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Stop and Consider Life is but a Day—A Lovely Tale of Human Life We Will Read!

October 17, 2019 1:29 am

Not twenty minutes has passed since you left me here in the café, since I said No to your request, that I would never write out for you the story of my mortal life. Now here I am with your notebook open, using one of the sharp pointed eternal ink pens you left me, delighted at the sensuous press of the black ink into the expensive and flawless white paper. Naturally, David, you would leave me something elegant, an inviting page. This notebook bound in dark varnished leather, is it not, tolled with a design of rich roses, thornless, yet leafy, a design that means only Design in the final analysis but bespeaks an authority. What is written beneath this heavy and handsome book cover will count, sayeth this cover. The thick pages are ruled in light blue—you are practical, so thoughtful, and you probably know I almost never put pen to paper to write anything at all. Even the sound of the pen has its allure, the sharp scratch rather like the finest quills in ancient Rome when I would put them to parchment to write my letters to my Father, when I would write in a diary my own laments…ah, that sound. The only think missing here is the smell of the ink, but we have the fine plastic pen which will not run out for volumes, making as fine and deep a black mark as I choose to make. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

I am thinking about your request in writing. You see you will get something from me. I find myself yielding to it. The questions of social isolation and loneliness in senior years will be discussed here. A distinction is made between the two: to be socially isolated is to have few contacts with family and community; to be lonely is to have an unwelcome feeling of lack or loss of companionship. The one is objective, the other subjective and, as we shall see, the two do not coincide. The poorest people, socially as well as financially, were those most isolated from family life. Social isolation needs to be measured by reference to objective criteria. The problem is rather like that of measuring poverty. “Poverty” is essentially a relative rather than an absolute term, and discovering its extent in a population is usually divided into two stages. Most people agree on the first stage, which is to place individuals on a scale according to their income; they often disagree about the second, which involved deciding how far up the scale the poverty “line” should be drawn. They task of measuring isolation can also be divided in this way by placing individuals on a scale according to their degree of isolation and by drawing a line at some point on the scale so that those below the line would, by common consent, be called “isolated.” #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

There were 20 people who were very isolated. Their ages ranged from 64 to 83. They comprised two married women, two widowers, eight widows, five spinsters and three bachelors. Thirteen of them lived alone; 12 had no children and half of the rest had sons only. It is worth examining their circumstances, taking first those with children. Four of the eight with surviving children had daughters. One was a widow living with her only daughter, unmarried; she had few other relatives and all lived outside London. The second was a widow who had come with her only daughter from Scotland after the war, leaving friends and relatives behind. They were together until the housing authorities of her daughter’s children lived with her but she saw the rest of the family once a week or less. The third was a very infirm widow whose only daughter was married to a naval officer, obliged to live near Portsmouth; she lived in the same house as a widowed and childes sister and saw her every day but infirmity prevented other social contacts. The fourth was a widower of 80 who said his daughter and son living in Bethnal Green visited him twice a week to see he was all right but did not spend much time with him, now his wife was dead; he had a drink with a friend twice a week but infirmity precluded other activities. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

The other four very isolated people with children had sons only. One was a married woman whose only son had moved into his wife’s home district outside London; she and her husband had only one relative in Bethanl Green, the wife’s unmarried sister, who was seen each week, and they had no friends or outside social activities, largely because the husband could not walk. Another was a widower, living with an unmarried son, who saw two married sons about once a week; he had no other surviving relatives. The two remaining people were both widows living alone. One had three sons living outside London, two of them visited her once a week; she saw a sister and two mature aunts in Bethnal Green every week but she spent much of her time on her own. The other had two illegitimate sons but no other relatives; she saw these sons occasionally. There remained the childless and the unmarried. Most were in a worse position. The 10 most isolated people of the 203 interviewed were all unmarried or childless. The circumstances of two are summarized below. Miss Paley, 67 years of age, lived in a one bedroom flat. It was a large airless room with dismal orange-brown wallpaper peeling off in huge strips. Two or three mats, ingrained with dirt, covered the floor. There was an old iron bedstead propped up in the middle by two bits of wood and on this was a heap of gray and brown blankets. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

An ancient iron mangle stood in a corner and there was a gas stove, a gas mantel for lighting, three or four wooden chairs and a table with a flat-iron propping up one of its legs. Miss. Paley wore a pair of stockings, extensively patched and tied around her knees, and a ramshackle navy-blue skirt and slip. Her skin had the whiteness of someone who rarely went out and she was very shy of her appearance, particularly the open sores on her face. She said she suffered from blood poisoning, but had not seen her doctor since the war. (This was confirmed by the doctor.) She was the only child of parents who had been street traders and who had died when she was young, in the 1880s, “I was with my aunt until I was nearly 40. She was 85 when she died. I had cousins in the street traders and who had died. I had cousins in the street but they were my aunt’s children. In the war they got scattered. They all had families to bring up and I have not met them since the war. I do not know where they are. I do my work in my own way. They would not have the patience with me.” Persistent questioning failed to reveal a singe relative with whom she has any contact. She did not g to the cinema, to a club or to church, and had no radio. She had spent Christmas on her own and had never had a holiday away from home. She sometimes made conversation with her neighbors in the street but because of her appearance did not go into their homes or hers. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

She had only one friend, a young woman who “used to live in the street where I lived,” and they visited one another about once a week. Her answer to a question about membership of a club was typical of much she said. “No, I cannot be shut in. I do not go to those clubs. They had been too much excitement for me.” At one point she said she went to bed about 8pm and got up between 10am and 11am the next day. I also found she had an hour or two in bed in the afternoons.” Mr. Fortune, 76 years of age, lived alone in a two-room council flat. There were two wooden chairs, an orange box converted into a cupboard, a gas stove, a table covered with newspaper, a battered old pram with tins and boxes inside, a pair of wooden steps and little else in the sitting-room. There was no fire, although the interview took place on a cold February morning. Mr. Fortune had been a cripple from birth and he was partly deaf. He was unmarried and his give siblings were dead. An older widowed sister-in-law lived about a mile away with an unmarried son and daughter. These three and two married nieces living in another East London borough were seen from once a month to a few times a year. Asked how often he saw his sister-in-law Mr. Fortune said, “Only when I go there. It is a hard job to walk down there in the Winter time and I have not seen her for three of four months.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

Asked about a gentleman’s club Mr. Fortune said, “No. I am simply as I am now. I should not like to join. Walking is such a painful job for me. I cannot get any amusement out of it.” He spoke to one or two of the neighbors outside his flat but he had no regular contact with any of them. He had one regular friend, living a few blocks away, who came over to see him on a Sunday about once a month, “more when there is fine weather.” He was not a churchgoer, never went to a cinema, rarely went to a pub because he could not afford a drink, had never had a holiday in his life and spent Christmas on his own. “My nephew came down for an hour. He gave me a little present, a Digital Storm Lynx Gaming PC, and the Canon EOS 6D Digital SLR Camera. No, I did not get any cards.” He received a non-contributory pension and supplementary assistance through the National Assistance Board, which recently arranged for him to have a woman home-help for two hours a week. Her regular call was the main event of the week. “I sit here messing about. Last week I was making an indoor aerial. I made those steps over there. I like listening to the wireless and making all manners of things. My time is taken up, I can tell you, with that and cooking and tidying-up.” The most striking fact about the most isolated people was that they had few surviving relatives, particularly near relatives of their own or of succeeding generations. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

This lent special significance to familiar references to fathers having weaker ties with children than mothers, to sons being drawn into their wives’ families, and to distant relatives being lost sight of after the death of “connecting” relatives. The isolated included a comparatively high number of unmarried and childless people, of those possessing sons but not daughters and of those without siblings. Rarely did they have friends, become members of clubs or otherwise participate in outside social activities in compensation. Nearly all of them where retired and most were infirm; some were why of revealing to others how ill or poverty-stricken they were or how they have “let themselves go.” They had little or no means of regular contact with the younger generation, and for one reason or another could not be brought into club activities. One of the most striking results of the whole inquiry was that those living in relative isolation from family and community did not always say they were lonely. Particular importance was attached during the interviews to “loneliness.” The question was not asked until most of an individual’s activities had been discussed and care was taken to ensure as serious and as considered a response as possible. One difficulty had to be overcome. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

