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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!
Our Eternal Life is Useless to Us if We Do Not See the Beauty Around Us, the Creation of Mortals Everywhere!
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
In Humility the Quest is to be Begun: in Even Greater Humility it is to be Fulfilled
And Distance Has Come and Taken You Far Away Again, but I Will See You Soon, My Friend!
I showed my power to understand. Yes, illusions before, I admit it, but the thing I have spoken here are true. Already you despise your son for his love of mortals, his need to be ever near them, his yielding to the violinist. “Lie awake watching you run through my head, I am alone again, but not for long my friend. We face another day and distance has come and taken you far away again, but I will see you soon my friend, and then I will sing you my song. I cannot go home alone again. No I cannot my friend. Until then, eyes, I recognize taking me back familiar to me from some other time or maybe another life. Remember out times, and know who I am. The memory stays, until we can breathe as one again,” Until then by Sully Erna. Power and the sense of significance, I have said, are intertwined. One is the objective form and the other the subjective form of the same experience. While power is typically extrovert, significance may not be extrovert at all but may be shown (and achieved) by prayer or other introvert, subjective methods. It is nevertheless experienced by the person as a sense of power in that it helps one integrate oneself and subsequently makes one more effective in one’s relations with others. Power is always interpersonal; is it is purely personal we call it strength. Power is social and consists of person in groups acting in concert. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
This is why the interpersonal view point, the tap root of the cultural school of psychoanalysis, is so important. If one believes the feeling of power in the sense of having influence in interpersonal relations with significant others is crucial for the maintenance of self-esteem and for the process of maturity, when the sense of significance is lost, the individual shift one’s attention to different, and often perverted or neurotic, forms of power to get some substitute for significance. “Here I am, what a nice place to be. I never thought I would see the skies separate for me and here I am. What a nice surprise. If only I had known what life was like on this side. You always bring me light, and you help me find my way. A gentle kiss goodnight is the innocence I crave. Here I am humbled and amazed. This beautiful little miracle of life was gifted to me, and here I am. I never thought I would say, if I could live my life again, I would live it your way. You always brought me life, and you have helped me find my way. I will never waste you time, I will never cause you pain. I will love you all my life, I will love you everyday. Under the light you shine on me, I promise I will be there for you baby. I would never want to leave you anyway, you have become my light. I cross my heart that is in your hands with hope that you will always be my best friend. I promise I will be there until the end,” My Light by Sully Erna. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Our particular problem in America at this point in history is the widespread loss of the sense of individual significance, a loss which is sensed inwardly as impotence. A situation in our day more tragic than the violence about us is that so many people feel they do not and cannot have power, that even self-affirmation is denied them, that they have nothing left to assert, and hence that there is no solution short of a violent explosion. Consider a recurring nightmare from a radical student at Columbia University. In this dream, the student Salvatore, came home from school and rand the bell to his house. He was told by his mother that she did not know him and that he did not belong there. He went to his cousin’s house and they told him the same thing. Finally he walked across the country to his father’s house in California and was told by his father that he did not know him and he did not belong there. The dream ended with him disappearing into the Pacific Ocean. “In separation, we come together. It never ends, change has just begun. Believing as we release the departed to know, what no one else could know. A way, into the unexplained. Redeem my soul into my body. To think my souls have been damned again, and again and again,” The Departed by Sully Erna. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Judging from how often this kind of dream—“My parents did not recognize me; they closed the door in my face,” “I do not belong to any place”—comes up in therapy, it seems to be an important clue to understanding our times. The student who had that dream was a member of the revolutionary movement not by accident. Violence, or acts close to it, gives one a sense of counting, of mattering, of power (whether the feeling be ersatz or not is unimportant at the moment). This in turn gives the individual a sense of significance. No human being can exist for long without some sense of significance. No human being can exist for long without some sense of one’s own significance. Whether one gets it by shooting a haphazard victim on the street, or by constructive work, or by rebellion, or by psychotic demands in a hospital, or by Walter Mitty fantasies, one must be able to feel this I-count-for-something and be able to live out that felt significance. It is the lack of this sense of significance, and the struggles for it, that underlies much violence. Writing in the Report to the Nation Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence appointed by the president after the assassination of Robert Kennedy and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., the historian Richard Maxwell Brown makes sobering statements about American violence. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
“The first and must obvious conclusion is that there has been a huge amount of it. We have resorted so often to violence that we have long since become a trigger happy people. It is not merely that violence has been mixed with the negative features of our history such as criminal activity, lynch mobs, and family feuds. On the contrary, violence has formed a seamless web with some of the noblest and most constructive chapters of American history.” The aftermath of the 1968 political assassination saw a bevvy of opinions and researches spring up on the causes of violence and its cures, consisting largely of debates between those emphasizing nature, and those emphasizing nurture. The former (stemming back, in the main, to Dr. Freud) held the general viewpoint that aggression is instinctive, part of the genetic equipment of mortals, and human beings are inherently aggressive. According to this view, it is a cross we must bear, an expression of the old Adam inevitably tainting human beings, and the most we can hope for is to control this evil in our hearts or let it out in wars and other culturally approved forms of violence. The other chief view, nurture, claims that aggression is a cultural phenomenon, caused—or at least augmented—by mass communication, faulty education, and especially TV. It is to be attacked and gotten rid of by changing our educational methods and controlling programs on TV. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
What all too often is tiresomely ignored is that these two approaches are not mutually exclusive. Aggression is part of the basic equipment of mortals, but it is also culturally formed, exacerbated, and can be, at least in part, redirected. Out culture is not simply a given, but is also us. We “homo called sapiens,” as Edna St. Vincent Millay put it in her sonnet, are the kind of creatures who create a vast TV and other forms of mass communication and, using these means, covertly teach aggression to our children. At the same time we endlessly sermonize against aggression. The contradiction this creates adds to the impotence everyone feels and to the hypocrisy with which we surround the issue of power in our culture. However, the real argument against many of these either/or explanation is that they leave out of the discussion exactly what is most important in the problem—that is, the question of the values, rooted in both nature and nurture, that link the two and are bound up with aggression and violence. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Richard Maxwell Brown concludes his part of the Report to the Commission on Violence by citing two problems which confront us: “One is the problem of self-knowledge…When that is done…we must realize that violence has not been the action only of roughnecks and racists among us but has been the tactic of the must upright and respected of our people. Having gained this self-knowledge, the next problem becomes the ridding of violence, once and for all, from the real (but unacknowledged) American value system.” However, is there not a flagrant contradiction in this? If violence has been part and parcel of “our highest and most idealistic endeavors” and had been the tactic of the “most upright and respected” people, should we not inquire whether these people find something, perhaps unconsciously, in violence that they value? Furthermore, one can never change a value system by willing it changed or by other conscious means, as though plucking weeds from a garden. The roots of values lie deep in the archetypal and unconscious symbols and myths of the society. Changing the values system first of all requires a probing into the questions: What does violence do for the individual? What purposes does one achieve through aggression and violence? #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
