever the story of Golgotha has been told as the turning event in the World-drama of salvation, the role of nature played in this drama has also been told. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
Painters of the crucifixion have used all their artistic power to express the darkness over the land in almost unnatural color. I remember my own earliest impression of Good Friday—the feeling of the mystery of the divine suffering, first of all, through the compassion of nature. And so did the centurion, the first pagan who witnessed for the Crucified. Filled with awe, with numinous dread, he understood in a naive-profound way that something more had happened than the death of a holy and innocent man. We should not ask whether clouds or a dust storm darkened the Sun on a special day of a special year, whether an Earthquake happened in Palestine just at that hour, whether the curtain before the holy of holies in the temple at Jerusalem had to be repaired or whether the raised bodies of the saints died again. However, we should ask whether we are able to feel with the evangelists and the painters, with the children and the Roman soldiers, that the event at Golgotha is one which concerns the Universe, including all nature and all history. With this question in our mind let us look at the signs reported by our evangelist. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
The Sun veiled its face because of the depth of evil and shame which it saw under the Cross. However, the Sun also veiled its face because its power over the World had ceased once and forever in these hours of its darkness. The great shining and burning God of everything that lives on Earth, the Sun who was praised and feared and adored by innumerable human beings during thousands and thousands of years, had been deprived of its divine power when one human being in ultimate agony maintained his unity wit that which is greater than the Sun. Since those hours of darkness it is manifest that not the Sun, but a suffering and struggling soul which cannot be broken by all the powers of the Universe is the image of the Highest, and that the Sun can only be praised in the way of St. Francis, who called it our brother, but not our god. The curtain of the temple was torn in two. The temple tore its gown as the mourners did because Christ, to whom the temple belonged more than to anybody else, was thrown out and killed by the servants of the temple. However, the temple belonged more than to anybody else, was thrown out and killed by the servants of the temple. However, the temple—and with it, all temple on Earth—also complained of its own destiny. The curtain which made the temple a holy place, separated from other places, lost is separating power. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
One who was expelled as blaspheming the temple, had cleft the curtain and opened the temple for everybody, for every moment. This curtain cannot be mended any more, although there are priests and ministers and pious people who try to mend it. They will not succeed because Christ, for whom every place was a sacred place, a place where God is present, has been brought on the Cross in the name of the holy place. When the curtain of the temple was torn in two, God judged religion and rejected temples. After this moment temples and churches can only means places of concentration on the holy which is the ground and the meaning of every place. And like the temple, the Earth was judged at Golgotha. Trembling and shaking the Earth participated in the agony of the man on the Cross and in the despair of all those who had seen in him the beginning of the new eon. Trembling and shaking the Earth proved that it is not the motherly ground on which we can safely build our houses and cities, our cultures and religious systems. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
Trembling and shaking the Earth pointed to another ground on which the Earth itself rests: the self-surrendering love on which all Earthly powers and values concentrate their hostility and which they cannot conquer. Since the hour when Jesus uttered a loud cry and breathed his last and the rocks were split, the Earth ceased to be the foundation of what we build on her. Only insofar as it has a deeper ground, can it stand; only insofar as it is rooted in the same foundation in which the Cross is rooted, can it last. And the Earth not only ceases to be the solid ground of life; she also ceases to be the lasting cave of death. Resurrection is not something added to the death of him who is the Christ; but it is implied in his death, as the story of the resurrection before the resurrection indicates. No longer is the Universe subjected to the law of death out of birth. It is subjected to a higher law, to the law of life out of death by the death of Christ who represented eternal life. When one man in whom God was present without limited committed his spirit into this Father’s hands, the tombs were opened and bodies were raised. Since this moment the Universe is no longer what it was; nature has received another meaning; history is transformed and you and I are no more, and should not be any more, what we were before. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
Living beings are not God. Yet one can approach God so intimately, be suffused by his presence so completely, that the first mystics to call this state union with God may be excused. The telepathic closeness which sometimes exists between two separated lovers, relatives, or friends is a slight hint of the telepathic closeness which exists between the harmonized human ego and its divine soul. In my alleged claim that every human being can develop the divinity within oneself, I do not mean that we humble mortals can ever rise to the stature of the Almighty, and I completely concur with the warning against beings attempting to join partners with God. I mean only that we have within us something that is lined with and related to God: it is our higher self, the discovery of and union with which represents the limit of our possible attainment. If it is wiser and humbler to leave some mystery at the bottom of all our intellectual understanding of life than to indulge in self-deceiving finality about it, then it is no less wiser and humbler to acknowledge the ultimate mystery at the heart of all our immediate mystical experience of life. The mystic’s claim to know God when one knows only the deepest part of one’s own self, is one’s particular kind of vanity. Whatever terminous and transcendental consciousness one may discover there, something ever remains beyond it lost in utter inscrutability. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
The World-Mind is impenetrable by human power. This agnostic conclusion does not, however, touch the validity of the mystic’s more legitimate claim, that the human soul is knowable and that an unshakeable union with it is attainable. The mystic may indeed feel the very stuff of God in one’s rapture but this does not supply one with the whole content of God’s knowledge. If therefore one claims not only to be one with God but also to be one with God’s entire consciousness, it is sheer presumption. The mystical union with God can never be a union of nature and substances, can never achieve a complete identity of the atom with the Infinite. What is possible of achievement is, to speak in terms of spatial symbolism which is the only satisfactory way of treating such a transcendental subject, to unite with a single point within the immeasurable infinite of God. We should learn to discern the truth not only through our rational minds but also through the very still and small voice of the Spirit. We can trust in our loving Heavenly Father, who is constantly trying to help be become the person he knows we can become. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
In addition to our rational minds, another dimension to gaining knowledge can give us guidance and understanding. It is the still and soft voice of his Holy Spirit speaking to our hearts and also to our minds. We have been given two sources of information, through our physical and spiritual capacities. When these two perspectives are then combined in our souls, one complete picture shows the reality of things as they truly are. We will find our Father’s voice in many places. We will find it when we pray, study the scriptures, attend church, engage in faithful discussion, or go to the temple. However, answers are sometimes slow to come. Still, if you have made the wrong decision, God will not let you proceed too far without a warning impression. Much grotesque misconception exists among the mystics about this claim to have untied with God, however. Not having passed through the metaphysical discipline and consequently having only a confused notion of what God is, they do not comprehend how exaggerated their claim is. For if they were really untied with God, they should have the power of God too. They would be able to set up as creators of entire Universes, of Suns, Stars, and cosmic systems. This feat is plainly beyond them. Let us hear no more of such babble and let them confine their strivings to realizable aims. God’s gift to his sorrowing creatures is a joy worthy of their destiny. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Refuse to Cover the Signs of the End in Our Lives and in Our Souls–We Are a Generation of the End and We Should Know What We Are!