A few people liked to let their children think they were lonely so the latter would visit them as much as possible. If children were present, this meant they were not inclined to give an honest answer. In an early interview one married woman, asked whether she ever got lonely, said, “Sometimes I do when they are all at work.” However, she hesitated before answering and looked at two married daughters, who were in the room. When this woman was alone, on a subsequent call, she told me she was “never lonely really, but I like my children to call.” When interviewed, a widow who was along, said she was never lonely. In fascinating contrast to this was a statement of one of her married daughters, who was interviewed independently. “She is not too badly off. The most she complains of is loneliness. She is always wanting us to go up there.” When the senior was alone, care was therefore taken to ask about loneliness so far as possible, and to check any answer which seemed doubtful. Some people living at the center of a large family complained of loneliness and some who were living in extreme isolation repeated several times with vigor that they were never lonely—such as Miss Paley and Mr. Fortune, described above. Despite there being a significant association between isolation and loneliness about a half of the isolated and rather isolated said they were not lonely; over a fifth of the first group said they were. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

Spirituality is something that can keep people from being lonely. When it liberates one from the yoke of the commandments to the freedom of the Spirit, the work of the Spiritual Presence in a being reaches its height. This is like a release from the sentence of death to a new life. A tremendous experience lies behind such words, an experience in which we all can share, but one that is rare in its full depth, and is then a revolutionary power that, through beings like Paul and Augustine and Luther, changes the Spiritual World, and, through it, the history of humankind. Can we, you and I, share in such an experience? First, have we not all felt the deadening power of the written code, written not only in the ten commandments and their many interpretations in the Bible and history, but also with the authoritative pen of parents and society into the unconscious depths of our being, recognized by our conscience judging us by what we do and, above all, by what we are? Nobody can flee from the voice of this written code, written internally as well as externally. And if we try to silence it, to close our ears against it, the Spirit itself frustrates these attempts, opening our ears to the cries of our true being of that which we are and ought to be in the sight of eternity. We cannot escape this judgment against us. The Spirit itself, using the written code, makes this impossible. For the Spirit does not give life without having led us through the experience of Hell. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

And certainly, the written code in its threatening majesty has the power to kill. It kills the joy of fulfilling our being by imposing upon us something we feel as hostile. It kills the freedom of answering creatively what we encounter in things and beings by making us look at a table of laws. It kills our ability to listen to the calling of the moment, to the voiceless voice of others, and to the here and now. It kills our courage to act through the scruples of our anxiety-driven conscience. And among those who take it most seriously, it kills faith and hope, and throws them into self-condemnation and despair. There is no way out from the written code. The Spirit itself prevents us from becoming compromisers, half fulfilling, half defying the commandments. The Spirit itself calls us back when we try to escape into indifference, or lawlessness, or (most usually) average self-righteousness. However, when the Spirit calls us back, it does so not in order to hold us within the written code, but in order to give us life. How can we describe the life that the Spirit gives us? I could use many words, well known to everybody, spoken by Paul himself, and after him by the great preachers and teachers of the church. I could say that the work of the Spirit, liberating us from the law, is freedom. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

Or I could say that its work is faith, or that its work is grace, and above all, that the Spirit creates love, the love in which all laws are confirmed and fulfilled and at the same time overcome. However, if I used such words, the shadow of the absent God would appear and make you and me aware that we cannot speak like this today. If we did, freedom would be distorted into willfulness, faith into belief in the absurd, hope into unreal expectations, and love—the word I would like most to use for the creation of the Spirit—into sentimental feeling. The Spirit must give us new words, or revitalize old words to express true life. We must wait for them; we must pray for them; we cannot force them. However, we know, in some moments of our lives, what life is. We know that it is great and holy, deep and abundant, ecstatic and sober, limited and distorted by time, fulfilled by eternity. And if the right words fail us in the absence of God, we may look without words at the image one in whom the Spirit and the Life are manifest without limits. One responds to the inner call according to one’s capacity, history, one’s circumstances and perspective. There was a British doctor, George Pickering, who wrote a book called Creative Malady, subtitled “Illness in the Lives and Minds of Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Mary Baker Eddy, Sigmund Freud, Marcel Proust, and Elizabeth Barrett Browning.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

In this book, the successful people we listened are covered, but the author could have added Mozart, Chopin, and Beethoven—these were all writers and musicians who had a malady, and George Pickering, the author, points out that each one suffered severe illness and met it constructively in creativity and in contribution to our culture. Pickering speaks of his own arthritic hips as “an ally,” and he “put them to bed,” he said, “when they become painful.” In bed he cannot attend committee meetings; cannot see patients or entertain visitors. He adds, “These are the ideal conditions for creative work—freedom from intrusion, freedom from the ordinary chores of life.” Now you have many questions in your mind about what I am saying, and I certainly had, and have, many questions also. Otto Rank, as a matter of fact, wrote a whole book, Art and Artist, on [these ideas]…Overcoming neurosis and creating art are identical things in Rank’s work. What I am doing tonight is challenging our whole view of health in our culture. We keep people living day after day because we think it is simply the number of days you live. We struggle to invent ways to live longer, as though infirmary were the ultimate enemies. Our health is our only priority. If we obey the dying nurse, whose constant care is not to please, but to remind of ours, and Adam’s curse and that to be restored, our we must heal and grow better. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

These are tremendously significant things—if you can take them in. When we think about Adam’s curse, this is referring to the fact that we are all the ultimate children of the myth of Adam—this is called in words that do not sound very nice anymore—this is called original sin, and the whole idea is that life is not a question of how long you live. It is not a question of how many days you can add. Many people would much prefer to go when their work is finished—to die—but what this verse is trying to say is that disease and illness mean something quite different from what most people in our Faustian civilization take then to mean. As alienating as illness is, it can also be a connecting of ourselves with new others on a new and deeper level. We see this in compassion. Creativity is one of the products of the right relationship between nature and infinity within us. We see also another gift which Fromm Reichmann certainly had, which Abe Maslow had, which Harry Stack Sullivan had—the gift of compassion, the ability to feel with other people, the ability to understand their problems—this is the other quality that makes a good psychiatrist. The experience of degeneration and of chaos is, I hope, temporary, but this can often be used as a way of reforming or reorganizing ourselves on a higher level. The Gods return in our charity. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

It is fair for each of us to ask ourselves what do we bring to the quest: what equipment, qualities, and virtues to entitle me to ask for the results I seek? When the sublime light of the Ideal shines down upon one and one has the courage to look at one’s own image by it, one will doubtless make some humiliating discoveries about oneself. One will find that one is worse than one believed and not so wise as one thought oneself to be. However, such discoveries are all to the good. For only then can one know what one is called upon to do and set to work following their pointers in self-improvement. However deep one’s commitment to the quest may be, one will have to reckon with one’s own frailties and one’s environmental pressures. The great being knows one has limitations, one knows one’s defects and faults—but one is not afraid of them. Paint me as I am, lips and all. All do not start with equal capacities for the quest. Each is qualified to go only a certain distance upon it. Those who exaggerate their capacities harm themselves by the presumption. Those who underrate them practise a false modesty. It is an error either to deceive oneself about one’s aspirations or to deter oneself unduly. Hope is good for beings: it confers endurance, spurs beneficial attitudes, and urges endeavour upon one. However, if its base is ungrounded fancy and extravagant wishes, one is hurt rather than benefited by it. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

Begin by admitting that one knows really little or nothing about your deeper mind. That is better than learned tall talk. It is much easier to set oneself a discipline than to keep it. This will engage one’s own creative faculties through application, and will further unite physical and spiritual discipline in order to create a dynamic of synergy which will assist in tearing the veil between physical and spiritual realms. Powerful changes will begin to take place within you and your life experience as you start to integrate and merge with these spiritual forces. When the inner blessings spills from the crown into outer darkness then mold and shape the energy of the spirit as a clear vision of what you want to achieve or accomplish through your process of prayer. The energy of God is then grounded by reversing negativity and moving more spiritual harmony in your being. Our faith feeds and grows in power as our consciousness expands. Every human being is an emanation of the void and unlimited possibility. As out consciousness expands, we unite and the knowledge of all and eternity becomes ours once again. We are simply taking back infernal wisdom which was ours to begin with. “Hear and know the commandments of God, and stir them up in remembrance of the oath which they have made,” reports Mosiah 6.3. However, when a being turns belief in the superior knowledge of the guide into belief in the virtual omniscience of the guide, it is dangerous. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

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It is Well to Remember that the Revealing God is Also the Concealing God for One!