In the utopian aim of removing all power and aggression from human behavior, we run the risk of removing self-assertion, self-affirmation, and even the power to be. If it were successful, it would breed a race of docile, passive eunuchs and would lay the groundwork for an explosion in violence that would dwarf all those that have occurred so far. Thus oversimplifying the issue, we talk as though our choice were only between aggression on the one hand and a race of eunuchs on the other. Caught in the contradiction which this breeds, it is not surprising that we wake up with bad dreams, sensing that the essence of ourselves, the self-affirmation and self-assertion that makes us persons and without which we have no reason for living, is taken from us. What we have failed to see is that aggression has been, on the beneficial side, in the service of those values of life which would, if discarded, leave us bereft, indeed. “How many ways can you break my spirit down…again and how many times have I peeled my face up off the ground…for you. In case that you are starting to think you can run my life…I would think again. Or cripple my faith, when you judge and criticize me…but I am still standing. I do not know if I can say I have lived through everything, but I have walked this Earth with bare feet broken in the snow and my father said to me it never seems to be a simple walk down an icy cold broken road. I will fight with what is inside of me…this warrior spirit inside of me,” Broken Road by Sully Erna. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
It has long been my belief that understanding aggression and violence requires that power be seen as basic to the problem. I believe, also, that the data given to us by depth psychology cast an especially revealing light on the springs of human power and on aggression and violence. In my concern with power, I am tying to reach a level below both the nature and nurture theories, below both the instinct and culture arguments. I am seeking the answer to the question: What does individual person achieve through aggression and violence? If the pre-industrial World was in many ways no less insecure than our own, at least work and community life were ordered on a human scale. First of all, most mortals lived in small, tightly knit communities in which the family was the productive unit. Second, the tools that mortals used, the pace of work, the distribution of things that were made—all of those were controlled by human capacities and needs. Perhaps most important, instead of being separated from what we now call leisure activities, work itself—ordinarily some craft—was closely integrated in the total life of individuals and communities. Some call this the World we have lost. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
It was by no means an idyllic Word, but time was, and it was all time up to 250 years ago when the whole of life went forward in the family, in a circle of loved, familiar faces, know and fondled objects, all to human size. That time has gone forever. It makes us very different from our ancestors. Different chiefly because of the technological revolution with its transformation of working conditions, the communities in which mortal life, and the whole complex social order that governs our lives. What happened, however, was companying change in human personality or character; and companying change in human personality or character; and it is the characterological revolution which must be understood if we are to determine whether alienation today differs in form and degree from the miseries of which earlier mortals complained. However, like the scientific and political upheavals which is accompanied, this characterological change had no sudden beginning or point in time at which earlier mortals complained. However, like the scientific and political upheavals which it accompanied, this characterological change had n sudden beginning or point in time at which spontaneously modern mortals replaced feudal mortals. History here is inadequate, and our evidence largely intuitive, or derived from literary works with their descriptions of social types, or from language itself. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
As much as anything else, one needs personal freedom in this search after truth. Every form of interference and obstruction comes from sources which have acquired only a partial or false insight into truth. However, such freedom is permitted only insofar as one is good enough, wise enough, balanced enough, judicious enough, and discriminating enough to use it properly. Otherwise it leads to non-truth and self-deception. One must learn to think for oneself and to practise discrimination for oneself, if one want to find one’s way to truth. “A veil of sparkling white soothes and bathes me in the light, it feels me with the Suns and visions of the ancient ones. Descend to me, and sooth my disarray, and so it is done—hear my words Avalon. Fields are swaying like dancers in the Moonlight, rivers field with dreams-Unbroken and still promising. Warm inside-open the way in flat into the night—embrace what is to be, Avalon” Avalon by Sully Erna. Avalon is the mythical island, in Arthurian legend. The island’s legendary healing powers were said to restore King Arthur after he was injured in a major battle. His sword, Excalibur, was forged there too. It is a utopian paradise where the legends of English knights and political wholeness unite in a kingdom lost in the mists of time. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
If a seeker find no one in one’s surroundings, contacts, or society near enough to one’s level of spiritual interests, then one must accept one’s loneliness, because one has chosen to draw away from the common preoccupation. For in order to be a working philosopher, a mortal must go one’s own way. This demand for individuality requires courage and wisdom. If one lack higher knowledge, intuitional feeling, and intellect—whose combination is wisdom—then one must seek to develop them and this demands works. Meanwhile, one can take help from personal guides and superior books. Without wisdom, or at least genuine efforts to work towards it, one’s course could be wrongly set to arrive at disaster. To withdraw from sectarian community life and walk alone requires qualities that only few possess. There is security, comfort, mortal and Worldly support in it. To be able to abandon these things a mortal must have strong inner urge as well as a continuous clear perception of philosophy’s meaning. “Breathe deep, bracing and strong, coming alive. Take back all that is lost, honour your pride. Time stops, silence is now, moving around hands raised fading to black, fall to the ground. From within, you will begin to feel the rise!” (The Rise by Sully Erna) #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
The weakling cannot walk this path. A mortal needs strength to follow out what one’s deep intuition tells one to do, especially where it departs from the allegedly rational or the socially conventional. If one’s guided attitude or actions meets with criticism or opposition, what is that to one? One is not answerable for what other people think about one. That is their responsibility. One is answerable only for what one oneself thinks and does. Only the mortal who has a passion to acquire the certainty of truth, who has the courage to hold unorthodox views and come to independent conclusions, who lives in an atmosphere of original thought, and to whom the charge of heresy is no charge at all, is at all likely to find one’s way to the truth. In truth, however, the pure relation can be built up into spatiotemporal continuity only be becoming embodied in the whole stuff of life. It cannot be preserved but only put to the proof in action; it can only be done, poured into life. Mortals can do justice to the relation to God that has been given to one only by actualizing God in the World in accordance with one’s ability and the measure of each day, daily. This is the only genuine guarantee of continuity. “Time is so wasted it wastes away, resurrect me Jesus Christ, I am so lonely for you. Taken away the innocence of live. Deliver me. Deliver me out of this pain and I will live through you again,” Eyes of a Child by Sully Erna. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
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
Why Do I Harm the Very Person I Love?