I do not know if God exists, and for all I do know, he does not exist. Then no sin matters. No sin achieves evil. However, they may not be true. Because if God does not exist, we are the creatures of highest consciousness in the Universe. We alone understand the passage of time and the value of every minute of human life. And what constitutes evil, real evil, is the taking of a singe human life. Whether a person would have died tomorrow or the day after or eventually, it does not matter. Because if God does not exist, this life, every second of it, is all we have. And sometimes we can feel the thoughts of others. I know you have heard the saying, “You could can the tension in the room with a knife.” Well thoughts can be a palpable in the air like smoke. Not read them, you understand, but feel the power of them. It is good to be respectful. Some do not want power over other because if they exercise such power, then one must protect it. One will make enemies. And one will have forever to deal with their enemies when all they want here is a certain space, a certain peace. Or not to be here at all. The only power that exists is inside ourselves. Of the many consequences of his rupture between state and being, most spectacular is the irrational myth of the state—the setting for modern dictatorship. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
However, dictatorships represent only the most extreme form of the alienation of the state. In democratic societies also government, like so many other social institutions originally designed to serve beings, threatens to become their master. Behind the growing sense of isolation in society, behind the whole quest for community which infuses so many theoretical and practical areas of contemporary life and thought, is possessed in the growing realization that the traditional primary relationships of beings have become functionally irrelevant to our State and economic and meaningless to the moral aspirations of individuals. The state has power to do great good as well as evil; and we are not joining those true reactionaries who dream of dismantling it. What we are suggesting is that the state even when providing necessary services is detached from individual needs. How to redress this imbalance between state and being has become a burning issue for all beings, right and left, who would reorder our society. Meanwhile, armed with ever greater police powers and increasingly effective means of persuasion, the modern state is now in a position to exploit the most terrible anxieties of beings for its own purposes, with the help of the fake news media. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
When the United States Government announced that it was conducting experiments of a death ray or neutron bomb, and 5G internet service, striking examples of this power was provided recently. This exquisitely refined technology will operate selectively, snuffing out human and animal life among the enemy, but leaving things—houses, antiquities, automobiles, aircrafts, shops, factories, furnishings, machines—untouched. A soldier in a tank or an office staff in a building would die, but the tank and the building would remain intact. There would be no lingering radioactivity, o that the attackers could take over and occupy the tank and the building without fear of contamination. Who would say that the alienation of modern beings is not now complete? The sketches of some—by now means all—of the conditions and influences alienating beings in modern society have been pointed out. However, can these conditions be altered and alienation overcome? Answers to this question demand the best thinking and planning of which our civilization is capable; they require thinking from the heart as well as the head; they demand co-operation among many diverse groups and nations. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
The task of healing our alienated community will be difficult, for the very tools of our analysis and planning tend to be alien forces, compelling us to deal with separate aspects of an interrelated set of problems. Being’s inhumanity to other beings is age-old, such as critics say: the oppressed less affluent have always been with us; work has always been drudgery (the fall of beings made it so); cruelty and torment are ever the common lot. As to the danger of nuclear war and mass extermination, the human beast has always lived dangerously, invented new and more terrible weapons, and in short loves hanging and drawing and quartering every bit as well as war and slaughtering. However, the argument runs, though this strange rather likeable human animal may be foolish and destructive, yet somehow one is crafty enough to survive, both as an individual and as a species. Acceptance of things as they are and have always been is the essence of this view. Its proponents consider alienation an inescapable part of the living condition of beings with which one must learn to live—alone. According to this approach, no amount or kind of social planning will succeed in alleviating the situation, and on the contrary may make it worse. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
In short, alienation is relative. Anthropology teaches that simpler, more solidaristic communities are not spared the personal disorders which we associate with complex age of information societies. And if citizens of the affluent society feel sorry for themselves, let them remember that most beings on Earth have never tasted any of the fruits of freedom. Our view, however, has been that alienation in modern society represents not a change of degree but of kind. Here we emphasize that what we are concerned with is not inhumanity, which has existed all through history and constitutes part of the human form, but a-humanity, a phenomenon of rather recent date. This a-humanity, this breakdown of distinctively human qualities and values, culminates in such horrors as the A-bomb or the concentration camp, the sudden slump of an overwrought civilization into that strange, systematized bestiality. The horror of the fake news media regime, its use of the most-up-to-date techniques of hacking and data mining, lies and distortion make it one of the lowest, sub-human, indeed sub-bestial kind, and in some way is related to the subtlest political and law enforcement experiences manifesting themselves in society and culture. Overcivilization, too much technology, and concomitant dehumanization are of the most crucial problems of our age. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
The deep suspicion of language and the impoverishment of ourselves and our relationships, which are both cause and result, are rampant in our times. We experience the despair of being unable to communicate to others what we feel and what we think, and the even greater despair of being unable to distinguish for ourselves what we feel and are. Underlying this loss of identity is the loss of cogency of the symbols and myths upon which identity and language is based. The breakdown of language is graphically pictured in Orwell’s 1984, in which the people not only go through the doublethink process but use word to mean exactly their opposites—for instance, war means peace. In Beckett’s Waiting for Godot, we are similarly gripped when Pozzo, the industrialist, commands his slave Lucky, the intellectual, to “Think, pig!….Think!” Lucky beings to orate a word salad of lengthy phrases strung together without a period that continues for three full pages. He finally collapses in a faint on the stage. It is a vivid portrayal of the situation that exists when language communicates nothing at all expect empty erudition. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
The breakdown is shown in the students’ protest against the “words, words, words” to which they must listen, in their sickness of heart at hearing the same things mouthed over and over again, and in their readiness to accuse faculty and others of “word garbage” or “verbal masturbation.” This is generally meant as a criticism of the lecture method, but it also represents what the television news has become. However, what they really are—or ought to be—talking about is a particular kind of lecture that does not communicate being from one person to another. It must be admitted that all too often this has been a characteristic of academic life, which makes the student protest against irrelevant education distinctly more relevant. The shelves of college libraries are weighed down with books that were written because other books were written because still other books were written—the meat of the meal getting thinner and thinner until the books seem to have nothing to do with the excitement of truth but only with status and prestige. And in the academic World, these last two values can be powerful indeed. Small wonder the young poets are disillusioned with talk, and they hold, as they did in the San Francisco love-in, that the best poem is a blank sheet of paper. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
At such a time, in our alienation and isolation, we long for a simple, direct expression of our feelings to another, a direct relation to one’s being, such as looking into one’s eyes to see and experience one or standing quietly beside one. We yearn for a direct expression of one’s and our moods and emotions with no barriers. We seek a kind of innocence that is as old as human evolution but some to us as something new, the innocence of children in paradise again. We long for a direct expression through our bodies of intimacy to short-cut the time of knowing the other that intimacy usually takes; we want to speak through our bodies, to leap immediately into identification with the other, even though we know it is only partial. In short, we yearn to bypass the whole symbols/verbal-language hang-up. Thus the great trend toward action therapies in or day in contrast to talking, and the conviction that truth will emerge—if it ever will—when we are able to live out our muscular impulses and experiences rather than get lost in dead concepts. Hence encounter groups, marathons, nude therapy, the use of barbiturates and other illicit substances. This is, in short, the bringing of the body into a relationship when there is no relationship. Whatever relatedness there is is ephemeral: it springs up multicolored and bright today, and often will be but a damp place where sea foam has evaporated on our hand tomorrow. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
My aim is not to derogate these forms of therapy nor to disparage the use of the body. My body remains one way in which my self can express itself—in this sense I am my body—and surely it is to be appreciated. However, I am my language as well. And I wish to point out the destructive trend represented in action therapies precisely in their implicit attempt to bypass language. For these action therapies are closely related to violence. As they become more extreme, they hover at the edge of violence, both in the activity within the group itself an in the preparation of the participants or anti-intellectualism outside. The longing for them really has its seat in despair—the despondent fact of not being understood, of not being able to communicate or to love. It is the endeavoring to jump over that period of time required for intimacy, the trying to immediately feel and experience the other’s hopes and dreams and fears. However, intimacy requires a history, even though the two people have to create history. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