October 15, 2019 11:56 pm

Visibility, significance, recognition! All that I had ever wanted when I took to the architectural design studio, all that I had ever wanted as a boy heading to Paris with a head full of dreams, all I had ever wanted I now had right here with my brothers and sisters! I had all that I have ever hoped for, and I had it here and now in this place and amongst my own people. The old human story simply did not matter. I had this, I had this moment, I had this recognition, and this visibility and this significance. And how could I ask for anything more? How could I look from right t left, at immortals who had witnessed all the epochs of recorded history, and want more than this? How could I gaze at immortals who had been drawn to this very spot by something more immense than they had ever witnessed, and long for more than the recognition they were now giving me? The victory of our own tribe to embrace one another, and let go of the hatred that had divided us for centuries, was my victory. After the house has schooled its tenants, there is still much uncertainty about the proper way to behave in this new and unique environment. What the house does not do, the neighbors finish off. By their example they indicate the code to be followed. Hence, if one person has a refrigerator, next-door thinks she should have one; if A has a BMW M5, B wants one too. #RandolphHarris 1 of 23

“If,” says Mrs. Abbot, “you make your garden one way, they will knock theirs to pieces to make theirs like it. It is the same with the curtains—if you put up new curtains, they have new curtains in a couple of months. And if someone buys a new Persian rug they have to hang it on the line so you can see it.” The struggles for possessions is one in which comparisons with other people are constantly made. Some of those who have achieved a more complete respectability look down on the others; those with less money resent the more successful and keep as far away from them as they can. “The whole answer—the whole trouble is, many men cannot earn enough. They have to hide in the closet or behind the curtains. They have got a certain amount of pride.” Resentment may also produce an aggressive spirit. “This place is all right for middle-class people, people with a bit of money. It is no good for less affluent people—I think they have all got money troubles, that is why they are so spiteful to each other.” We have been arguing that, the possession of a new house having sharpened the desire for other material goods, the striving for them becomes a competitive affair. The house is a major part of the explanation. However, there is more to it than that. In Bethnal Green people, as we said earlier, commonly belong to a close network of personal relationship. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23

These people know intimately dozens of other local people living near at hand, their school-friends, their work-mates, their pub-friends, and above all their relatives. They know them well because they have known them over a long period of time. Common family residence since childhood is the matrix of friendship. In this situation, Bethnal Greeners are not, as we see it, concerned to any marked extent with what is usually thought of as “status.” It is true, of course, that people have different incomes, different kinds of jobs, different kinds of houses—in this respect there is much less uniformity than at Greenleigh—even different standards of education. However, these attributes are not so important in evaluating others. It is personal characteristics which matter. The first thing they think of about William is not that he has a “fridge” and a BMW M5 sports sedan. They see him as a bad-tempered, or a real good sport, or the man with a way with women, or one of the best boxers of the Repton Club, or the person who got married to Ava last year. In a community of long-standing, status, in so far as it is determined by job and income and education, is more or less irrelevant to a person’s worth. He is judged instead, if he is judged at all, more in the round, as person with the usual mixture of all kinds of qualities, some good, some bad, many indefinable. He is more of a life-portrait than a figure on a scale. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23

People in Bethnal Green are less concerned with “getting on.” Naturally they want to have more money and a better education for their children. The borough belongs to the same society as the estate, one in which standards and aspirations are moving upward together. However, the urge is less compulsive. They stand well with plenty of other people whether or not they have net curtains and fine pram. Their credit with others does not depend so much on their “success” as on the subtleties of behavior in their many face-to-face relationships. They have the security of belonging to a series of small and overlapping groups, and from their fellows they get the respect they need. How different is Greenleigh we have already seen. Where nearly everyone is a stranger, there is no means of uncovering personality. People cannot be judged by their personal characteristics: a person can certainly see that his or her neighbor works in one’s back garden in one’s short sleeves and one’s wife goes down to the shops in a blue coat, with two canvas bags: but that is not much of a guide to character. Judgment must therefore rest on the trappings of the being rather than on the being oneself. If people have nothing else to go by, they judge from one’s appearance, one’s house, or even one’s Minimotor. One is evaluated accordingly. Once the accepted standards are few, and mostly to do with wealth, they become the standards by which “status” is judged. #RandolphHarris 4 of 23

In Bethnal Green it is not easy to give a man a single status, because he has so many; he has, in addition to the status of citizen, a low status as a scholar, high as a darts-player, low as a bargainer, and high as a story-teller. In Greenleigh, he has something much more nearly approaching one status because something much more nearly approaching one criterion is used his possessions. Or rather we should say that the family has one status. The small group which lives inside the same house hangs together, and where people are known as “from No. 22” or “37,” their identity being traced to the house which is the fixed entity, each one of them affect the credit of the other. The children, in particular, must be well dressed so that neighbors, and even more school friends and teachers, will think well of them, and of the parents. “We always see that the children look smart. At these new schools, you like them to go to school respectable. We like to keep them up to the standard out here.” The status is that of the family of marriage much more sharply than it is in Bethnal Green. In Bethnal Green the number of relatives who influence a person’s standing is much larger, and they are varied in their attributes. From a prominent local personality, a street-trader, say, a councilor, or a publican, a person can borrow prestige; but through another relative one may be associated with less enviable reputation. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23

One connection confers high status, another lone. It is therefore all the more difficult to give a person a single rating. On the other hand, the comparative isolation of the family at Greenleigh encourages the kind of simplified judgment of which we have been speaking. People at Greenleigh want to get on in the light of these simple standards, and they are liable to be more anxious about it just because they no loner belong to small local groups. Their relationships are window-to-window, not face-to-face. Their need for respect is just as strong as it ever was, but instead of being able to find satisfaction in actual living relationships, through the personal respect that accompanies almost any kind of respect is just as strong as it ever was, but instead of being able to find satisfaction in actual living relationships, through the personal respect that accompanies almost any steady human interaction, they have to turn the other kind of respect which is awarded, by some strange sort of common understanding, for the quantity and quality of possessions with which the person surrounds oneself. Those are the rules of the game and they are, under strong pressure from the neighbors, almost universally observed. Indeed, one of the most striking things about Greenleigh is the great influence the neighbors have, all the greater because they are anonymous. #RandolphHarris 6 of 23

Though people stay in their houses, they do in a sense belong to a strong compelling group. They do not now their judge personally but her influence is continuously felt. One might even suggest, to generalize, that the less the personal respect received in small group relations, the greater is the striving for the kind of impersonal respect embodied in a status judgment. The lonely man, fearing he is looked down on, becomes the acquisitive man; possession the balm to anxiety; anxiety the spur to unfriendliness. We took as out starting point people’s remarks—so frequent and vehement as to demand discussion—about the unfriendliness of their fellow residents. We have suggested two main explanation. Negatively, people are without the old relatives. Positively, they have a new house. In a life now house-centered instead of kinship centered, competition for status takes the form of a struggle for material acquisition. In the absence of small groups which join one family to another, in the absence of strong personal associations which extend from one household to another, people think that they are judged, and judge others, by the material standards which are the outward and visible mark of respectability. One may work toward enlightenment and inner freedom, to the aspiration which draws one most. Whatever helps consciousness come nearer to high moods is a useful spiritual path to someone. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23