Do you think we find our destiny somehow, no matter what happens? I mean, do you think even as immortals we follow some path that was already marked for us when we were alive? We have said that human freedom gives birth to the human spirit and that spirit is necessary if there is to be freedom. However, are not human spirit and freedom also the sources of evil? What did do we really mean when we say the wrath of God is necessary if there is to be any love of God? In the course of my therapeutic experience I have met and talked with a number of parents whose son or daughter happened to be in treatment with me. When the parents let their hair down, their attitudes varied from tearful regret on the part of a clergy member high up in the ecclesiastical hierarchy about his son’s depression to the genuine, if sad, puzzlement of a mother whose psychotic episode when her daughter was born had a good deal to do wit the latter’s present promiscuity to the boisterous instructions of a Wall Street executive who adjured me to hurry and get his son to shape up. The boisterousness of the executive only served to emphasize his subconscious realization that his authoritarianism had a good deal to with his son’s perpetual failures in everything he tired. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
If these parents could have spoken out of the depths of their feelings, each one of them—even the Wall Street executive—would have cried out, “Why do I harm the very person I love?” When we see the evil we do, scarcely any of us can remain unaffected, mostly unintentionally, to those in our own family and to people we love by our inability to understand what is going on in the other’s thoughts. Oscar Wilde’s line “Yet each man kills the thing he loves” may relieve us to some extent in that it presents the universal quality of the problem of evil; we are not alone in the harm we partly cause. However, Oscar Wilde also makes it impossible for us to forget that each of us participates in the inhumanity to other human beings. The inevitability of evil is the price we pay for freedom. And the denial of evil is also the denial of freedom. Since we have some margin of freedom, we have to make some choices; and this means the chance of making the wrong choice as well as the right one. Freedom and evil presuppose each other, whether we accept responsibility for our freedom and evil or not. Possibility is possibility for evil as well as good. We can pretend innocence, but such retreating to childhood ignorance does not help anyone. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
There is an inescapable egocentricity in all of us, leading to the absolutizing of our own perceptions, which then become destructive to those closest to us. There is a tendency in each one of us to be absolute in one’s self. Each of us is bound up in one’s own skin, each of us sees life through one’s own eyes, and none of us can escape doing some violence to those we long most to understand. The good that I would I do not, and the evil that I would not do, that I do. There is no evading this dilemma. This is the original sin: each of us speaks out of one’s separate individuality and thus inexorably runs roughshod over yearnings and perceptions that are precious to people we love. And if one tried very hard not to do this, if one makes every effort to do good, one succeeds only in adding an element of self-righteousness to the ways one confronts one’s fellows. The problem of evil has been a stumbling block for philosophers and theologians for millennia. Those who represent the rational approach to evil, from Aristotle through Aquinas to the rational philosophers of today, hold that the more we solve our problems, the less evil will exist. Evil is thus a lack of goodness. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The more our science progresses, the argument goes, the more mysterious of life and nature are solved, and the less evil there is in this would. However, I believe this point of view is wrong. I heard this judgment much more in my earlier days before the advent of Adolph Hitler, before the Second World War with all its newly technologized ways of killing, before the use of concentration camps as an accepted political arm of the government, and before hydrogen bomb, with its unutterably cruel mass maiming and slaying. This depressing list should make clear the fact that the progress of science and technology has not resulted in our being less evil. Human cruelty and capacity for evil increase neck and neck with technological progress, just look at how many of the TV news stations lie, distort facts, and ruin lives for fun. Our ways of killing are made more efficient as well as our ways of living. In fact it is thought, people who are terrorized for fun should be beautiful in person so the insult to God might be greater when the Dark Tick is done. When the World of mortals collapses in ruin, beauty will take over. The trees shall grow again where there were streets; the flowers will again cover the meadow that is now a dank field of hovels. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
That shall be the purpose of the Satanic master, to see the wild grass and the dense forest cover up all trace of the once great cities until nothing remains. And why call this Satanic? Why not call it chaos? That is all it is. However, mortals invented Satan, did they not? Satanic is merely the name they give to the behavior of those who would disrupt the orderly way in which mortals want to life. Satan is mortal’s invention, a name for the force that seeks to overthrow the civilized order of things. The first man who made laws—be he Moses or some ancient Egyptian king Osiris—that lawmaker created the devil. The devil meant the one who tempts you to break the laws. And we are truly Satanic in that we follow no law for mortal’s protection. So why not truly disrupt? Why not make a blaze of evil to consume all the civilizations of Earth? The main example of the evil that is present in technology along with the good is, of course, nuclear power. If we had any doubts about the dangers to health and even life itself in radiation, nuclear residue, as well as the nuclear bombs per se we have only to listen to the Union of Concerned Scientists to shock us out of our delusions. Not only can nuclear fission destroy the World population many times over, but there is evidence that radiation and strontium 90 may already be seeping into the bodies of an unknown number of us. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
In any case, we walk a razor’s edge in dealing with nuclear fission. Science and technology deal with the how of life, and not the why or what for—which truth reputable scientists by the score tell us. Science increases the possibilities for good and the possibilities for evil, which many esteemed scientists have been shouting to us from the housetops. There is also another group of philosophers and the theologians who take a different approach. This group includes Heraclitus, who said “war is both king of all and father of all,” through Sokratis, Augustine, Pascal, Boehme, and down to Kierkegaard and Bateson. These thinkers directly face the fact that freedom makes evil inevitable. As long as there is freedom there will be mistake choices, some of the catastrophic. However, to relinquish the capacity to make choices in favor of the dictatorial segment of us called our reason is to surrender what makes us human in the first place. The modern form of the Grand Inquisitor’s plan leads people to hand over their responsibility to the scientists in the white coat or to the psychotherapist in the comforting office or to the priest in the church or to the anonymous environment all about us. If we could do these things, we would have the temporary facsimile of evading evil. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
However, while we are no longer committing evil, we also are no longer committing goodness; and the age of the robot will be upon us. The ultimate error is the refusal to look evil in the face. This denial of evil—and freedom along with it—is the most destructive approach of all. To take refuge with the Moonies, or with Jonestown, or any others of the hundreds of cults, most of which seem to spring up in California, is to find a haven where our choices will be made for us. We surrender freedom because of our inability to tolerate moral ambiguity, and we escape the threat that one might make the wrong choice. The mass suicides at Jonestown seem to me to be the terrible, if brilliant, demonstration of the ultimate outworking of the attitudes with which the adherents joined in the first place. They committed spiritual suicide in surrendering their freedom to evade the partial evil of life, and they end up demonstrating to the World in their own mass suicides the final evil. Religious people have for millennia fervently asked, “How could a God of love permit evil?” An answer is given by that tributary of Christianity, Gnosticism: God allowed evil to exist, woven into the texture of the World, in order to increase mortal’s freedom and one’s will to prove one’s moral strength in overcoming. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
However, the question the religious people above ask is simplistic. Let us recall the words of Boehme, above, that God is a fire and it is necessary to confront the wrath of God if the love of God is to have any reality. A Hassidic saying points toward the same thing: God is not nice, God is no uncle. God is an Earthquake. We note that some saints through history have spoken of themselves as the “Chief of sinners.” Obviously, this cannot mean sinner in the sense of committing overt, objective crimes. However, it can mean that the saints, being more highly developed spiritually than ordinary people, have a correspondingly deeper awareness of their pride, vanity, hardness of heart, and obtuseness of understanding. If we look at sin from the inside, we see that there is indeed, sound meaning to their claim. It is impossible to have a sensitive conscience and a good conscience at the same time. If one has a sensitive conscience one will be aware of the evils of the World in which we as human beings participate. Hence, there is no clear, good conscience, but an active concern about the evils. It is not at all surprising, then, that in the Garden of Eden myth, the knowledge of good and evil comes by virtue of the evil of rebellion against God. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