We forget at our peril that beings are a symbol-making creature; and if the symbols (or myths, which are a pattern of symbols) seem arid and dead, they are to be mourned rather than denied. The bankruptcy of symbols should be seen for what it is, a way station on the path of despair. The distrust of language is bred into by experiencing the medium is the message phenomenon. Most of the words coming over TV are lies not in the sense of outright falsehood (that would imply a still remaining respect for the word) but in the sense that the words are used in the service of selling the personality of the speaker rather than in communicating some meaning. This is the more subtle form of emphasizing not the meaning of the word but the public-relations value of it. Words are not used for authentic, humanistic goals: to share something of originality or personal warmth. The medium is then the message with a vengeance; as long as the medium works, there is no message. The phrase “credibility gap,” which is conspicuous in wartime but is present in other times as well, goes much deeper than anyone’s mere intention to deceive. We listen to the news dispatches and find ourselves wondering where the truth really lies and why the reporters and anchors constantly lie, spread rumors, and distort the truth. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
In our day it often seems that deception has been accepted as the means of communication. That is why the fake news media pushed their Russia election conspiracy, to cover up the fact the TV news is full of lies and wants to confuse them people and not present the truth so they can influence the elections. In this confusion, there is a more serious aliment in our public life: language bears less and less relationship to the item being discusses. There is a denial of any relationship to underlying logic. The fact that language has its roots in a shared structure is entirely ignored. The way language is used by the fake news media often denies the whole structure of communication. There is relationship in their reports to the question asked. In extreme and persistent form, this is one species of schizophrenia; but in our day it is simply called news and politics. And suddenly the lid is torn off. The picture of Death appears, unveiled, in a thousand forms. As in the late Middle Ages the figure of Death appears in news, pictures, poetry, politics, and the Dance of Death with every living being is painted and sung, so our generation—the generation of World wars, information, technology, revolutions, and mass migrations—rediscovers the reality of death. We have seen millions die in war, hundreds of thousands die illegally migrating all over the World, hundreds of thousands in revolutions, tens of thousands in persecutions and systematic purges of underrepresented groups. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Multitudes as numerous as whole nations still wander over the face of the Earth or perish when they are turned away, in boat or by foot, from the countries they want to enter; in them is embodies a part of these tremendous events in which Death has again grasped the reins which we believed it has relinquished forever. Such people carry in their souls, and often in their bodies, the traces of death, and they will never completely lose them. You who have never taken part yourself in this great migration must receive these others as symbols of a death which is a component element of life. Receive them as people who, by their destiny, shall remind us of the presence of the End in every moment of life and history. Receive them as symbols of the finiteness and transitoriness of every human and living being concern, of every human and living being’s life, and of every created thing. We have become a generation of the End and those of us who have been refugees and exiles in our own communities or in the greater World should not forget this when we have found a new beginning here or in another land. The End is nothing external. It is not exhausted by the loss of that which we can never regain: our childhood homes, the people with whom we grew up, the country, the things, the language which formed us, the goods, both spiritual and material, which we inherited or earned, the friends who were torn away from us by sudden death. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
The End is more than all this; it is in us, it has become our very being. We are a generation of the End and we should what we are. Perhaps there are some who think that what has happened to the and to the whole World should now be forgotten. Is it not more dignified, truer and stronger to say “yes” to that which is our destiny, to refuse to cover the signs of the End in our lives and in our souls, to let the voice of Death be heard? Amid all the new possibilities offered to us, must we not acknowledge ourselves to be that which destiny has made us? Must we not confess that we are symbols of the End? And this End is of an age which was both great and a lie. It is the End for all finitude which always becomes a lie when it forgets that it is finite and seeks to veil the picture of death. However, who can bear to look at this picture? Only one who can look at another picture behind and beyond it—the picture of Love. For love is stronger than death. Every death means parting, separation, isolation, opposition and not participation. So it is, too, with the death of nations, the end of generations, and the atrophy of souls. Our souls become poor and disintegrate insofar as we want to be alone, insofar as we bemoan our misfortunes, nurse our despair and enjoy out bitterness, and yet turn coldly away from the physical and spiritual need of others. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
Love overcome separation and creates participation in which there is more than that which individuals involved can bring to it. Love is the infinite which is given to the finite. Therefore we love in others, for we d not merely love others, but we love the Love that is in the and which is more than their or our love. In mutual assistance what is most important is not the alleviation of need but the actualization of love. Of course, there is no love which does not want to make the other’s need its own. However, there is also no true help which does not spring from love and create love. Those who fight against death and disintegration through all kinds of relief agencies know this. Often very little external help is possible. And the gratitude of those who receive help is first and always gratitude for love and only afterwards gratitude for help. Love, not help, is stronger than death. However, there is no love which does not become help. Where help is given without love, there new suffering grows from the help. It is love, human and divine, which overcomes death in nations and generation and in all the horror of our time. Help has become almost impossible in the face of the monstrous powers which we are experiencing. Death is given power over everything finite, especially in our period of history. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
However, death is given no power over love. Love is stronger. It creates something new out of the destruction caused by death; it bears everything and overcomes everything. It is at work where the power of death is strongest, in war and persecution and homelessness and hunger and physical death itself. It is omnipresent and here and there, in the smallest and most hidden ways as in the greatest and most visible ones, it rescues life from death. It rescues each of us, for love is stronger than death. Use the power inside you. Do not abhor it anymore. Use that power! And when they see you in the streets above us, use that power to make your face a mask and think as you gaze on them as on anyone: beware. Take that word is if it where an amulet given to you to wear about your neck. And when your eyes meet with your enemy’s eyes, or the eyes of anyone else, speak to them politely what you will, but think of that word and that word only. It is an icon of love. Feel the love. Not physical love, you must understand. True love is what a student and teacher share. Knowledge would never be withheld by a real teacher. No geographical limits ought to be set for the sources whence a being draws spiritual sustenance. Why exclude other lands and remain shut in with India alone? #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
Nor should any temporal limits be set for it. Why exclude the modern Word and remain shut in with the ancient one alone? Enlightened individuals have been born all through history, have contributed their ideas beliefs experiences and revelations, and all through the social scales. This is so, must be so, because Truth, Reality, Goodness, and Beauty, in their best sense, are in the end got from within. God is in your very being. To know him as something apart or far-away in time and distance or as an object outside yourself, separate from you—that is not the Way—impossible. Jesus gave away the secret: he is within you. It is surprising how widely people have ignored Jesus’ message (“The kingdom of Heaven is within you”) when its means is so clear, its phrasing so strong. If a being lives in harmony with the divine World-Idea, one may also live in trust that one will receive that which belongs to one. This will be brought about either by guiding one to it or guiding it to one. “All things whatsoever the Father hath are mine.” That which you need is yours now—if only you could raise yourself to the recognition of your true relation to your Overself. The heart, which abandons itself to the Supreme Mind, finds itself related to all its works, and will travel a royal road to particular knowledges and powers. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Every Difficulty Slurred Over Will be a Ghost to Disturb Your Repose Later on
You are afraid. You do not stand en garde against fear. You do not understand the danger of fear itself. We will know these answers when we find those who can tell us, those who have possessed knowledge for centuries, for however long creatures such as ourselves have walked the Earth. That knowledge was our birthright, and he deprived us. Although mass society is a political as well as a cultural phenomenon, many of its critics, among them Ortega y Gasset and T. S. Eliot, have concentrated their attack chiefly against what they regard as its vulgar values, its sameness, its threat to high culture. While one may share their concern about the danger of standardized tastes, or about the threat which mass behavior in politics or in culture poses for individual expression, there is far more to the problem than this—indeed, far more than many aristocratically inclined critics of mass society (and of democracy) want to see. For it is not only beings of sensibility who feel crushed by the sheer weight of mass society and its values. In short, what is alienating in mass society is not merely the corruption of art, or the power of the multitudes—a power often exaggerated—but more importantly, the atomization of individuals who make up the mass. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
In that society, there is a tendency for the aggregates of individuals [to be] related to one another only by way of their relation to a common authority, especially the state. That is, individuals are not directly related to one another in a variety of independent groups. A population in this condition is not insulated in any way from the ruling group, not yet from elements within itself. In time the many secondary groups, associations and publics which beings had formed in earlier age tend to lose their role as intermediaries between state (or media) and individual. This tendency was particularly notable in Nazi Germany, which set out to build an elaborate system of mass control through terror and bureaucracy but it is also apparent in our own society, despite our reputation for being a nation of joiners (the fact is that most of our citizens are not joiners). Mass society weakens or destroys traditional human groupings, thus leaving the individual at the mercy of impersonal communication, such as newspapers and radio and fake new media broadcasted on the television. In addition, the process of communication itself, presumably a two-way system, tends to become a one-way street with individuals more on the receiving or taking end than on the giving end. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