One should take any approach which appeals to one, if it is morally worthy, and try to use what one can of it. Several different methods of spiritual development have been offered to humanity. Some have more merit than others and some are more effective than others. However, so much depends on the particular needs and status of each person, that the value of a method cannot be generalized with fairness. It is misleading to pick out any one way to the Overself and label it the best, or worse still, the only way. It is unfair to compare the merits of different ways. For the truth is that firstly each has a contribution to make, and finally each individual aspirant has one’s own special way. The claims that these simpler paths like devotion or repeating a declaration can lead to the goal, are neither true nor untrue. For they lead to the philosophic path which, in its own turn, leads directly to the goal. Is there a single teacher, prophet, messenger, or stain who has been universally acclaimed and universally followed? For that to be, all humankind would need the same outer background and inner status. Great or small there are certain differences between all persons. They cannot pursue the same ways, therefore we should let others take a different view in religion from ourselves. They very widely that it is an adventure for society if there exists as greater a diversity of approaches as possible—they are thus better able to suit particular needs. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23

Why should anyone be afraid of diversity in religious views, of variety in religious practices? Let heresies multiply! Let the sects flourish! For out of all this free competition, the seeker has a better chance to find truth. The modern seeker is fortunate in this: that one has a wealth of teachings to choose from—or by which to be bewildered. We must not only acknowledge the differences between beings but respect them. Consequently we must accept the fact of variations in responsive capacity and not demand that all should think alike, believe alike, behave alike. What is too much for one individual is too little for another. No universally applicable prescription can be given to suit everyone alike. All these paths should converge towards one another, as all must merge in the central point in the end. However different personal reactions will necessarily be with every individual seeker, there will still remain certain experiences, requirements, and conditions—and these are the most important ones—along one’s oath which must be the same for every other seeker too. Each being’s approach must inevitably be individualistic yet each will also share in common all the essential which constitute the Quest. Whether a being is a Zionist or a Zennist, whether one seeks the Christian Salvation or the Japanese Satori, the fundamental approach is more or less the same. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23

There is no cut and dried system or method which can be guaranteed to work successfully in every case. However, there are suggestions, hints, ideas which have been culled from the personal experiences of a widely varied, World-spread number of masters and aspirants. Since each being’s pat is peculiarly an individual one, no book can guide all one’s steps. A book may help one through some situations, inform one about the general course of inner development, and warn one against the probable mistake and chief pitfalls. Each being has to strive for this higher consciousness in one’s own way. Each path to it is unique. However, at the same time one may profitably avail oneself of the general instruction contained in writing like the present one. Let us now consider the innocence of the “enemy,” a typical young member of the Ohio National Guard, roughly around the age of 22. I am helped in this by a letter I received from a college girl whose brother was exactly in that position: I shall quote from this letter: “My younger brother Michael was afraid to answer the telephone in those says for fear it would be his National Guard Headquarters calling him for riot duty on one of the nearby campuses. Michael says that the rest of his group was afraid of a phone call as he. He was not at all sure the student protestors were wrong, and even if they were, the presence of the National Guard was no answer. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23

“If my brother had been called for riot duty, and if some irresponsible officer had provided him with a loaded gun, and if the confrontation had become strained, he may have shot a student…I think that both Allison Krause and the Guardsman who shot her were playing roles that did not belong to either of them.” Let us assume, with my correspondent, that Michael is mobilized and arrives on the Kent State campus. He picks up the fact that the students at Kent State had woefully neglected any real communication with the townspeople—indeed, had gone out of their way to irritate them. On Saturday nights, according to a dispatch in the New York Times, students would sit on the downtown sidewalk, making the townspeople walk around them to the accompaniment of obscenities, totally unaware, although it is hard to believe, of the degree of hatred this was engendering in the people of the town of Kent. Over a period of two days Michael sees one building burnt down, he gets only three hours sleep the night before, the students yell obscene jokes at him and pelt him with rocks as he is marched with his battalion through the taunting crowds. Shall we condemn Michael, our hypothetical young guardsman, as murderer? #RandolphHarris 11 of 23

If we do that—because he was the one who squeezed the trigger—and fold up our briefcases and go home, we are preventing ourselves from understanding a large segment of reality, and we are capitulating exactly at the point where we should press on the hardest. Michael’s sister, my correspondent, goes on to point out where she thinks the culprit is: “I think the country has evolved into a kind of massive unreality and fear…It is a kind of out-of-touchness which robes people of most of their alternative except survival.” There is no denying that this massive “unreality and fear” exists. In our day we tend to live out the state of mind that Camus predicted in his early novel, The Stranger, in which Meursault, the anti-hero, exists in a general state of semiconsciousness. He makes love to a girl as though both were half-asleep, and he finally shoots an Arab in the Sun on the desert in a condition of semiawareness that leaves us, as no doubt it left him, wondering whether he really shot the Arab or not. He is tried for murder. His crime is actually the murder of himself. What my correspondent calls this “massive unreality” and “out-of-touchness” makes every being a stranger to other beings as well as oneself. And the fact that it is the sickness of contemporary beings, who surrenders one’s consciousness in the face of the continual assaults on one’s senses, like surf in a perpetually stormy ocean, does not make our problem any easier. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23

However, you and I also make up this country which has become so filled with “massive unreality and fear.” When we think of the “country” or the “society” as at fault, we tend to posit the country as an anonymous “it” which does things to us, the people in it. It is then, in part, a convenient peg on which to hang our own projections. Thus we evade the issue on its deeper levels. I am not discounting the importance of social psychology, the study of the way groups takes on roles and use them for their various purposes of security. I am also aware of the effect of electrotechnics on the individual, of the mass impersonality of technology, and of the experience each of us undergoes as the sport of innumerable pressures operating on us in “a World we never made.” However, our society, our country, has this power because we as individuals capitulate to it; we give over our own power, as I have tried to point out earlier, and we then are offended because we are powerless. To that extent, we victimize ourselves. Our survival depends on whether human consciousness can be asserted, and with sufficient strength, to stand against the stultifying pressures of technological progress. If the country has evolved into a state of “massive unreality and fear,” it must be you and I who experience this unreality and fear. And so we must push on in our endeavor to understand the psychological uses of innocence and murder. #Randolphharris 13 of 23

The striving for power serves in the first place as a protection against helplessness, which as we have seen is one of the basic elements in anxiety. The neurotic is so averse to any remote appearance of helplessness or weakness in oneself that one sill shun situations which the normal person considers entirely commonplace, such as any acceptance of guidance, advice, or help, any kind of dependence on persons or circumstances, any giving in to or agreeing with others. This protest against helplessness does not arise in all its intensity at once, but increases gradually; the more the neurotic feels factually handicapped by one’s inhibitions, the less one is factually able to asset oneself. The weaker one factually becomes the more anxiously one has to avoid anything that has a faint resemblance to weakness. In the second place, the neurotic striving for power serves as a protection against the danger of feeling or being regarded as insignificant. The neurotic develops a rigid and irrational ideal of strength which makes one believe one should be able to master any situation, no matter how difficult, and should master it right away. This ideal becomes linked with pride, and as a consequence the neurotic considers weakness not only as a danger but also as a disgrace. One classifies people as either “strong” or “weak,” admiring the former and despising the latter. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23