If Adam and Eve are to have any freedom, any true autonomy or true independence, they must defy the orders of God; and whether Yahweh is benevolent or destructive does not at that moment matter. This defying of the orders of God is essential for this development of their own consciousness. Otherwise they will forever be the inert appendage of God. Is this alienating? Anxiety-creating? Guilt-producing? Of course. However, what become available with these “curses” are the blessings of love, responsibility, and the passion and power to create. Still, after meeting with certain people, one may complain about a sense of depression which comes to one’s mind. One should reduce such meetings to the least number possible, and where it is necessary to deal with them, to do so by correspondence as much as one can. It does not matter that such people may have spiritual interests and many also on the Quest. The Quest is an individual matter; it is not a group Quest. One finds God by oneself, alone in the privacy of one’s heart and life, not with the help of a group nor in public associations. Be yourself, your own divine self. Why play a part? Why be an echo? Why follow the World in its pursuit of the trivial, the stupid, the pain bringing? #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
One should not permit oneself to be re-entangled by others in past contacts which have out served their purpose and which now will only keep one down. This freedom to search for and find truth as well as to select one’s own path of approach toward it, is a precious prerogative. One refuses to accept a label; one feels oneself to be outside all the common categories. The divergence of opinion among leading individuals on every subject is extraordinary and emphasizes one again the necessity of thinking for oneself. Remember that custom and habit are the great tyrants who enslave the mass of humankind. Only when one is true to one’s own self, real freedom is possible. Do not permit yourself to be hypnotized by the common indifference to these high matters, but be loyal to the promptings of the spirit. With this decree one runs up one’s personal declaration of independence. No school can hold one. One’s loyalty is henceforth given to global thought. Nor is this all. The mystic life depends on no institution, no tradition, no sectarianism. It is an independent and individual existence. Without falling into the vacuity of skepticism, the intelligent and independent seeker shuns strict and rigid doctrines sectarian intellectual or emotional positions. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
However, this openness of mind, one’s semi-detached stand, do not prevent one’s forming favourable appreciations or accommodating unflattering impressions. “All this is the genius of Our Divine Violinist, but we must now be with him every waking moment. To force him to write we tie him to a chair. We put ink and paper in front of him. And if this fails, we make him dictate as we write down plays.” If you do not feel any affinity with it, let others follow whatever path attracts them, but do not let them impose their path upon you. The unified I: for (as I have said earlier) the unification of the soul occurs in lived actuality—the concentration of all forces into the core, the decisive moment of mortals. However, unlike that immersion, this does not entail ignoring the actual person. Immersion want to preserve only what is pure, essential, and enduring, while stripping away everything else; the concentration of which I speak does not consider our instincts as too impure, the sensuous as too peripheral, or our emotions as too fleeting—everything must be included and integrated. What is wanted is not the abstracted self but the whole, undiminished mortal. This concentration aims at and is actuality. The doctrine of immersion demands and promises penetration into thinking the One, that by which the World is thought, the pure subject. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
However, in lived actuality no one thinks without something being thought; rather is that which thinks as dependent on that which is thought as vice versa. A subject that annuls the object to rise above it annuls its own actuality. A thinking subject by itself exists—in thought, as the product and object of thought, as a limit-concept that lacks all imaginable content; also in the anticipatory determination of death for which one may also substitute its metaphor, that deep sleep which is virtually no less impenetrable; and finally in the assertions of a doctrine concerning a state of immersion that resembles such deep sleep and is essentially without consciousness and without memory. These are the supreme excesses of It-language. One has to respect its sublime power to ignore while at the same time recognizing it as something that can at most be an object of living experience but that cannot be lived. In the former centuries there was a long-lasting struggle in the Church about the religious significance of hearing and seeing. First, seeing prevailed, but then hearing became more and more significant. Finally, in the days of the Reformation hearing became completely victorious. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
The typical Protestant church-building bear witness to the victory. They are halls to hear sermons, emptied of everything to be seen of pictures and sculptures, of lights and stained windows, of most of the sacramental activities. Around the desk of the preacher a room was built to listen to the words of the law and gospel. The eye could not find a place to rest in contemplation. Hearing replaced seeing, obedience replaced vision. Truth is knowledge of things as they are, and as they were and as they are to come. Truth looks backward and forward, expanding the perspective of our small point in time. Jesus said, “I am the way, the truth, and the life.” Truth shows us the way to eternal life, and it comes only through our Savior, Jesus Christ. There is no other way. Jesus Christ teaches us how to life, and, through his Atonement and Resurrection, he offers us forgiveness from our sins and immortality beyond the veil. This is absolutely true. Our mortal quest is to strengthen our faith in the Lord Jesus Christ, to choose good over evil, and to keep his commandments. While we celebrate the innovations of science and medicine, the truths of God go far beyond these discoveries. We can know things of God as we seek them spiritually. The things of God knoweth no mortal, except one as the Spirit of God for they are spiritually discerned. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Love is a Cosmic Force—For those Who Stand in it and Behold in it, People Emerge from their Entanglement in Busy-ness!
Riding on a train through Switzerland, I looked up suddenly to see Armand directly opposite watching me over the upturned cover of cover of his fur-lined coat. Armand snatched the book out of my hand and insisted that I explain what it was, why I read it, what did the picture on the cover mean? In Paris Armand pursued me nightly through the boulevards and the back streets, only and now and then questioning me on the places I went, the things I did. In Venice, I would look out of my room at the Danieli, to see Armand staring from a window across the way. Only when people are tired of the frustrations and obstruction, the spites and cruelties which so often mar Worldly life, will individuals feel ready to turn in real earnest to the Quest. Only then will its perfect tranquility seem more desirable than the hectic excitement of following desires. The essential point is that the more an executive is involved in the World’s affairs, the more one needs this quest which leads one out of the World. The more one’s life is devoted to acquiring money and good and position, the more one needs a firm base within oneself from which properly to use these things as they ought to be used. A time may come when a mortal may tire of the whole social round, the business or professional rat-race, and desire to turn away from it—when one begins to see through its futilities, vanities, and uneducatedness. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
After trying to the usual ways, what other recourse can they have to fulfill this quest? The first appearance of this sense of futility (in the heart’s deeper life), and may pass disregarded and unheeded. However, it will return again and again, and grow apace, until the unsatisfactoriness of a wholly materialistic life, the transitioriness of a merely Earthly happiness, achieve recognition and obtain acceptance. With this negative phase, modern mortal’s inner life begins. They feel vaguely that there are higher laws governing life, that they do not know them. They would like to learn, but in the medley of sects and cults—wit their claims and contradictions—they do not feel safe enough to entrust their lives to any particular one, although attracted to some more than to others. To escape from Worldly troubles, to assuage the disappointment of frustrated hopes, Christians offer a way. The smugly complacent, the thoughtless surface-types, or those always immersed in pettinesses and trivialities will have no awareness of a higher need. However, the others, relatively a few, will find it gnawing at their hearts and tensing their minds. The very condition which is so satisfactory to the larder group brings misery to the smaller one. No longer is one content to be a straw swept along by the river of circumstance. Those who are tired of the falsities and inanities accepted by so many, who want to come to a true life, must come to the quest. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