How does one talk back to a TV screen? Well, with the invention of social media and hashtags, it is now possible, so the TV could become two-way communication with a two-way street in the future. However, I doubt people want the TV watching them, as it would be a huge invasion of privacy because you did not consent to them entering your home and private life. Nonetheless, as things are now, the formation of opinion is facilitated for those who control the channels of communication—whether they be propagandists in a military dictatorship or the advertising industry or even a political party in our society; the stage is set for manipulation of tastes and opinions as obstacles to mass persuasion are removed. A manipulated mass is alienated to the extent that it is powerless to withstand these pressures. Here we can see why it is not the masses, those dumb beasts who threaten individual excellence, but a powerful elite which monopolizes the means of communication, thereby weakening primary human relations and creating obedient multitudes. However, just because they consider themselves elite and powerful, it does not negate the fact that they may be savages or are immune to prosecution. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
In fact, no one, even politicians, is above the law. The United States Attorney’s Office for the Middle District of Pennsylvania announced that Scranton Mayor William L. Courtright, age 61, of Scranton, Pennsylvania, plead guilt on 2 July 2019 to a criminal information charging him with three felony public corruption offenses. According to United States Attorney David J. Freed, the criminal information charges Mayor William L. Courtright with engaging in a multi-year conspiracy with unidentified individuals to take bribes from vendors who did business with the City. The information also alleges that other objectives of the conspiracy were to commit the offenses of attempted extortion under color of official right and extortion through use of fear or of economic hard. The undercover investigation by the FBI revealed that the former mayor accepted cash payments from vendors doing business with the city in a pay-to-play scheme. “In this County, in this Commonwealth, in the Country—our elected officials work for us, not the only way around. Using public office for personal financial gain is a crime, plain and simple. All citizens, not just those in law enforcement, should demand that our public officials scrupulously follow the law. And when they do not, no matter how difficult the investigations may be, or how long they may take, the United States Department of Justice and our laws enforcement partners will home them to account,” reports U.S. Attorney Freed. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
“Bill Courtright used the city of Scranton. He traded on his office in exchange for money and other valuable favors. He wielded his official powers for his own benefit, when he should’ve been focused on his community. The FBI will never stop seeking to bring to justice corrupt public officials who so badly betray the public trust. To that end, we and our partners at the Pennsylvania State Police and the IRS have launched a task force specifically to take on public corruption in the northeast Pennsylvania region. We’re working on behalf of the people, who expect—and deserve—honest services from all their elected officials,” reports Michael T. Harpster, Special Agent in Charge of the FBI’s Philadelphia Division. Bill Courtright did plead guilty and faces a maximum penalty under federal law for this offense of 35 years imprisonment, and a term of supervised release following imprisonment, and a fine. Therefore, no one is above the law. Nonetheless, on every side, they [the media audience] feel themselves the object of manipulation. They see themselves as the target for ingenious methods of control, through advertising which cajoles, promises, terrorizes; through propaganda that, utilizing available techniques, guides the unwitting audience into opinions which may or may not coincide with the best interests of themselves or their affiliates; through cumulatively subtle methods of salesmanship which may simulate values common to both salesperson and client for private and self-interested motives. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
In the place a sense of Gemeinschaft—genuine community of values—there intrudes pseudo-Gemeinschaft—the feigning of personal concern with the other fellow in order to manipulate one the better. No wonder that in this most alienated of societies the slogan “togetherness” was first promoted by an advertiser. If many are persuaded to accept the spurious values handed down to them, a dissenting few can always be depended on to reject them. In this rejection can be seen still another major form of alienation, reflected at one extreme in the revolt of artists and intellectuals against what they consider the uncongenial and materialistic standards of bourgeois society. Personifying this revolt in their art, as well as in their lives, are writers like Baudelarie (an internal emigrant who longed to escape anywhere out of this World); Rimbaud (who did escape and whose self-imposed exile became a model for many artistic rebels following him) and Dostoyevsky (who regarded the freedom of the atheistic individual, his loneliness and isolation as the greatest evils; and in whose works the twin themes of the atomization of society and self-alienation receive their supreme expression). #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
We are dealing with more than mere disenchantment. The modern Word debases. It debases the state; it debases men. It debases love; it debases women. It debases the race; it debases the child. It debases the nation; it debases the family. It even has succeeded in debasing what is perhaps most difficult in the World to debase—because this is something which has in itself, as in its texture, a particular kind of dignity, like a singular incapacity for degradation—it debased death. The two attitudes we have toward the clock indicate two ways of timing—the one as being timed, the other as timing for the next hour, for today and tomorrow. What does the clock tell you? Does it point to the hour of rising and working and eating and talking and going to sleep? Does it point to the next appointment and the next project? Or does it show that another day, another week have passed, that we have become older, that better timing is needed to use our last years for the fulfillment of our plans, for planting and building and finishing before it is too late? Or does the clock make us anticipate the moment in which its voice does not speak any more for us? Have we, the beings of the information age, the beings who are timing every hour from day to day, the courage and the imagination of the Preacher who looks back at all his time and all timing and calls it vanity? And if so, what about our timing? Does it not lose meaning? #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Must we say with the Preacher that it is good for beings to enjoy life as it is given to them from hour to hour, but that it is better not to be born at all? There is another answer to the question of human existence, to the question of timing and being timed. It is summed up in the words of Jesus: “The time is fulfilled and the kingdom of God is at hand.” In these words, God’s timing breaks into our human timing. Something new appears, answering the question of the Preacher as well as the question of the business person. We ask with all generations of thinking beings: What is the meaning of the flux of time and the passing away of everything in it? When the end of all our work is the same, what is the meaning of our toiling and planning? Vanity? And this is the answer we get: Within this our time something happens that is not of our time but out of eternity, and this times our time! Here the secrets that have endured the passage of time, which many have only dimly begun to understand. When Jesus says that the right hour has come, that the kingdom of God is at hand, he pronounces the victory over the law of vanity. This hour is not subject to the circle of life and death and all the other circles of vanity. When God himself appears in a moment of time, when God subjects himself to the flux of time, the flux of time is conquered. And if this happens in one moment of time, then all moments of time receive another significance. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
When the finger of the clock turns around; not one vain moment is replaced by another vain moment, but each moment says to us: The eternal is at and in this moment. The moment passes, the eternal remains. Whatever in this moment, in this hour, on this day and in this short or long life-time happens has infinite significance. Our timing from moment to moment, our planning today for tomorrow, the toil of our lifetime is not lost. Its deepest meaning lies not ahead where vanity swallows it, but it lies above where eternity affirms it. This is the seriousness of time and timing. “With their wicked words they will try to hold you down. No this is not our fate, the lives in which they are bound. And there is something more we know it has to be found. I know the World will not wait, the tide is turning around, and there is not enough time. And no there is not enough time, In the fallout of the wasted, in the half light I stand before you in the last dance of an old life. Now the cool wind is blowing and we cannot stay, but it is alright. When the night is gone, I will still be here,” reports Emma Hewitt (Not Enough Time). #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
This idea of time stirred my soul as if it were a pool of water longing to be still. I was mesmerized, enchanted. The faces of humans passed me like candle flames in the night dancing on dark waves. I was sinking into darkness. I was weary of longing. I was turning around and around and around in the street, looking at the stars and thinking. Through our timing God times the coming of his kingdom; through out timing God elevates the time of vanity into the time of fulfillment. The activist who is timing with shrewdness and intuition what one has to do in one’s time and for one’s time, and for our whole activististic civilization cannot give us the answer. And the Preacher, who himself once was a most successful activist, knows that this is not an answer; he knows that vanity of our timing. And let us be honest, the spirit of the Preacher is strong today in our minds. His mood fills our philosophy and poetry. The vanity of human existence is described powerfully by those who call themselves philosopher or poets of existence. They are the children of the Preacher, this great existentialist of his period. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
However, neither they nor the Preacher knows an answer. They know more than people of mere acting. They know the vanity of acting and timing. They know that we are timed. However, they do not know the answer either. Certainly we must act; we cannot help it. We have to time our lives from day to day. Let us do it as clearly and successfully as the Preacher when he still followed the example of King Solomon. However, let us follow him also when he saw through all this and realized its vanity. Then, and then alone, are we prepared for the message of the eternal appearing in time and elevating time to eternity. Then we see in the movement of the clock not only passing of one moment after the other, but also the eternal at hand, threatening, demanding, promising. Then we are able to say: “In spite”! In spite of the fact that the Preacher and all his pessimistic followers today and everywhere and at all times are right, I say yes to time and to toil and to acting. I know the infinite significance of every moment. However, again in saying so we should not relapse into the attitude of the activist, not even of the Christian activist—and there are many of them, men and women in Christendom. The message of the fulfillment of time is not a green light for a new, an assumedly Christian activism. However, it makes us say with Paul: “Through our outer nature is wasting away our inner nature is renewed every day—because we look not to the things that are seen but to the things are unseen. For the thing that are seen are transient, but the things that are unseen are eternal.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