One goes to extremes also in what one considers to be weakness. One has more or less contempt for all persons who agree with one or give in to one’s wishes, who have inhibitions or do not control their emotions so closely that they always show an impassive face. One despises the same qualities in oneself as well. One feels humiliated if one has to recognize the existence of anxiety or an inhibition in oneself, and thus despises oneself for having a neurosis and is anxious to keep this fact a secret. One also despises oneself for not being able to cope with it alone. The particular forms that such a striving for power will take depend upon what lack of power is most feared or despised. I shall mention a few expressions of this striving that are especially frequent. For one, the neurotic will desire to have control over others as well as over oneself. One wants nothing to happen that one has not initiated or approved of. This quest for control may take the attenuated form of consciously permitting the other to have full freedom, but insisting on knowing about everything one does, and feeling irritated if anything is kept a secret. Tendencies to control maybe repressed to such a degree that not only the person oneself, but even those about one, may be convinced of one’s greater generosity in allowing freedom to the other. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23

If a person represses one’s desire for control so completely one may, however, become depressed or have severe headaches or stomach upsets every time the other has an appointment with other friends or unexpectedly comes home late. Not knowing the cause of the disturbances one may accredit them to weather conditions, to an error in diet or similar irrelevant conditions. Much of what appears as curiosity is determined by a secret wish to control the situation. Also persons of this type are inclined to want to be right all the tie, and are irritated at being proved wrong, even if only in an insignificant detail. They have to know everything better than anyone else, an attitude which may at times be embarrassingly conspicuous. Persons who are otherwise serious and dependable, when confronted with a question to which they do not know the answer, may pretend to know, or may invent something, even if ignorance in this particular instance would not discredit them. Sometimes the emphasis is on the need to know in advance what will happen, to anticipate and predict every possibility. This attitude may go with a distaste for any situation involving uncontrollable factors. No risk should be taken. The emphasis on self-control shows in an aversion to being carried away by any feelings. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23

If he falls into love with her, the attraction which a neurotic woman feels for a man may suddenly turn into contempt. Patients of this type find it hard to allow themselves much drift in free associations, because that would mean losing control and letting themselves be carried away into unknow territory. I am going to talk with you tonight about something that is very close to my own thoughts—this something I have been thinking about for years in my own hear, and in the period when I spent two years in bed with tuberculosis up in the Adirondack mountains before there were any drugs for this disease—all of these things come together in these ideas I have been sharing with you tonight. They came, particularly, when I was interviewing, in New York City, student candidates to be trained in analytic institutions. I was on the committee for two groups, and so I interviewed for these two different groups. What I asked myself was, “What makes a good psychotherapist? What is there in a particular person that would tell us that here is somebody that can genuinely help other people in the fairly long training of the psychoanalyst?” It was quite clear to me that it was not adjustment—adjustment that we talked of so fondly when I was Ph.D. student, and so ignorantly. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23

I knew that the well-adjusted person who came in and sat down to be interviewed would not make a good psychotherapist. Adjustment is exactly what a neurosis is; and that is one’s trouble. It is an adjustment to nonbeing in order that some little being maybe preserved. An adjustment always flounders on the question—adjustment to what? Adjustment to a psychotic World, which we certainly live in? Adjustment so societies that are Faustian and insensitive? And then I looked further. We know very little about the effect of punishment on learning, because almost no truly scientific studies have been made of it on human beings. For instance, we do not know how much punishment is best for learning—and we do not know how much difference it makes as to who is giving the punishment, whether an adult learns best from a younger or an older person than oneself—or any things of that sort. Harry Stack Sullivan, who was the only psychiatrist born in America to contribute a new system that was powerful enough to have an influence, not only on psychiatry, but on psychology, sociology, and a number of other professions, was one of my teachers. We all revered him greatly. Dr. Sullivan was an alcoholic, and he was latently homosexual—he once proposed to Clara Thompson when he was drunk and got up very early the next morning to take it back. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23

Dr. Sullivan never could get along with any groups with more than two of three people. It dawned on me that mental problems are problems that always had their beginnings, and their cures, in interpersonal relationships. Consider Abe Maslow. He was not a therapist, but one of the great psychologists. Dr. Maslow had a miserable time of it. He came from an immigrant family in the slums; he was alienated from his mother and afraid of his father. In New York, groups often lived in ghettos, and Abe was beaten up by Italian and Irish boys in the vicinity (he was Jewish); he was underweight, and yet, this man, the man who had so many hellish experiences—was the one who introduced the system of peak experiences into psychology. Dr. Freud and Dr. Maslow are two of the most important people in the development of psychology. I want to propose a theory to you, and this is the theory of the wounded healer. I want to propose that we heal other people by virtue of our own wounds. Psychologists who become psychotherapist, psychiatrists, too, as far as that goes, are people who had, as babies and children, to be therapists for their own families. This is pretty well established by various studies. And I propose to carry that idea further and to propose that it is the insight that comes to us by virtue of our own struggle with our problems that lead us to develop empathy and creativity with human beings—and compassion. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23

There was a study made in England, at the University of Cambridge, of geniuses—great writers, great artists, and so on—and of the forty-seven that this woman took as her sample, eighteen had been hospitalized—in a mental hospital—or had been treated with lithium, or had electric shock. These were people that you know. Handel—his music came out of great suffering. Byron—you would think he did everything but suffer, but he was a manic depressive. Anne Sexton, who, I believe, later committed suicide, was a manic-depressive. Virginia Woolf, who I know committed suicide, was also troubled by depression. Robert Lowell, the American poet, was manic depressive. Now, what I enlarge that to say that there are positive aspects to all diseases, to all illness, whether it is mental or physical. We may say that some form of struggle is necessary to carry us to the depth out of which creativity comes. Therefore a certain amount of discipline and personal power must be accumulated to prevent physical, mental, and spiritual catabolism. One must develop a self-devotion which will instill self-love, self-respect, and beneficial thinking that will empower you to shatter obstacles as the God of your World. If you can work through the test of your own demons and your imaginations own worst fears all else will seem rudimentary and insignificant. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23

Just remember, you must be honest with yourself and work hard as hell (pun intended) to become something great. Indeed, we sometimes see obstacles as locked doors which keep us from uniting the various levels of our consciousness. However, awareness just moves around and the filter of perception changes. Operating from a higher state of awareness is not to be mistaken for uniting the isolated levels of consciousness. Consciousness cannot expand until it is first made whole and this is to oppose creation and all its limitations. It is a force which acts as the very key which unlocks the cages of imprisonment so that we can reach liberation by stepping into outer darkness which reunited the isolated frequencies of the light spectrum. Through this we not only better perceive reality but we are also better able to counter create though personal alchemical transmutation and spirituality. Feel your soul absorbing the isolated colors of the light spectrum and reuniting the consciousness which has been torn through creation. Jerome Kagan, a professor up at Harvard, made a long and intensive study of creativity, and what he concluded is that the artist’s main capacity, what he calls “his creative freedom” is not born within him. The creativity is made in the pain of adolescent loneliness, the isolation of physical disability. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23

We often expect people who experience the ultimate in horror in their background to be broken people. When we hear of what people have been through, we doubt they will survive. However, some not only survive, they become exceedingly creative and productive human beings. Individuals who have suffered calamitous events in the past can, and do, function later at average levels and may even function at higher-than-average levels. Relevant coping mechanisms may avert the potentially detrimental effects of calamitous experiences, but they may also transform these experiences into growth-producing experiences. Inmates who have had poor, unpampered childhoods adapted best to the concentration camps, whereas most of those who had been reared by permissive, wealthy parents were the first to die. Many of our most valuable people have come from the most calamitous early-childhood situations. Investigations of the childhoods of eminent people expose the fact that they did not receive anything like the kind of child rearing that a person in our culture is led to believe is healthy for children. Now, whether in spite of or because of these conditions, these children not only survived, but reached great heights of achievement, many after having experiences the most deplorable and traumatic childhoods. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23

There was a study also done right here in Berkeley of the long-term development of human beings. A group of psychologists followed people through from birth to 30 years of age. They followed 166 men and women through adulthood, and they were shocked by the inaccuracies of their expectations. They were wrong in about 66 percent of the cases, mainly because they had overestimated the damaging effects of early troubles. They had also not foreseen—this sentence is interesting to all of us—they also had not foreseen the negative effect of a smooth and successful childhood, that a degree of stress and challenge seemed to spur psychological strength and competence. The goal here is to allow the essence of God to flow through and operate within each level of our being or consciousness. In this way we can become fully open to gateways to his powers. As we build our faith the Holy Ghost will serve as our foundation. It will align us and our temple with the frequency of the Godhead to be employed and serve to raise your own level of spiritual power. This will further unite physical and spiritual discipline in order to create a dynamic synergy which will assist in tearing the veil between physical and spiritual realms. Powerful changes will begin to take place within you and your life experience as you begin to integrate and merge with these spiritual forces. “And a portion of that Spirit dwelleth in me, which giveth me knowledge, and also power according to my faith and desires which are in God,” reports Alma 18.35. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23

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It Will Not be Enough to Show them the Path—One Must Also Keep them Steadfast on the Path!