Those who seek a larger meaning to life cannot live like the less affluent for bodily needs alone, or like the professional for bodily and cultural needs alone. Their feeling is still the profounder: a peace and harmony, an understanding and strength. People come to this quest seeking something beyond the misery, wretchedness, and cruelty of this chaotic World, something of light, warmth, kindness, and peace. The need to insulate ourselves privately from the shocks of contemporary living, is partly met my Christianity. There are those who come to this quest simply because they are disillusioned with the World. Wearied with the self-seeking disputations of political schemers, repelled by the heartless treatment of non-followers by political extremists, they turn away and look elsewhere for truth, honesty, goodness. We seek truth for various reasons. One is because it possesses a certitude that gives us anchorage and rest. The free mortal is one who wills without arbitrary self-will. One believes in destiny, and believes that it stands in need of one. One must sacrifice one’s puny, unfree will, that is controlled by things and instincts, to one’s grand will, which quits defined for destined being. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
As freedom and destiny, so arbitrary self-will and fate belong together. However, freedom and destiny are solemnly promised to one another and linked together in meaning. Metaphorically, freedom in its essence is the acceptance of the chains which suit you and for which you are suited, and of the barness in which you pull towards an end chosen and valued by yourself, and not imposed. It is not, and never can be, the absence of restrictions, obligations or law and of duty. That direct relationships involve some action on what confronts us becomes clear in one of three examples. The essential deep of art determines the process where by the form becomes a work. That which confronts me is fulfilled through the encounter through which it enters into the World of things in order to remain incessantly effective, incessantly It—but also infinitely able to become again a You, enchanting and inspiring. It becomes incarnate: out of the flood of spaceless and timeless presence it rises to the shore of continued existence. Less clear is the element of action in the relation to human You. The essential act that here establishes directness is usually understood as a feeling, and thus misunderstood. Feelings accompany the Christian spirit and spiritual fact of love, but they do not constitute it; and the feelings that accompany it can be very different. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
Jesus Christ’s feeling for the possessed man is different from his feeling for the beloved disciple; but the love is one. Feelings one has; love occurs. Feelings dwell in mortals, but mortals dwell in one’s love. This is no metaphor but actuality; love does not cling to an I, as if the You were merely it content or object; it is between I and You. Whoever does not know this, know this with one’s being, does not know love, even if one should ascribe to it the feelings that one lives through, experiences, enjoys, and expresses. Love is a cosmic force. For those who stand in it and behold in it, mortals emerge from their entanglement in busy-ness; and the good and the evil, the cleaver and the foolish, the beautiful and the unattractive, one after another become actual and a You for them; that is, liberated, emerging into a unique confrontation. Exclusiveness comes into being miraculously again and again—and now one can act, help, heal, educate, raise, redeem. Love is responsibility of an I for a You: in this consists what cannot consist in any feeling—the equality of all lovers, from the smallest to the greatest and from the blissfully secure whose life is circumscribed by the life of one beloved human being to him that is nailed his life long to the cross of the World, capable of what is immense and bold enough to risk it: to love mortals. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
Let the meaning of action in the third example, that of the creature and its contemplation, remain mysterious. Believe in the simple magic of life, in service in the Universe, and it will dawn on you what this waiting, peering, stretching of the neck of the creature means. Every word must falsify; but look, these beings live around you, and no matter which one you approach you always reach Being. Relation is reciprocity. My You acts on me as I act on it. Our students teach us, our works form us. When they are touched by the sacred basic word, the wicked become a revelation. How are we educated by children, by animals! Inscrutably involved, we live in the currents of universal reciprocity. You speak of love as if it were the only relationship between mortals; but are you even justified in choosing it as an example, seeing that there is also hatred? As long as love is blind—that is, as long as it does not see a whole being—it does not yet truly stand under the basic word of relation. Hatred remains blind by its very nature; one can hate only part of a being. Whoever sees a whole being and must reject it, is no longer in the domination of hatred but in the human limitation of the capacity to say You. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
It does happen to mortals that a human being confronts them and they are unable to address one with the basic word that always involves an affirmation of the being one addresses, and then they have to reject either the other person or themselves: when entering-into-relationship comes to this barrier, it recognizes its own relativity which disappears only when this barrier is removed. Yet whoever hates directly is closer to a relation than those who are without love and hate. This, however, is the sublime melancholy of our lot that every You must become an It in our World. However exclusively present it may have been in the direct relationship—as soon as the relationship has run its course or is permeated by means, the You becomes an object among objects, possibly the noblest one and yet one of them, assigned its measure and boundary. The actualization of the work involves a loss of actuality. Genuine contemplation never lasts long; the natural being that only now revealed itself to me in the mystery of reciprocity has again become describable, analyzable, classifiable—the point at which manifold systems of laws intersect. And even love cannot persist in direct relation; it endures, but only in the alternation of actuality and latency. The human being who but now was unique and devoid of qualities, not at hand but only present, not experienceable, only touchable, has again become a He or She, an aggregate of qualities, a quantum with no shape. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Now I can again abstract from one the color of one’s hair, of one’s speech, of one’s graciousness; but as long as I can do that one is my You no longer and not yet again. Every You in the World is doomed by its nature to become a thing or at least to enter into thinghood again and again. In the language of objects: every thing in the World can—either before or after it becomes a thing—appear to some I as its You. However, the language of objects catches only one corner of actual life. The It is the chrysalis, the You the You the butterfly. Only it is not always as if these states took turns so neatly; often it is an intricately entangled series of events that is tortuously dual. What is the relationship between freedom and determinism? Both of them operate in our day-to-day lives. If we refused to accept either freedom or determinism, we would diminish our possibilities for living. Without determinism and the predictability of plane schedules that goes with it, for example, our lives would be lost in anarchy. However, without freedom and the exuberance that goes with it, without poetry and flights of imagination that freedom entails, we would be swallowed up in apathy. I read everything on the topic I could find, and I pondered the question at length; but evermore, I came out by the same door I went in. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
One morning, having gotten up early to go to my study, I walked out to get the morning newspaper, which is thrown on the curb in front of our house. When I was about fifteen steps from the house, in this relaxed, preworking mood, there suddenly came into my mind—so clearly that it seemed like someone speaking out loud—these sentences: Freedom and determinism give birth to each other. Every advance in freedom gives birth to a new freedom. Freedom is a circle within a larger circle of determinism, which is, in turn, surrounded by a larger circle of freedom. And so on ad infinitum. Immediately there crowded also into my mind the demonstrations for this hypothesis. Take Dr. Freud and his description of the unconscious. In his deterministic theory of the mind, he demonstrated that our needs are determined by unconscious childhood experiences and that our so-called rational values are really not rational, but are compensations for their opposites in our unconscious, irrational urges. Dr. Freud seems to be taking our freedom away. However, soon we began to see that the real effect of Dr. Freud’s determinism was to increase the breadth and depth of the human mind. One was, in our present terms, simply clarifying one aspect of destiny. For hereafter the mind would include not only the conscious, the unconscious, and, with an assist from Dr. Jung, the collective unconscious. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
Lo and behold, the determinism in Dr. Freud’s theory actually gave us far-reaching possibilities for freedom in self-development, freedom in directing our minds, and freedom in enjoying the ecstatic possibilities of intellectual exploration. Another illustration was Dr. Darwin and the determinism to make us all into a bunch of monkeys? However, after the anger had cooled, we began to see that Darwin’s new theory, deterministic as it was, actually gave us a new intellectual freedom for understanding our past and new freedom in possibilities, especially in the twentieth century, for controlling and directing our evolution. All this ran through my mind in a few seconds. Immediately after that flood of idea, I picked up the newspaper and started back toward the house. However, in the few moments it took to retrace my steps, I became acutely aware of a fragment of poetry running through my mind: “Other friends have flown before—on the morrow one will leave me.” I had no idea where this intrusive and surprising couplet came from, and at that moment I had not the slightest hint as to what it meant. However, I became aware that I was instantaneously filled with anxiety. My frightened mind was now totally occupied by thoughts completely contrary to my exhilaration of minutes before. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