In these words the message of the Preacher and the message of Jesus are untied. All is vanity but through this vanity eternity shines into us, comes near to us, draws us to itself. When eternity calls in time, then activism vanished. When eternity calls in time, then pessimism vanishes. When eternity times us, then time becomes a vessel of eternity. Then we become vessel of that which is eternal. However, who was to make this revelation when the sky and sea become indistinguishable and neither any longer was chaos? God? Or Satan? It struck me suddenly what consolation it would be to know Satan, to look upon his face, no matter how terrible that countenance was, to know that I belonged to him totally, and thus put to rest forever the torment of this ignorance. To step through some veil that would forever separate me from all that I called human nature. However, even in these moments, when all the World was sleeping, neither Heaven nor Hell seemed more than a tormenting fancy. To know, to believe, in one or the other that was perhaps that only salvation for which I could dream. Any psychology that aims to understand the reality underlying all human beings in crisis is bound to be a bewildering one. Part of the problem, however, rests with us existentialist ourselves. Although we have made valiant theoretical and therapeutic contributions, we have yet to cohesively integrate them for practical, clinical use. We have also spent much of our energy in the reactive rather than proactive mode of discourse, especially in the area of psychotherapy. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Because there would be no rest in damnation, could be no rest; and what was this torment compared to the restless fires of hell? Us living beneath those constant stars—those stars themselves—what has this to do with Satan? And those images which sound so static to us in childhood when we are all so take up with mortal frenzy that we can scarce imagine them desirable: seraphim gazing forever upon the face of God—and the face of God itself—this was rest eternal, of which this gentle, cradling planet was only the faintest promise. The implications of this promise is revolutionary, indeed, for it signals a revised conception of existence. The streets are full of enlightened people. All beings have the possibility of attaining enlightenment because all have the divine self hidden under their narcissism. Each of us is linked with God, the Mover of all this moving Universe. This link must be brought into our field of awareness. There is possessed the highest fulfilment of our lives. The individual consciousness is not alone. It is fathered by a universal consciousness. Between the two there is this link. To awaken one day and discover (in several cases, rediscover) it will be a being’s most satisfying experience. The World-Mind is omnipresent. There is a point where every being touches it. When one attains awareness of this point, one is at last attending the true Holy Communion service. The little centre of consciousness that is myself rests in and lives by the infinite ocean of consciousness that is God. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
The first momentary discovery of this relationship constitutes genuine religious experience, and its expansion into a final, full disclosure constitutes a philosophic one. If God is everywhere, as he must be, then God is in beings too. This fact makes possible one’s discover, under certain conditions, of a diviner element in one’s being which is ordinarily obscured. In the end, no being can miss being in the presence of, or confronted by, the divine power. It is a fact which, whether one accepts or denies the idea of its existence, one must one day reckon with it. This is because one has never really been separated from it, never been aware of any thing or thought expect by virtue of consciousness derived from it. What we know through sense as forms points to the existence of the mind. What we know through the intellect as thoughts points to the mind. What does the individual mind itself point to? We can find the answer by plunging deep into its core, deeper and ever deeper in the practice of contemplation until we come to its ultimate source. There, where the World vanishes and the id is stilled, we become one with the infinite and eternal Mind behind the Universe. Ordinarily beings cannot directly penetrate that layer of the mind which is continuous with, and contiguous to, God. However, during the deepest state of prayer one may do so. The human mind, finite and limited though it be, can become an inlet to the universal Mind. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
Such a happening is attended by blissful yet tranquil feelings. This little being that is me merges into larger consciousness that is pure infinite Being—until the body calls me back. Must beings take formal vows in order to discipline themselves? Can one not be loyal to one’s ideal, which in the end is self-chosen or one would not have turned one’s back upon the World, without making promises and uttering pledges which it may not be possible to redeem? Are the tonsured head and the coarse robe essential to ensure the practice of self-control in act and thought? If one is to persevere in the purification of character, is it not enough that one one’s self wants it? If one chooses to do so, one is free to live in the normal human relationships, to follow a career in the World, to marry and beget children. Of course this will necessarily entail certain disciplinary conditions. However, one will not be obliged to flee from all possessions into jungles, monasteries, or the like. “Therefore repent ye, repent ye, lest by knowing these things and not doing them ye shall suffer yourselves to come under condemnation, and ye are brought down unto this second death,” reports Helaman 14.19. Simplicity is the final achievement. After one has played a vast quantity of notes, it is simplicity that emerges as the crowning reward of art. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
This Whole Person is Architect and Developer, Tenant, and Landlord, Apollo and Dionysus in the House of Human Nature!
If the aged are increasingly isolated from community life, theirs is a fate which many groups share in an urban civilization. Not only does the city weaken the traditional kinship group; it also tends to atomize the individual by freeing one from old bonds. The anonymity and hence the alienation of the city dweller have never been more graphically described than by the following words: The restless and noisy activity of the crowded streets is highly distasteful, and it is surely abhorrent to human nature itself. Hundreds of thousands of men and women drawn from all classes and ranks of society pack the streets of most major cities. Are they not all human beings with the same innate characteristics and potentialities? And do they not all aim at happiness by following similar methods? Yet they rush past each other as if they had nothing in common. They are tacitly agreed on one thing only—that everyone should keep to the right of the pavement so as not to collide with the stream of people moving in the opposite direction. No one even thinks of sparing a glace for one’s neighbors in the streets. The more that city folk are packed into a tiny space, the more repulsive and disgraceful becomes the brutal indifference with which they ignore their neighbors selfishly concentrate upon their private affairs. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
We know well enough that this isolation of the individual—this narrow-minded egotism—is everywhere the fundamental principle of modern society. However, nowhere is this selfish egotism so blatantly evident as in the frantic bustle of the great cities of New York, London, Tokyo, Shanghai, and San Francisco. The disintegration of society into individuals, each guided by one’s private principles and each pursuing one’s own aims has been pushed to its furthest limits in many of these World Class Cities and others. Here indeed human society has been split into its component atoms. And although some of these cities features have softened, they are still basically the same: mechanical, atomistic, impersonal, predatory. The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of one’s existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, notably life in a great city where one has become a mere cog in a machine. Today in an increasingly citified World, these pressures have mounted and mortals find it difficult to preserve their identity. “I fear lest the Spirit of the Lord hath ceased striving with them. For so exceedingly do they anger that it seemeth me that they have no fear of death; and they have lost their love, one towards another; and they thirst after blood and revenge continually,” reports Moroni 9.4-5. #RandolphHarris 2 of 14
With the rise of corporate America and the financial districts came another historical development in the breakdown of traditional community bonds: the antagonism of social classes. The globalization caused a social dislocation of stupendous proportions, and the problem of poverty is merely the economic aspect of this event. Those at the bottom were not the only ones affected, although in the early industrial period huge masses of the laboring population resembled more the specters that might haunt a nightmare than human beings. However, if the workers were physically dehumanized, the owning classes were morally degraded. The traditional unity of a Christian society was giving place to a denial of responsibility on the part of the well-to-do for the conditions of their fellows. The Two Nations were taking shape. To the bewilderment of thinking minds, unheard-of wealth turned out to be inseparable from unheard-of poverty. Scholar proclaimed in unison that a science had been discovered which put the laws governing mortal’s World beyond any doubt. #RandolphHarris 3 of 14
It was at the behest of these laws that compassion was removed from the hearts, and a stoic determination to renounce human solidarity in the name of the greatest happiness of the greatest number gained the dignity of secular religion. “Pray for them, my children, that repentance may come unto them. However, behold, I fear lest the Spirit hath ceased striving with them; and in this part of the land they are also seeking to put down all power and authority which cometh from God; and they are denying the Holy Ghost,” reports Moroni 8.28. The class struggles that have raged in Europe, Asia, Africa, Mexico, Australia and North America may then be regarded, at least from the point of view of those at the bottom, as not just an effort to secure a larger slice of the economic pie but also as a desperate attempt to restore a lost community. If this struggle is less violent today than in the past and if the workers of Europe and America have made considerable material progress, it would be naïve to assume that they have found that community. The two nations may not be far apart as in the nineteenth century, but the gap between them still exits. #RandolphHarris 4 of 14
There is a sharp division between “them” (those on top: bosses, lawyers, doctors, judges, police, professors, civil servants) and “us” in the working class. “They” are the people at the top, the higher-ups, the people who give you your dole, call you up, tell you to go to war, fine you, made you split the family up, control your legal status and health and safety and education. The rapid inflation in the economy has intensified working class solidarity because of severe distress. However, if working people have a keen sense of them and us they also have strong commitments as members of a group with common interest and needs. That is, if alienated from the larger society, least they felt they belonged to their own class, which was not necessarily a matter of class consciousness, but rather a sense of sharing problems with kin and neighbors whose work and living arrangements were similar. The class conscious political parties and labor movements that grew up in these World Class Cities are products, not the cause, of these common experiences. Many members of the new generation are discovering for themselves that impulses of spirit are more precious than the Worldly goods they inherit from their parents. Their discover is of tremendous value indeed, and no one would argue with it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 14