October 14, 2019 2:20 am

Now let me take up the point again. Do not be destroyed in the first years. It happens with too many. There is so much danger all around you. It is easy to despair. It is easy to succumb to bitter hatred of yourself. It is easy to feel that the World no longer belongs to you, when nothing is further from the truth. It is all yours and the passage of the years is yours. And now you must simply and plainly live up to it. When people regard others as unfriendly, the comparisons they implicitly make are with the community of Bethnal Green. We have already discussed the reasons why people living in the borough considered that a friendly place. They and their relatives had lived there a long time, and consequently had around them a host of long-standing friends and acquaintances. At Greenleigh they neither share long residence with their fellow tenants nor as a rule have kin to serves as bridges between the family and the wider community. These two vital interlocked conditions of friendliness are missing, and their absence goes far to explain the attitude we have illustrated here. It also accounts for the astringency of the criticism. Migrants, to the Untied States of America or to housing estates, always take part of their homeland, with them, our information like everyone else. They take with them the standards of Bethnal Green, derived from a close community of kindred and neighbors. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

Friends, within and without the kindship network, were the unavoidable accompaniment of the kind of life they led—too much so for devotees of quiet and privacy. They grew up with their friend, they met them at auntie’s, for tens years for tea and animal crackers or hot chocolate, they walked down the street with them to work. They are used to friendliness, and, their standards in this regard being so high, they are all the more censorious about the other tenants of the County Council. They are harsh in their comment, where someone arriving from a less settled district, or from another and even newer housing estate, might be accustomed to the standoffishness, and, by one’s canons, even impressed by the good behavior, of the same neighbors. If they had an established community, it would not matter quite so much people being newcomers. The place would then already have been crisscrossed with tires of kinship and friendship, and one friend made would have been an introduction to several. However, Greenleigh was built in the late 1940s on ground that had been open fields before. The nearest substantial settlement, a few miles away at Barnhurst, is the antithesis of East London, an outer suburb of privately-owned houses, mainly built between the wars for the rising middle classes of the time. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

The distance between the estate and its neighbor is magnified by the resentment, real and imagined, of the old residents of Barnhurst at the intrusion of rough East Enders into the rides of Essex and, what is worse, living in houses not very unlike their own put up at the expense of the taxpayer. “People at Barnhurst look down on us. They treat us like dirt. They are a different class of people. They have money.” “It is not so easy for the girls to get boys down here. If people from the estate go to the dance hall at Barnhurst they all look down on them. There is a lot of class distinction down here.” These, the kind of thoughts harbored by the ex-Bethnal Greeners, do nothing to make for ease of communication between the two places. So there is no tradition into which the newcomers can enter. If Barnhurst has any influence upon Greenleigh, it is to sharpen the resentment of the estate against its environment and to stimulate the aspiration for material standards as high. Nor would it matter quite so much if the residents of Greenleigh all had the same origin. No doubt if they all came from Bethnal Green, they would get on much better than they do: many of them would have known each other before and, anyway, at least have a background in common. As it is, they arrive from all over London, though with East Ender predominant. Such a vast common origin might be enough to bind together a group of Cockneys in the Western Desert Western Essex is to near for that. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

When all are from London, no one is from London: they are from one of the many districts into which the city is divided. What is then emphasized is far more their differences than their sameness. The native of Bethnal Greens feels oneself different from the native of Stepney or Hackney. One of our informants, who had recently moved into Bethnal Green from Hackney, a few minutes away, told us “I honestly do not like telling people that I live in Bethnal Green. I come from Hackney myself, and when I was a child living in Hackney, my parents would not let me come to Bethnal Green. I thought it was something terrible.” These distinctions are carried over to Greenleigh, where it is no virtue in a neighbor to have come from Stepney, rather the opposite. Mr. Abbot summed it up as follows: “You have not grown up with them. They come from different neighborhoods, they are different sorts of people and they do not mix.” We had expected that, despite these disadvantages, people would, in the course of time, settle down and make new friendships, and our surprise was that this had not happened to a greater extent. The informants who had been on the estate longest had no higher opinion than others of the friendliness of their fellows. Four of the 18 coupes who had been there six or seven years judged other people to be friendly, as did six of the 23 couples with residence for five years or less. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

Mr. Oliver was one who commented on how long it was taking time for its wonders to perform. “They are all Londoners here but they get highbrow when they get here. They are not so friendly. Coming from a tuning like the one where we lived, we knew everyone. We were bred and born amongst them, like one big family we were. We knew all their troubles and everything. Here they are all total strangers to each other and so they are all wary of each other. It is question of time, I suppose. However, we have been here four years and I do not see any change yet. It does seem to be taking a very long while to get friendly.” One reason it is taking so long is that the estate is so strung out—the number of people per acre at Greenleigh being only one-fifth what it is in Bethnal Green—and low density does not encourage sociability. In Bethnal Green your pub, and your shop is a “local.” There people meet their neighbors. At Greenleigh they are put off by distance. They do go to the pub because it may take 20 minutes to walk, instead of one minute as in Bethnal Green. They do not go to the shops, which are grouped into specialized centers instead of being scattered in converted houses through the ordinary streets, more than they have to, again because of the distance. And they do not go so much to either because when they get there, the people are gathered from the corners of the estate, instead of being neighbors with whom they already have a point of contact. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

The pubs and shops of Bethnal Green serve so well as “neighborhood centers” because there are so many of them: they provide the same small face-to-face groups with continual opportunities to meet. Where they are few and large, as at Greenleigh, they do not serve this purpose so well. The relatives of Bethnal Green have not, therefore, been replaced by the neighbors of Greenleigh. The newcomers are surrounded by strangers instead of kin. Their lives outside the family are no longer centered on the people; their lives are centered on the house. This change from a people-centered to a house-centered existence is one of the fundamental changes resulting from the migration. It does some way to explain the competition for status which is in itself the result of isolation from kin and the cause of estrangement from neighbors, the reason why coexistence, instead of being just a state of neutrality—a tacit agreement to live and let live—is frequently infused with so much bitterness. When we asked what in their view had made people change since they moved from East London, time and time again our informants gave the same kind of suggestive answers—that people had become, as they put it, “toffeensed,” “big-headed,” “high and mighty,” “jealous,” “a cut above everybody else.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

“It is like a strange land in your own country,” said Mrs. Ames. “People are jealous out here. They are made to be much quitter in a high-class way, if you know what I mean. They get snobbish, and when you get snobbish you are not sociable any more.” “I am surprised,” said Mr. Tonks, “at the way people vote Conservative at Greenleigh when the L.C.C. built these houses for them. One has a little car or something and so one thinks oneself superior. People seem to think only of themselves when they get here.” “The neighbor runs away with the idea that she is a cut above everybody else, but when you get down to brass tacks,” which Mrs. Berry proceeded to do, “she is worse off than you will ever be. She is one of those people, you know what I mean, she is very toffee-nosed. There are some people down here who get like that.” Conflict play an infinitely greater roe in neurosis than is commonly assumed. To detect them, however, is no easy matter—partly because they are essentially unconscious, but even more because the neurotic goes to any length to deny their existence. What, then, are the signals that would warrant us to suspect underlying conflicts? We usually can find their presence was indicated by a few factors, both fairly obvious. One is the resulting symptoms—fatigue, boredom, jealousy, and stealing. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