I began to recognize an old shadow-companion, an enemy-friend who always put in his leering appearance at just such moments. The context surrounding this verse in my mind indicated that it expressed the anxiety projected by this uninvited and obtrusive guest who spoke so stridently I could not help but listen. It was as though my enemy-friend was saying, “Come off it. Forget these new ideas you have gotten, which you fondly imagine were original. People have known these things for centuries. Forget it all and go in and enjoy your breakfast.” Now very anxious but exhilarated, I hurried into the house not to eat my breakfast, but to scribble down these ideas before they should be lost in the confusion that anxiety creates. Later on in the morning, I recalled where the couplet came from. It was the last two lines of a stanza in Poe’s The Raven. As every schoolboy knows (although later we may have forgotten) the scene of the poem in Poe’s room late at night. Oppressed with feelings of loneliness and alienation, and possibly under the influence of medication, Poe carries on a conversation with this raven who flew into his room and perched on his window sill. Poe gradually begins to feel an affection for this unusual bird, and he fears, in the couplet mentioned, that the bird will desert him—“On the morrow he will leave me.” However, the raven answers this one word, as he does at the conclusion of half of the stanzas in the poem: “Nevermore.” #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
Being a psychoanalyst, I could not resist pondering the significance of the word “nevermore.” Could it mean “nevermore” will we escape from the human paradox? That is, when we gain enough freedom to get new insights, new visions, will we be attacked by the anxiety that accompanies freedom like a shadow? We may black off our new thoughts by apathy or by strict and rigid doctrines, hanging on to the tried and true ideas that never upset anyone. Yet whatever form of denial we choose, this “nevermore” says that we never will be completely free from this human paradox: that with the freedom presupposed in every new idea, there comes the equivalent anxiety to plague us. This is the curse and the blessing of being human—that we are free but destined at the same moment. However, at the same time this destiny, of which this black bird was a part, is saying something helpful: that its presence, as Poe experienced it, will “nevermore” desert us. Long before the Christian era people spoke of the divine providence at work behind the driving forces of life and history. And in Christianity the words of Jesus about the birds of the air and the lilies of the field, and one’s command not to be anxious about tomorrow, have strengthened the faith in providence. It become the most common belief of Christian people. It gave them courage in danger, consolation in sorrow, hope among ruins. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
However, more and more this faith lost is depth. It became a matter-of-course and was deprived of the overwhelming, surprising and triumphant character it has in the words of Paul. When the German soldiers went into the First World War most of them shared the popular belief in a nice God was would make everything work out for the best. Actually, everything worked out for the worst, for the nation and for almost everyone in it. In the trenches of the war, the popular belief in personal providence was gradually broken and in the fifth year of war nothing was left. During the second World War similar developments took place in this country. In the political tensions and fears of the last decade the belief in historical providence also broke down. The confidence, shared by large groups in this country, that in history everything will eventually turn out for the best, has almost disappeared. Today not much of it is left. Neither the personal nor the historical belief in providence had depth or a real foundation. These beliefs were products of wishful thinking and not of faith. Faith in providence is not a part of the Christian faith—a part which is easier to grasp than the other parts. It is not the case, as an old country parson once told me, that people firmly believe in divine providence, but that the higher contents of the Christian faith, sin and salvation, Christ and the Church, are strange to them. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
If this is so, then the meaning of providence must also be strange to them and their belief in it is due to break down as such beliefs have in the storms of our century. Faith in providence is faith altogether. It is the courage to say yes to one’s own life and life in general, in spite of the driving forces of fate, in spite of the insecurities of daily existence, in spite of the catastrophes of existence. It is of such courage that Paul speaks in our text. However, first he speaks of the powers which try to make this courage impossible. What do these powers do? They separate us from the love of God. This sentence is surprising. We would point to the dangers of pain and death which threaten our life day by day. Paul is certainly not unaware of them. He enumerates them as tribulation of distress or persecution or famine or nakedness or peril or the sword. However, he feels himself to be a conqueror of them all. And then he starts again and names the powers which threaten to separate us from the love of God. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
There is something mysterious about these powers. They do not have evil names like those which Paul has previously listed; most of them have glorious names—Angels, principalities, life, and height. Why are they the ones which are most threatening? It is because they are always at work in every moment of our lives and because they have a double face. They are the powers which rule the World and they rule it for good and for evil. They grasp us by the good they bring and they destroy us by the evil they contain. This is the reason that they are more dangerous than the obvious evils. This is the reason that the triumph over them is the ultimate test which proves that Jesus is the Christ, the bringer of the new state of things. There are billions of forms and of creatures in the Universe spread through space. They appear and vanish, they come and go, create and pass away, grow and decay, act and interact. This has been going on for immense periods of time; but in the thoughtful mortal’s mind there must arise the question, “To what end was is and shall be all this?” If mental restlessness, a discount with ignorance, with the recurring trivialities of life which does not offer any higher meaning, put one on the Quest, one may find oneself suffering from mental loneliness. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
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
The Way of Life Would be to Love Guardedly and Almost Secretly but the Soul is Perfectly Knowable and Experienceable
It was a more lavish place even than the great hall of the palace; it was stuffed to overflowing with fine things, with a couch made of carved leopards, and a bed hung with sheer silk; and with polished mirrors of seemingly magical perfection. The concept of destiny makes the experience of anger necessary. The kind of person who never gets angry is, we may be sure, the person who also never encounters destiny. When one encounters destiny, one finds anger automatically rising in one, but as strength. Passivity will not do. This emotion is not necessarily negative. Encountering one’s destiny requires strength, the encounter takes the form of embracing, accepting, or attacking. Experiencing the emotional state of anger and conceiving of destiny means that you are free from regarding yourself as too precious; you are able to throw yourself into the game, whatever it may be, without worrying about picayune details. Enkil, a man in his middle twenties, sought the help of a psychotherapist because he was having difficulty in his marriage. One week, after he had had several sessions with the therapist, sudden and dramatic changes occurred in his relationship with his wife, Akasha. Both of them began to talk to each other about events and feelings that they had never discussed before. In some ways it was an agonizing week for them. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Anger that had been pent up for months, and even years, poured forth. In the course of their self-disclosures each of them revealed that they had had dates with another since their marriage. More expressions of anger and hurt burst forth, reaching an intensity they had never experiences before. However, when the anger and hurt had been expressed other feelings began to manifest themselves. They became aware that they felt closer and more attracted to each other than they ever had before. As they moved toward each other, they felt more care and warmth. Gaining awareness of our fear of love is often a difficult task, for we tend to disguise it from ourselves and others by employing many defenses against intimacy. Some people have a reservoir of hostility built up over the years that has something to do with their behavior, and the functions that it appears to serve in relation to their spouse and other people one cares for is one of keeping it virtually impossible to experience intimacy. There are many similar defenses against intimacy. We may keep people at a distance by seeming indifferent to them, by being rigid or legalistic, or by playing the role of martyr. As long as we are successful at employing these ways of keeping others away, it is hard for us to become aware of our fear of love, for we make the possibility of intimacy so remote that there is a little danger of our experiencing it. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