However, here, again, a kind of trading on innocence comes in to confuse the picture. To a greater or lesser extent, youths of today, like the rest of us, use and enjoy the benefits of technology, no matter how simplified their lives may be. Our culture’s affluence, often to be found in the life styles of parents of the more radical young people, is what makes it possible for them to indulge in their radicalism and, many times, form communities. Here they get scattering wheat on unploughed, hard, dry ground, insisting: “It will grow.” All one proves is that without some knowledge of the agriculture, all the good intentions in the World cannot prevent the members of the community from starving when Winter comes. The fact, of course, that many of these communities fail and all have a difficult time does not lighten their moral value as a testimony to the voice of nature; and they are a sharp reminder to all our consciences of the divisive baggage of Worldly possession. However, the high purpose is not enough. One observer of a number of communities says that those doomed to failure are the ones with no other purpose than the self-improvement of the group, whereas those that succeed have some goal or value—a special religious commitment, for example—that transcends the members themselves. #RandolphHarris 6 of 14
This saves them from the innocence of believing that what they want will come out of their wanting it, that nature will renounce its age-old neutrality and fit their mortality (as it was in the Garden of Eden), and that somehow one escapes the tragedies and complexities of life simply by being simple. We have seen that innocence cuts across generations. Faced with the multitude of choices and sensing our essential impotence, we cry for some shield, for some protection from this insoluble dilemma, for someone or some technique to take the impossible responsibility from us. One defense is innocence. Innocence is real and loveable in the child; but as we grow we are required by the fact of growth not to close ourselves off, either in awareness or experience, to the realities that confront us. Innocence as a perpetuation of earlier attitudes—the innocence of the flower children, of the too easy program of loving everyone, of wearing one’s birthday suit without anxiety or guilt, of oversimplification of honesty and sincerity as though one were still a child—all these may be charming but they are also radically nonadaptive in our contemporary World. It is an innocence that shows itself in the clear, open, pure visage of a Larry, an innocence that expects nature to hear our need and forsake her ancient condition of neutrality in order to protect us from harm. It is an innocence without responsibility. #RandolphHarris 7 of 14
This type of innocence is a defense against having to confront the realities of power, including such external forms of power as war machine or such inner forms of power as status and prestige. The fact that innocence is used for such extrainnocent purposes is what makes it suspect. Innocence as a shield from responsibility is also a shield from growth. It protects us from new awareness and from identifying with the sufferings of humankind as well as with the joys, both of which are shut off from the pseudo innocent person. The person of independent temperament cannot fit easily into monastic existence with its formal patterns and clock-timed bell-signalled regularity. The solution of the World’s problems does not lie in renouncing the Worldly life itself. If every man became a priest or every woman a nun, they would merely exchange one set of problems—Worldly ones—for another set—monastical ones. It is probably correct to say that the first kind are harsher and grimmer than the second kind. However, whatever type of life is adopted, problems will inescapably be there. Whether the ideal is a hermit’s existence or a householder’s the same qualities have to be developed. #RandolphHarris 8 of 14
How can a person escape from the World-Mind since one is indissolubly united with it? Through the Overself one is a very part of it, one’s consciousness could not work without it. The Godlike deepest Self in us knows and feels on its own level; therefore the intellect’s reasoning and the aesthetic feeling are reflections on a lower level of spiritual activities. So many human sufferings are the consequences of human errors, and so many of these errors arise from human ignorance. The supreme ignorance of all which leads to the greatest sins and sufferings is that one does not know one is an individualized part of a greater consciousness. Although this consciousness shines through one’s ego it is apart from the ego, for it stands in its own right and exists as an entity by itself. It is this consciousness which enables a mortal to act and think in the physical body and it is one’s diviner part. Blinded by the error of materialism, one identifies with the body itself. #RandolphHarris 9 of 14
The self of every create is divine Being, the ultimate Consciousness, but only when evolution brings it to the human level does it have the possibility of discovering this fact. It is true that the human mind makes it own World of experience, but it is not true that it makes it by itself; for behind the individual mind is the Cosmic Mind. If the World is but an idea there must be a mind which conceived it. Although my individual mind has so largely contributed to its making, it has not contributed to its original conception. Such a mind must be an undivided universal one in which my own is rooted. It must indeed be what mortals commonly call God. Thus the World-mind originates our experience for us but we ourselves mold it. It supplies the karmic-forces material and we as individuals supply the space-time shape which this material takes. Thus there is a union of the individual with the universal. Whether we think of this mysterious origin as manifesting itself in waves of energy or in particles of the same force, it is and must be there for the deeply reflective atomic scientist. Whether we think of it as God the Creative Universal Mind or as God the inaccessible all-transcending Mind remote from human communion, it is and must be there for the intuitive. However, in both cases his entire Universe is but a thought in the Universal Mind. #RandolphHarris 10 of 14
Every object and every creature is simultaneously included in this thought: therefore every human being too. Through this relationship it is possible for a mortal to attain some kind of communion with IT. This is what the quest is all about. Let us consider once more what has here been said about encounters with what is natural and with what is spiritual. The question may be asked at this point whether we have any right to speak of a reply or address that comes from outside the sphere to which in our consideration of the orders of being we ascribe spontaneity and consciousness as if they were like a reply or address in the human World in which we live. Is what has here been said valid except as a personalizing metaphor? Are we not threatened by the dangers of a problematic mysticism that blurs the borderlines that are drawn, and necessarily have to be drawn, by all rational knowledge? The clear and firm structure of the I-You relationship, familiar to anyone with a candid heart and the courage to stake it, is not mystical. To understand it we must sometimes step out of our habits of thought, but not out of the primal norms that determine mortal’s thoughts about what is actual. Both in the realm of nature and in the realm of spirit—the spirit that lives on in sayings and works and the spirit that strives to become sayings and works—what acts onus may be understood as the action of what has being. #RandolphHarris 11 of 14
Human existence is challenged and charged by the perils and prices of everyday existence. “Every thing has it appointed hour, there is a time for all things under Heaven: a time for birth, a time for death, a time to plant, and a time to uproot, a time to terminate, and a time to heal, a time to break down, and a time to build, a time to cry, a time to laugh, a time to mourn, a time to dance, a time to scatter and a time to gather, a time to embrace, a time to refrain, a time to embrace, a time to refrain, a time to see, a time to lose, a time to keep, a time to throw away, a time to tear, a time to sew, a time for silence and a time for speech, a time for love, a time for hate, a time for war, a time for peace,” reports Ecclesiastes 3.1-8. You have read words of a man who lived about 200 yeas before the birth of Jesus; a man nurtured in Jewish piety and educated in Greek wisdom; a child of his period—a period of catastrophes and despair. He expresses this despair in words of a pessimism that surpasses most pessimistic writings in World literature. Everything is in vain, he repeats many times. #RandolphHarris 12 of 14
It is vanity, even if you were King Solomon who not only controlled the means for any humanly possible satisfaction but who also could use them with wisdom. However, even such a man must say: All is in vain! We do not know the name of the writer of this book who is usually called the Preacher, although he is much more a teacher of wisdom, a practical philosopher. Perhaps we wonder how his dark considerations of mortal’s destiny could become a Biblical book. It took indeed a long time and the overcoming of much protect before it was accepted. However, finally synagogue and church accepted it; and now this book is in the Bible besides Isaiah and Matthew and Paul and John. This “all is in vain” has received Biblical authority. I believe that this authority is deserved, that it is not an authority produced by a mistake, but that it is the authority of truth. His description of the human situation is truer than any poetry glorifying mortals and their destiny. His honesty opens our eyes for those things which are overlooked or covered up by optimist of all kinds. So if you meet people who attack Christianity for having too many illusions tell them that their attacks would be much stronger if they allied themselves with the Preacher. The very fact that this book is a part of the Bible shows clearly that the Bible is a most realistic book. And cannot be otherwise. #RandolphHarris 13 of 14
For only on this background the message of Jesus as the Christ has meaning. Only if we accept an honest view of the human situation, of mortal’s old reality, can we understand the message that in Christ a new reality has appeared. One who never has said one’s life vanity of vanities, all is vanity cannot honestly say with Paul, “In all these things we are more than conquerors through one who loved us.” This view would enrich psychology by embracing literary sources, humanistic values, and the power of myth. Clinicians can utilize existential principles to empower clients in a wealth of ways: to cope more effectively and respond to life’s demands, to achieve a deeper understanding of the situational forces operating on them, and to gain a sense of how the individual’s interpretation of life creates new possibilities and realities of existence. Existential-integrative psychology and religion aspires us to guide others toward personal liberation, an inner sense of freedom one that absorbs and transforms experiential challenges. Rather than retreat from the onslaught of traumatic experiences or exploit them for personal gains, the client, and all of us, can live most fully, be optimally functional, by developing the mental flexibility to be on the moment, meaningfully rooted in the past, with viable options for the future. This whole person is architect, developer, tenant and landlord, Apollo and Dionysus in the House of Human Nature. #RandolphHarris 14 of 14
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
Against Heavens Hand or Will, Argue Not Nor Bate a Lot of Heart or Hope, Still Bear Up and Steer Right Onward!