The fact is that every neurotic symptom points to an underlying conflict; that is, every symptom is more or less direct outgrowth of a conflict. We shall see gradually what unresolved conflicts do to people, how they produce states of anxiety, depression, indecision, inertia, detachment, and so on. An understanding of the causative relation here helps direct our attention from the manifest disturbances to their source—though the exact nature of the source will not be disclosed. The other signal indicating that conflicts were in operation was inconsistency. When person is convinced of a procedure being wrong and a injustice being done to him or her, or when a person who has highly valued friendship is turned to stealing money from a friend, sometimes the person will be aware of such inconsistencies; more often one is blind to them even when they are blatantly obvious to an untrained observer. Inconsistences are as definite an indication of the presence of conflicts as a rise in body temperature is of physical disturbance. To cite some common ones: A girls wants above all else to marry, yet shrinks from the advances of any man. A mother oversolicitous of her children frequently forgets their birthdays. A person always generous to others is cheap about expenditures for himself. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

Another who longs for solitude never manages to be alone. One forgiving and tolerant toward most people is oversevere and demanding with oneself. Unlike the symptoms, the inconsistencies often permit of tentative conflict. An acute depression, for instance, reveals only the fact that a person is caught in a dilemma. However, if an apparently devoted mother forgets her children’s birthdays, we might be inclined to think that the mother was more devoted to her ideal of being a good mother than to the children themselves. We might also admit the possibility that her ideal collided with an unconscious sadistic tendency to frustrate them. Sometimes a conflict will appear on the surface—that is, be consciously experienced as such. This would seem to contradict my assertion that neurotic conflicts are unconscious. However, actually what appears is a distortion or modification of the real conflict. Thus a person may be torn by a conscious conflict when, in spite of one’s evasive techniques, well-functioning otherwise, one finds oneself confronted with the necessity of making a major decision. One cannot decide now whether to marry this woman or that one or whether to marry at all, whether to take this or that job, whether to retain or dissolve a partnership. He will then go through the greatest torment, shutting from one opposite to the other, utterly incapable of arriving at any decision. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

He may in his distress call upon an analyst, expecting him to clarify the particular issues involved. And one will necessarily be disappointed, because the present conflict is merely the point at which the dynamite of inner frictions finally exploded. The particular problem distressing him now cannot be solved without taking the long and tortuous road of recognizing the conflicts hidden beneath it. In other instances the inner conflict may be externalized and appear in the person’s conscious mind as an incompatibility between oneself and one’s environment. Or, finding that seemingly unfounded fears and inhibitions interfere with his wishes, a person may be aware that the crosscurrents within oneself issue from deeper sources. The more knowledge we gain of a person, the better able we are to recognize the conflicting elements that account for the symptoms, inconsistencies, and surface conflicts—and, we must add, the more confusing becomes the picture, through the number and variety of contradictions. So we are led to ask Can there be a basic conflict underlying all these particular conflicts and originally responsible for all of them? Can one picture the structure of conflict in terms, say, of an incompatible marriage, where an endless variety of apparently unrelated disagreements and rows over friends, children, finances, mealtimes, servants, all point to some fundamental disharmony in the relationship itself? #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

A belief in a basic conflict within the human personality is ancient and plays a prominent role in various religions and philosophies. The powers of light and darkness, of God and the devil, of good and evil are some of the ways in which this belief has been expressed. In modern psychology, Dr. Freud, on this score as on many others has done pioneer work. His first assumption was that the basic conflict is one between our instinctual drives, with their blind urge for satisfaction, and the forbidding environment—family and society. The forbidding environment is internalized at an early age and appears from then on as the forbidding superego. What remains, then, is the contention that the opposition between primitive egocentric drives and our forbidding conscience is the basic source of our manifold conflicts. My belief is that though it is a major conflict, it is a secondary and arises of necessity during the development of a neurosis. If we could actually see that God was satisfied with the fruits of our labor, imagine what a stimulus it would be to our own efforts today. Again we come back to the natural genius of primitive beings, who provided themselves with what beings need most: to know daily that one is living right in the eyes of God, that one’s workaday action has cosmic value—no, even that it enhances God Himself! #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

For early beings emanations of light and heat from the Sun were the archetypes of all miraculous power: the Sun shines from afar and by its invisible touch cases life to unfold and expand. We cannot say much more about this mystery even today. The individual Sun-Being was the focus of a cosmology of invisible energy, like the modern computer and atomic reactor, and one aroused the same hopes and yearning the arouse for the perfectly ordered, plentifully supplied life. Like the reactor, too, one reflected back energy-power on those around one: just the right amount and they prospered; too much and they withered into decay and death. Just as in traditional society, we tend to vote for the person who already represents health, wealth, and success so that some of it will rub off on us. Whence the old adage “Noting succeeds like success.” This attraction is also especially strong in certain religious cults of the Father Divine type: the followers want to see wealthy flaunted in the person of their leader, hoping that some of it will radiate back to them. How can we unite the message of the Spiritual Presence with the experience of the absent God? Let me say something about the absent God, by asking—what is the cause of His absence? We may answer—our resistance, our indifference, our lack of seriousness, our honest or dishonest questioning, our genuine or cynical doubt. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

All these answers have some truth, but they are not final. The final answer to the question as to who makes God is absent is God Himself! It is the work of the Spirit that removes God from our sight, not only for some beings, but sometimes for many in a particular period. We live in an era in which the God we know is the absent God. However, in knowing God as the absent God, we know Him; we feel His absence as the empty space that is left by something or someone that once belonged to us and has now vanished from our view. God is always infinitely near and infinitely far. We are fully aware of Him only if we experience both of these aspects. However, sometimes, when our awareness of God has become shallow, habitual—not warm and not cold—when He has become too familiar to be exciting, too near to be felt in His infinite distance, then He becomes the absent God. The Spirit has not ceased to be present. The Spiritual Presence can never end. However, the Spirit of God hides God from our sight. No resistance against the Spirit, no indifference, no doubt can drive the Spirit away. However, the Spirit that always remains present to us can hide itself, and this means that it can hide God. Then the Spirit shows us nothing except the absent God, and the empty space within us which is His space. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

The Spirit has shown to our time and to innumerable people in our time the absent God and the empty space that cries in us to be filled by Him. And then the absent one may return and take the space that belongs to Him, and the Spiritual Presence may break again into our consciousness, awakening to us to recognize what we are, shaking and transforming us. This may happen like the coming of a storm, the storm of the Spirit, stirring up the stagnant air of our Spiritual life. The storm will then recede; a new stagnancy may take place; and the awareness of the present God may be replaced by the awareness of the empty space within us. Life in the Spirit is ebb and flow—and this means—whether we experience the present or the absent God, it is the work of the Spirit. A constitutional fatalism continuously adjusts itself to the ever-changing present. A pervasive alarmism greets every advance. For two thousand years we have been getting “out of hand.” This derives of course from our susceptibility to viewing the “now” ad the End Time, an Apocalyptic obsession that has endured since Christ ascended into Heaven. We must stop this! We must perceive that we are at the dawn of a sublime age! Enemies will no longer be conquered. They will be devoured, and transformed. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

However, here is the point I really want to make: Modernism and Materialism—elements that the Church has feared for so long—are in their philosophical and practical infancy! Their sacramental nature is only just being revealed! Never mind the infantile blunders! The electronic revolution has transmuted the industrial World beyond all predictive thinking of the twenty first century. We are still having birth pangs. Get into it! Work with it! Play it out. Daily life for millions in the developed countries is not only comfortable but a compilation of wonders that borders on the miraculous. And so new spiritual desires arise which are infinitely more courageous than the missionary goals of the past. There will be mountains and obstacles in your life to overcome and this will breed achievement. There will be beasts in our field of existence so that you may grow in cunning and might. This breeds victory. You must stand alone and endure as a warrior and usurp the power. Do not focus so much on politics and the news, as this keeps us from focusing on the power we have within. The power to destroy and create anew. It keeps us from seeing that we are our own God and we are our own Devil. We must constantly work toward achieving our goals through creating doorways of manifestation of desire through action in the World. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