With the lion so successfully caged, we do not become aware of our fear of it. If we can begin to see what we are doing and begin to give up some of our defenses, then we will be more likely to experience our fear of love directly. Once this occurs, we are in a much better position to do something about it. If we cannot only be aware of our fear of love, but also accept it both in ourselves and in others, it will also be helpful. Here, as elsewhere, caring for ourselves seems to be the starting point for personality growth. If we can experience and accept our fear of love, we will have less need of indirect ways of expressing it, which are almost invariably harmful to relationships. When we experience more intimacy than our fears will permit, instead of finding some pretext for withdrawing, we can admit our fear to ourselves and often to the other person as well. This direct way of responding to our fear will be far less destructive to the relationships. A natural ebb and flow of the experience and expression of love will then be possible, as we experience such intimacy as we are ready for and then withdraw for a time as our fear asserts itself too strongly. As we see this pattern clearly, we will be far more able to take in stride apparent setbacks in our association with others. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
When we can recognize that when someone we love acts destructively or hurtfully towards us it is almost certainly an indication that one, too, is afraid rather than that one does not care for us, and it makes a big difference to recognize this. If we did not have this insight, we may be just as hurt or express as much anger. The chances of resolving the situation are much better, however, because we ourselves will not be likely to react as though we have been completely rejected and unloved. This is when we often pick one of Mrs. Winchester’s favorite flowers, a daisy, and pluck the petals off as we play that “he or she loves me, he or she loves me not” game in which we tally up what we consider to be indications of how the other person involved feels based on what answer comes up when we get to the last petal. Then no matter the outcomes, we say to ourselves, “There must something the matter with me or my love would not treat me this way.” This game may give up hope, but it might just be pointless, for the problem is usually not possessed in the absence of caring but rather in the fear of love, which leads the person to act as though one does not care. Of course, recognizing the existence of the fear of love does not always lead to a resolution of interpersonal difficulties. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
Anger for some people is a path to freedom. The times when some people become angry are times when one gains valuable insight, which are then expressed constructively—for example, the time when Akasha told Enkil about her plans to marry Lestat and move across the World, which he had called “the craziest plan I ever heard.” Experiences like Enkil’s is analogous to a ship putting out to sea. It is cast loose from the dock, and, sailing in the open wind, it then gets its power from cooperation with wind and sea and stars, as we get our power by living in cooperation with destiny. Our freedom, like the ship’s, thus comes from engaging destiny, knowing that the elements are there all the time and that they have to be encountered or embraced. Constructive anger is one way of encountering destiny. However, often sailors find that they have to fight the elements, as in the case of a storm at sea. We find our freedom at the juncture of forces we cannot control but can only encounter—which often, like the ship fight the storm, takes all the strength we have. Now it is not only sailing with, it is sailing against the sea and the storm winds. The constructive anger we have been speaking about is one way of using our power to choose our way of encountering destiny. The possible responses to destiny range from cooperation with at one end of the spectrum to fighting against the other. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
Our anger empowers us in the struggle against destiny. As Beethoven cried, “I will seize fate by the throat!” And out of that came the Fifth Symphony. Of course, recognizing the existence of the fear of love does not always lead to a resolution of interpersonal difficulties. A woman, for example, might see that her husband belittles her constantly as a means of avoiding intimacy and as a way of coping with his own self-hate. Yet if she saw no crack in the wall of this defense, she might ultimately come to the conclusion that it would be self-destructive for her to continue the marriage. And a child might still have to be taken from a cruel father even though it might be recognized that his brutality is rooted in a terrible fear of love. If we can discover that the potential hurt of not experiencing and expressing love ultimately far outweighs the risk that accompany intimacy, this might also be a helpful revelation. When we dare to love, we can never eliminate the possibility that we will be hurt. The emotional involvement of caring always includes vulnerability; in fact, if we allow ourselves to love someone, we can be certain that we will sometimes be hurt. Someone we love will pass on to Heaven; someone we love maybe injured; someone we love may suffer from an infirmary; someone we love will be so frightened and mistrustful of our caring that they will react in ways that are hurtful or even destructive to us. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
If we chose to love, these are painful experiences, and we cannot avoid them. It is quite customary to relegate us, the votaries Christianity, to the asylum of eccentricity, crankiness, gullibility, fraud, and even lunacy. In some individual cases our critics are perfectly justified in doing so. When the Christian losses one’s direct path, one easily deviates into these aberrations. However, to make a wholesale condemnation of all Christianity because of the rotten condition of a part of it is unfair and itself an unbalanced procedure. Wherever and whenever it can, science puts all matters to the test. Christianity welcomes this part of the scientific attitude. It has nothing to fear from such a practical examination. However, there is a drawback here. No scientist can test it in a laboratory. One must test it in one’s own person and over a long period. Owning to the widespread lack of education of the subject, there are some people who are disturbed by various fears of prayer. Prayer has been given by God to mortals for their spiritual profits, not for their spiritual destruction. Hatred and jealousy of the flesh, which is in so many evil spirits, is due to that fact that we have both body and soul, which should not exist on this Earth. There are times when there had been mountains and oceans and forests and no living things such as us. That is why evil believes that to have a spirit within a mortal body is a curse. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
God likes the music and rhythm of the language—the shape of words, so to speak. Yes, there are bad spirits who like to hurt people, and why not? And there are good spirits who love them, too. This is why the Bible stresses righteousness. God requires us to have faith in our soul and requires us to search for it patiently, untiringly, and unremittingly. Because this is a strong Christian experience, one’s who preserve in their search may hold the hope that one day they may find it. Mortals will rush agitatedly hither and thither in quest of a single possession, but hardly one can be induced to go in quest of one’s own soul. Strange as it may seem to our kith and kin who has immersed themselves heavily in the body’s senses, hard to believe as it may be to those who have lost themselves deeply in the World’s business, there is nevertheless a way up to the soul’s divinity. That the divine power is active here, in London or Oakland, and now, in the twenty first century, may startle those who look for in only in Biblical times and in the Holy Land. However, human perceptions in their present stage cannot bring this subtler self within their range without a special training. Its activity eludes the brain. What are the alternatives to a life in which love experienced and expressed? Does such a life hold out the hope of any less hurt? Only two other alternatives appear to be available. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
One of the alternatives, if it possible, would be to cut oneself off completely from the experience of love. Such a person would say in effect to themselves, “I will not allow anyone to mean anything to me. I may have business relationships of one kind or another, but no one will be important to me beyond the immediate dealings in which we find each other useful, and no one will learn anything of personal nature about how I feel or who I really am. I will never allow myself to experience the desire or need for love.” Perhaps this kind of life could be achieved, but it sounds like a desperately lonely existence. Perhaps a person could keep so busy or be so controlled that one could even block the loneliness out of awareness, but what kind of life is that? The viewpoint suggested here does, of course, involve a value judgment that meaningfulness is found above all else in human relationships, although it does not appear that few of us would choose to live so isolated an existence. The other alternative is more often practiced, but it seems almost equally unsatisfying. This way of life would be to love guardedly and almost secretly. Although one may not be aware of it, such a person says to oneself, “All right, so I admit to myself that I care for my children and my partner. And maybe there are a few other people in the World who mean something to me. However, I am going to play it cool. I will never reveal too much of myself or let them know how much I care. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