Investigators of the paranormal—we watch and we are always here. I sat up and pushed myself back against the paneled wall and stared at him because I could not believe the sound I was hearing. He ripped into the song. He tore the notes out of the violin and each note was translucent and throbbing. His eyes were closed, his mouth a little distorted, his lower lip sliding to the side, and what struck my heart almost as much as the song itself was the way that he seemed with his whole body to lean into the music, to press his soul like an ear to the instrument. I have never known music like it, the rawness of it, the intensity, the rapid glittering torrents of notes that came out of the strings as he sawed away. It was Mozart that he was playing, and it has all the gaiety, the velocity, and the sheer loveliness of everything Mozart wrote. Nicolas de Lenfent had been educated all his life to be a little imitation aristocrat. Well, during his first term studying law in Paris, at Pantheon-Assas University, he fell madly in love with the violin, of all things. Seems he heard an Italian virtuoso, one of those geniuses from Padua who is so great that mortals say he has sold his soul to the devil. Well, Nicolas dropped everything at once to take lessons from Wolfgang Mozart. He sold his books—the 17th century Institutio Theologiae Elencticae by Francisco Turrettione, the 16th century Tractatulus Hypocratis Medicorum Optimi de Aspectibus Plantrum Verus Lubam by Pietro d’Abano. He did nothing but play and play until he failed his examinations. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Nicolas wanted to be a musician. Can you imagine? And his father was beside himself. He even smashed the instrument, and you know what an expensive instrument the Molitor Stradivarius is, and you know what a piece of expensive merchandise means to the good draper. Nicolas promptly ran away to Clermont and sold his rare silver and tortoiseshell verge pocket watch to buy another. He is impossible all right, and the worst part of it is that he plays rather well. On Sunday when I went to mass, he was playing upstairs in his bedroom over the shop. Everyone could hear him, and his father was threatening to break his hands. I gave a little grasp at the cruelty of it. I was powerfully fascinated! I think I loved him already, doing what he wanted like that. Of course, people said he will never be anything. He is too old. That when you are already twenty, you cannot take up the violin. But what do they know? He plays magically in his own way. And maybe he can sell his soul to the devil. Engaging destiny is seen most brilliantly in poets, partly because of their genius with words, but mainly because they live in and write with the awareness of deeper dimensions of consciousness than the rest of us. Whether or not we call these depths subconscious, unconscious, or collective unconscious, they still are arrived at only by intensity of feeling and vision, an ecstasy or a rage that cuts through superficial existence and reveals the profound forms of life. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
We should expect poets to have a great deal to communicate about destiny and about their own struggles to confront it. And we are not disappointed. I have always had a secular mind, but not for any philosophical reasons. Many people do not much believe in God and never have. Of course, when they do to mass they say they do. However, it is a duty for them. Real religion long ago died out for many people, especially when Madalyn Murry O’Hair came along and founded American Atheists and challenged mandatory prayer and Bible reading in public schools, but of course she and her sons ended up stealing money from the foundation and absconded. And as fate would have it, David Roland Waters, a convicted felon and former employee of American Atheists was convicted of murdering Madalyn O’Hair, her second son Jon Garth Murray, and her adopted daughter Robin Murry O’Hair (daughter of her son William J. Murray and his high school girlfriend Susan). Now we have all these shootings in the schools since people are removing God from the country founded in his name, as religion has died out in the families of thousands of aristocrats. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Once I remember crying over witches. We were little boys and the priest was teaching us our prayers. And the priest took us out to see the place where they burnt the witches in the old days, the old stakes and the charred ground. That was a horrid, horrid place. I remember screaming and being carried home, nightmares about the fires. Someone bathing my forehead and saying, “Wake up.” However, I had not thought of that little scene in years. It was the place itself I thought about whenever I drew near it—the thicket of blackened stakes, the images of men and women and children burst alive. When my mother came to get us, she said it was all ignorance and cruelty. She was so angry with the priest for telling us the old tales. The final horror to hear they had all died for nothing, those long-forgotten people of our village, that they had been innocent. Victims of superstition. There were no real witches. No wonder I had screamed and screamed. However, my mother told a different story, that the witches has been in league with the devil, that they had lighted the crops, and in the guise of wolves killed the sheep and the children. Still, if no one is ever brunt in the name of God, the World would be better. The good father even said that they had burnt a good number of werewolves in those times, too. They were a regular menace. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Nevertheless, the poet’s way is the opposite to the opaque, placid life. In authentic poetry we find a confrontation which does not involve repression nor covering up nor sacrifice of passion in order to avoid despair, nor any of the other ways most of us use to avoid direct acknowledgment of our destiny. The art of the poets teases out our awareness of our fate; the energy that does into the making of the poem adds to our passion; and by means of the music poets combine with words, the poem takes on a power to express the dignity of our state as human beings. All pains in the immortal spirit must endure, all weakness which impairs, all griefs which bow, find their sole speech in that victorious brow. This is an expression for all of us to understand the passions and griefs experienced in engaging our own destinies. The joy and ecstasy from this level is where freedom takes off. All possibilities open up—thou art freed. When we consider how our light is spent, half our days in this dark World and wide, and that one talent which is death to hide could lodge us useless, not to express our freedom is a cruel fate. For many people their failure to see life and its precious capacity is what eats away their souls. However, religious faith is what helps us to accept our destiny, it keeps us from being cynical and sarcastic. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Against Heavens hand or will, one must not argue, nor bate a lot of heart or hope, but still bear up and steer right onward. This thought might lead one through the Worlds vain mask content, through the veil, have we no better guide. This is not a resignation. Resignation usually drains away one’s power and productivity. However, we are still passionate in our defense of freedom. Give us the liberty to know, to utter, and to argue freely according to conscience, above all other liberties. Help us to save free conscience from the paw of hireling wolves whose gospel is their maw. It is important to have such passionate devotion to the cause one believes in and speak not of resignation, passivity, docility, or loss of energy. Tragic experience can be formed by art into a thing of beauty. This outer power in politics as well as inner power of poetry indicates that we have kept very much alive our dialectical relation to our own destiny and thus our experience of authentic freedom. The World is twofold for mortals in accordance with our twofold attitude. Modern society only recognizes one of these modes, the mode of experience, through which mortals treats the World (including their fellow people), as an object to be analyzed and utilized. Most mortals ignore the second mode, the mode of encounter, through which mortals enter into a relation with the World, engaging as active participants rather than as objective observer. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
It is only by opening ourselves up to this second mode of engaging in the World that we can escape the ills of the modern human condition. Or mortals encounter being and becoming as what confronts one—always only one being and everything only as a being. What is there reveals itself to one in the occurrence, and what occurs there happens to one as being. Nothing else is present but this one, but this one cosmically. Measure and comparisons have fled. It is up to us how much of the immeasurable becomes reality for us. The encounters do not order themselves to become a World, but each if for us a sign of the World order. They have no association with each other, but every one guarantees our association wit the World. The World that appears to us in this way is unreliable, for it appears always new to us, and we cannot take it by its word. It lacks density, for everything in it permeates everything else. It lacks duration, for it comes even when not called and vanishes even when we cling to it. It cannot be surveyed: if one tries to make it surveryable, one loses it. It comes—comes to fetch us—and if it does not reach us or encounter us it vanishes, but it comes again, transformed. It does not stand outside us, it touches our ground; and id we say “soul of my soul” we have not said too much. However, one must beware of trying to transpose it into our soul—that way one destroy it. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
It is your present; you have a present only insofar as you have it; and you can make it into an object for you and experience and use it—you must do that again and again—and then you have no present any more. Between you and it there is a reciprocity of giving: you say You to it and give yourself to it; it says You to you and gives itself to you. You cannot come to an understanding about it with others; you are lonely with it; but it teaches you to encounter others and to stand your ground in such encounters; and through the grace of its advents and the melancholy of its departures it leads you to that You in which the lines of relation, though parallel, intersect. It does not help you to survive; it only helps you to have intimation of eternity. The It-World hangs together in space and time. The You-World does not hang together in space and time. The individual You must become an It when the event of relation has run its course. The individual It can become a You by entering into the event of relation. These are the two basic privileges of the It-World. They induce mortals to consider the It-World as in which one has to live and also can live comfortably—and that even offers us all sorts of stimulations and excitements, activities and knowledge. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
In this firm and wholesome chronicle the You-moments appears as queer lyric-dramatic episodes. Their spell may be seductive, but they pull us dangerously to extremes, loosening the well-tried structure, leaving behind more doubt than satisfaction, shaking up our security—altogether uncanny, altogether indispensable. Since one must after all return into the World, why not stay in it in the first place? Why not call to order that which confronts us and send it home into objectivity? And when one cannot get around to saying You, perhaps to one’s father, wife, companion—why not say You and mean It? After all, producing the sound “You” with one’s vocal cords does not by any means entail speaking the uncanny basic word. Even whispering an amorous You with one’s soul is hardly dangerous as long as in all seriousness one means nothing but experiencing and using. One cannot live in the pure present: it would consume us if care were not taken that it is overcome quickly and thoroughly. However, in pure past one can live; in fact, only there can a life be arranged. One only has to fill every moment with experiencing and using, and it ceases to burn. And in all the seriousness of truth, listen: without It a human being cannot live. However, whoever lives only with that is not human. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
If I am not for myself, who will be? And if I am only for myself, what am I? And if not now, when? When we have fears that we may cease to be, before the pen has gleaned one’s teeming brain—keep in mind the chief expression of possibility, the freedom to create, may be taken from one. When one beholds, upon the night’s starred face, huge cloudy symbols of a high romance, and think that one may never live to trace their shadows, with the magic hand of chance; and when one feel, fair creature of an hour, that one shall never look upon thee more, never have relish in the faery power of unreflecting love;–then on the shore of the wide World one stands alone, and thinks till love and fame to nothingness do sink. The words will began to pour out of one as they had out of a poet, and soon one will be talking about things they had felt in their hearts, varieties of secret loneliness, and the words will seem to be essential words they way good friends do on those rare occasions. And friends will come to describe their longings and dissatisfactions, and say things to each other with exuberance. Once night, when the third bottle of wine came, I began to talk of my life, as I had never done before—of what it was like each day to ride out into the mountains, to go so far I could not see the towers of my father’s house anymore, to ride above the tilled land to the place where the forest seemed almost haunted. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Into this Universe, and why not knowing nor whence, like water willy-nilly flowing; and out of it, as wind along the waste, I know not whither, willy-nilly blowing. Up from the Earth’s centre through the Seventh Gate I rose, and on the Throne of Saturn sate; and many knots unraveled by the road; but not the master-knot of human fate. The moving finger writes; and, having writ, moves on: nor all your piety nor wit shall lure it back to cancel half a line, nor all your tears wash out a word of it. We must attack the false wishes of illusions that we all tend to carry—the hope that somehow we shall escape, through our special piety or our self-pity, the common fate of humankind. We simply do not know the ultimate answers. However, despite this fate and the injustices that it implies, we must seize what freedom we can and push on. The mystery will remain a mystery, our destiny cannot be unraveled by reason or by wit. We must pit fortitude against fatalism. Confront fate without becoming fatalistic. As a boy eight centuries ago, studied Sufism and science and as an adult become known as Persia’s outstanding astronomer, who wrote an authoritative text on algebra, who revised the astronomical tables, who persuaded the sultan to reform the calendar, and who in other ways worked diligently in the sultan’s government. Hardly a hedonistic loafer! #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Because something deep down in the subconscious knows that the ego is destructible, sooner or later, in one incarnation or another, a longing arises for what which is indestructible. From this moment one begins, however feebly, to crease indulging the desires, the wishes, of one’s ego, and to replace the by something new and higher. This is the beginning of the Quest, and it may take a religious, a spiritual, or a philosophic form, according to one’s maturity. Many seem to believe their entry into the quest for God will set their life in order and solve their problems forever. This is, of course, mere wishful thinking. It is not their entry but their completion of the quest that could ever do these things for them. The embracing of one’s fate so directly and so clearly—as well as so blithely and courageously—reduced the negative effect of the piddling worries about destiny, and sets one free inwardly for actualizing one’s freedom outwardly. Like Queen Akasha, those persons who often seem the most capable of accepting the inevitable are also the most productive and the most capable of pleasure and joy. We see in these poets that the acceptance of human destiny is the way to put one’s feet on solid ground. We then are not the ready prey of hobgoblins—we are no longer fighting battles against figments of our imagination; no boogeyman or woman is lurking in the closet. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
We are freed from the hundred and one imaginary bonds; we are loosed from the need to beg others to take care of us. Having confronted the worst, we are released to open up to the possibilities of life. Those of us who dare to face the question of truth may listen to what the Fourth Gospel says about it. The Fourth Gospel speaks a true reality—that reality which does not deceive us if we accept it and live with it. If Jesus says, “I am the truth,” he indicates that in Christ the true, the genuine, the ultimate reality is present, unveiled, undistorted, Christ’s infinite depth, in his unapproachable mystery. Jesus is not the truth because his teachings are true his teachings are. However, Christ’s teachings are true because they express his words. And he is more than any word said about him. The truth which makes us free is neither the teaching of Jesus nor the teaching about Jesus. They point to the truth, but are not a law of truth. Nor are the doctrines about him the truth that liberates. I say this to you as somebody who all his life has worked for a true expression of the truth which is the Christ. However, the more one works, the more one realizes that our expressions, including everything we have learned from our professors and from the teaching of the Church in all generations, is not the truth that makes us free. “The dead do not share. Though they reach towards us from the grave (I swear they do) they do not band their hearts to you They hand their heads, the part that stares,” Stan Rice from “Their Share” Body of Work (1983). #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