“No sense getting too far out on a limb or being too enthusiastic about our relationship. No use letting them see how much they mean to me. They would be likely to find some way of using it to push me around or hurt me.” A lot of us settle for this approach to love. However, this, too, makes for a kind of loneliness and cheats us out of the deepest and most satisfying experiences of love. And since it involves a guardedness and calculated dullness in our relationships, it cheats us of the free, unburdened feelings that spontaneity in our actions and words could give us all. All of life becomes toned downed and the exhilarating excitement is taken away. The risks of love are ever-present, but the alternatives are not inviting. So from the standpoint of satisfying living it is better even to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. If we postponed the experience and expression of love until we no longer feared it, we would postpone it forever. Some people do appear to use their fear of love as a perpetual excuse for stalemated living—loving and trembling seem to go together. If we desire love we must learn to love in spite of our fears. This process of taking a chance on love might be compared to the experience of a person who wants to make parachute jumps. If one is no a fool, one is frightened. And no amount of prejump training will eradicate that fears. When the time comes to make the leap one will be trembling internally and, quite possibly, externally. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
No amount of reassurance by experienced jumpers will make it otherwise. Making the leap of love is not too unlike this. No amount of advance preparation or reassurance from others will keep us from experiencing fear. If the experience is too frightening, we can make some tentative leaps in the direction of self-disclosure and the involvement of love and withdraw back into the security of emotional distance. In that, it is different, however, as the parachutist, once committed, does not have that option. When we make our first moves toward deeper experiences and more open expressions of love, it may seem at first that our fear is greatly intensified. This is a very critical time, for we may become so frightened that we choose to withdraw permanently and not allow ourselves another chance to feel so deeply. This sometimes happens in psychotherapy. After a few sessions a person may begin to respond to the therapist’s warmth with feelings of caring. Perhaps the individual does not even allow oneself to verbalize these feelings but suddenly discovers one cannot afford the sessions or does not have sufficient time to work them into a busy schedule. At first, when we allow ourselves to love more deeply, it is understandable that the experience of fear is intensified. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
In the past our defenses—the devices we used to keep our emotionally distant from others—protected us not only from the experience of love but also from the full awareness of our fear. As we allow the defenses to crumble we stand vulnerable and stark before our fear. One thing that will help as we begin to allow ourselves the experience of love will be the awareness that we no longer in the same circumstances as we were when the fear of love developed within us. When we were first exposed to the risks of love, we were children. And when we experienced the hurts of feeling rejected, we were relatively helpless to do anything about the situation. No wonder we were frightened and built whatever defenses against hurt we could be walling ourselves off emotionally. Every person who does not feel this close intimate fellowship with one’s Overself is necessarily a pilgrim, most probably an unconscious one, but still in everything and everywhere one is in search of one’s soul. The soul is perfectly knowable and experienceable. It is here in mortal’s hearts and minds, and such knowledge once gained, such experience once known, lifts them into a higher estimate of themselves. Mortals then become not merely thinking animals but glorious beings. It is not astonishing that mortals have ever been attracted and captivated by something which the intellect can hardly conceive nor the imagination picture, something which cannot even be truly named? #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
Here is something to ponder over: why mortals should have forfeited all that seems dear, to the point of forfeiting life itself, for something which can never be touched or smelled, seen or heard. What is it that turned mortal’s hearts toward religion, Christianity, philosophy since time immemorial? One’s aspiration toward the diviner life is unconscious testimony to its existence. It is the presence within one of a divine soul which has inspired this turning, the divine life itself in one’s heart which has prompted one’s aspiration. Mortals have no escape from the urge to seek the Sacred, the Profound, the Timeless. The roots of one’s whole being are in it. We are neither the originator of this doctrine nor even its prophet. The first mortal who ventured into the unknown within-ness of the Universe and of oneself was its originator whilst every mortal who has since voiced this discovery has been its prophet. The day will come when science, waking more fully than it is now from its materialistic sleep, will confess humbly that the soul of mortals really does exist. Often as adults we still feel helpless, as though we were still children. However, we are not helpless. If we express love and are rejected, we can do something about it—we can express our anger and frustrations. If our loving proves unsatisfying, we can withdraw from that person is we choose to and express our love to others more able to respond. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
When we love them has nothing to do with our value as a person, we can discover that another person’s inability to express love to us. Perhaps most important of all we can learn that we can survive hurt and that, while we can learn that we can survive hurt and that, while it is never pleasant, it need not be catastrophic. Mortals are free to imprison their hearts and minds in soulless materialism or to claim their liberty in the winder life of spiritual truth. Let them pull aside their mental curtains and admit the life-giving Sunlight of truth. What could be closer to a mortal than one’s own mind? What therefore should be more easy to examine and understand? Yet the contrary is actually true. One knows only the surfaces of the mind; its deeps remain unknown. Our fear of love will never completely disappear any more than would the fear of the parachutist. In both instances there is always a realistic risk of hurt, but as we are able to enter into more and more emotionally intimate relationships, the fear will gradually lessen. If the mind is to become conscious of itself, it can do so only by freeing itself from the ceaseless activity of thoughts. The systematic exercise of prayer is the deliberate attempt to achieve this. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
Just as muddied water clears if the Earth is left alone to settle, so the agitated mind clarifies its perceptions if left alone though prayer to settle quietly. There exists a part of mortal’s nature of which ordinarily one is completely ignorant, and of whose importance one is usually sceptical. What is the trust highest purpose of mortal’s life? It is to be taken possession of by one’s higher self. One’s dissatisfactions are incurable by any other remedy. True happiness lay in drawing nearer to the Infinite Being. That which is Infinity is indeed bliss; there can be no happiness in limited thing. Such is the insecurity of the present-day World that the few who have found security are only the few who have found their own soul, and inner peace. We will find it increasingly easy to be ourselves and to express all our feeling, for we will have increasing confidence that people will generally like us as we are. And when we are frightened, we will likely find it comfortable to express that feeling, too—and expressing it will help to dissipate it. “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear,” reports I John 4.18. It is true. There is no fear in love—only fear of love and the vulnerability it involves and the repeated experience of love reduces fear. Whether the central message of the New Testament, which revolves around the crucifixion of Jesus, is regarded as the literal truth or as a myth growing out of mortal’s yearning for meaning in life, the theme is a deeply moving one. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
The New Testament is often garbled by theological lingo, and possible drafted by William Shakespeare, but it finally comes down to relationships and appears to be essentially this: God risked creating persons so independent they could love him or thumb their noses at him. He went even further and chose to love them. As it always does, the decision to love necessarily included suffering. However, it must have been worth the risk, for perhaps the alternative even for God was the ultimate loneliness of having no one to love. We can discover for ourselves that it is worth the risk to love, even though we tremble and even though we know we will sometimes experience the hurt we fear. Preference for some human being is necessarily a different thing from charity. Charity does not discriminate. If it is found more abundantly in any special quarter, it is because affliction has chanced to provide an occasion there for the exchange of compassion and gratitude. It is equally available for the whole human race, inasmuch as affliction can come to all, offering them an opportunity to exchange. Preference for a human being can be of two kinds. Either we are seeking some particular good in one, or we need one. In general way all possible attachments come under one of these heads. We are drawn toward a thing, either because there is some good we are seeking from it, or because we cannot do without it. Sometimes the two motives coincide. Often however they do not. Each is distinct and quite independent. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Randolph Harris II International Institute 