The spell is just the seed which plants possibility. The spell is the blessing conveyed through proclamation of taking the path to become a person of power by becoming self to the fullness of what its potential may be. By doing this we can then act out that power within the World to enrich our lives. We have to have the power to take control of this life experience. Conflict puts the masses in a constant state of personal sacrifice so that they will never attain their full potential and unite the various aspects of consciousness to become whole. As a result, we are cattle to be consumed. As one becomes more lucid or awake in the moment, reality begins to reveal to us, it is like clay to be molded and shaped by will and intent. The strength to do this can only be attained by reuniting with those parts of self we are taught to shun and war against. This must be done with caution through strategic alchemical advancement. It is our goal to bring the energy of creation through the crown and usurp it. This force will awaken various levels of consciousness to once again merge them together, forging the adept as a microcosmic emanation of the void, as their potential for power increase. “And the Lord said unto him: Write these things and seal them up; and I will show them in mine own due time unto the children of men,” reports Ether 3.27. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

Thee for Enlivening All the Cheerful Eyes that Glance so Brightly at the New Sun-Rise!

October 13, 2019 12:13 am

All my life I had believed in Heaven and Hell. Did Heaven look down upon this metamorphosis? We have described some of the effects of migration. People’s relatives are no longer neighbors sharing the intimacies of daily life. Their new neighbors are strangers, drawn from every part of the East End, and they are, as we have seen, treated with reserve. In point of services, neighbors do not make up for kin. Our informants were so eager to talk about their neighbors, and generally about their attitude to other residents on the estate, that we feel bound to report them. They frequently complained of the unfriendliness of the place, which they found all the more mysterious because it was so different from Bethnal Green. Why should Greenleigh be considered so unfriendly? The prevailing attitude is expressed by Mr. Morrow. “You cannot get away from it, they are not so friendly down here. It is not ‘Hello, Joe,’ ‘Hello, mate.’ They pass you with a side-glance as though they do not know you.” And by Mr. Adams. “We all come from the slums, not Park Lane, but they do not mix. In Bethnal Green you always used to have a little laugh on the doorstep. There is none of that in Greenleigh. You are English, but you feel like a foreigner here, I do not know why. Up there you had lived for years, and you knew how to deal with the people there. People here are different.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

And by Mr. Prince. “The neighbors round here are very quiet. They all keep themselves to themselves. They all come from the East End but they all seem to chance when they come down here.” Of the 41 couples, 23 considered that other people were unfriendly, eight were undecided one way or another and ten considered them friendly: the recorded opinions are those of the couples because in no interview did husband and wife appear to hold strongly different view. How does this majority who consider their fellow residents unfriendly feel about themselves? Do they also label themselves unfriendly? No one admits it, some indignantly deny it. If they are hostile themselves, they do not acknowledge it, but attribute the feelings to others. Yet they mostly reveal that their own behavior is the same as they resent in others; that (since others are unfriendly) to withdraw will avoid trouble and keep the peace; that coexistence is safer, because more realistic, than cooperation. “The policy here is do not have a lot to do with each other, then there will not be any trouble,” says Mr. Chortle succinctly. Neurotic conflicts may be concerned with the same general problems as perplex the normal person. However, they are so different in kind that the question has been raised whether it is permissible to use the same term for both. I believe it is, but we must be aware of the differences. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

This attitude is supported by reference to the skirmishes and back-biting which have resulted from being “too friendly” in the past. “It is better if you just talk to neighbors and do not get too friendly,” concludes Mr. Sandeman from his past experience. “You stop friends if you do not get to know them well. When you get to know then you are always getting little troubles breaking out. I have had too much of that and so I am not getting too friendly now.” Mr. Young told his wife, “When I walk into these four walls, I always tell her ‘Do not make too many friends. They turn out to be enemies.’” And one experience had turned Mr. Yule into a recluse. “We do not mix very well in this part of the estate. At first I used to lend every Tom, Dick, and Harry all my tools or lawn mower or anything. Then I had $1,000 pinched from my wallet. Now we do not want to know anyone—we keep ourselves to ourselves. There is a good old saying—the Englishman’s home is his castle. It is very true.” Usually the troubles are shadowy affairs which have always happened to people other than oneself. “We are friendly,” says Mr. Oliver in the usual style, “But we do not get too involved, because we have found that causes gossip and trouble. We have seen it happen with other people, so we do not want it to happen to us. Now we keep ourselves to ourselves.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

Whatever the justification, the result is the same. People do not treat others either as enemies or friends. They are wary, though polite. They pass the time of day in the road. They have an occasional word over the fence or a chat at the garden gate. They nod to each other in the shops. Neighbors even borrow and lend little things to each other, and when this accommodation is refused, it is a sign that acquaintance has turned into enmity. Mrs. Chortle has broken off trading as well as diplomatic relations with one of her neighbors. “These people are very dirty,” she said, “and I have told the I do not want to borrow or lend.” So has Mrs. Morrow, for the different reason that “Just because they have got a couple of ha’pence more than you they do not want to know you. In Bethnal Green it was different—neighbors were more friendly.” Even where relations have not been served, there is little of the mateyness so characteristic of Bethnal Green. Mr. Stirling summed it up by remarking, “I do not mind saying hello to any of them, or passing the time of say with them, but if they do not want to have anything to do with me, I do not want to have anything to do with them. I am not bothered about them. I am only interested in my little family. My wife and my two children—they are the people that I care about. My life down here is my home.” #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

Women feel the lack of friends, as of kin, more keenly than their menfolk. Those who do not follow their husbands into the society of the workplace—and loneliness is one of the common reasons for doing so—have to spend their day alone, “looking at ourselves all day,” as they say. In one interview the husband was congratulating himself on having a house, a garden, a bathroom and a TV—“the tellie is a bit of a friend down here”—when his wife broke in to say,” It is all right for you. What about the time I have to spend here on my own?” This difference in their life may cause sharp contention, especially in the early years. “When we first came,” said Mrs. Haddon, “I have just had the baby and it was all a misery, not knowing anyone. I sat on the stairs and cried my eyes out. For the first two years we were swaying whether to go back. I wanted to and my husband did not. We used to have terrible arguments about it. I use to say, “It is all right for you. I have to sit here all day. You do get a break.’” Not that all women resent it. A few, like Mrs. Painswick, actually welcome seclusion. She had been more averse to the quarrels amongst the “rowdy, shouty” Bethnal Greeners than appreciative of the mateyness to which quarrels are the counterpart, and finds the less intense life of Greenleigh a pleasant contrast. “In London people had more squabbles. We have not seen neighbors out here having words.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

What, then, are the characteristics of neurotic conflicts? A somewhat simplified example by way of illustration: An engineer working in collaboration with others at mechanical research was frequently afflicted by spells of fatigue and irritability. One of these spells was brought about by the following incident. In a discussion of certain technical matters his opinion were less well received than those of his colleagues. Shortly afterward a decision was made in his absence, and no opportunity was given him subsequently to present his suggestions. Under these circumstances, he could have regarded the procedure as unjust and put up a fight, or he could have accepted the majority decision with good grace. Either reaction would have been consistent. However, he did neither. Though he felt deeply slighted, he did not fight. Consciously he was mere aware of being irritated. The murderous rage within him appeared only in his dreams. This repressed rage—a composite of his fury against the others and of his fury against himself for his own meekness—was mainly responsible for his fatigue. His failure to react consistently was determined by a number of factors. He had built up a grandiose image of himself that required deference from others to support. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

This self-inflated image was, of course, unconscious at the time: he simply acted on the premise that there was nobody as intelligent and competent in his field as he was. Any slight could jeopardize this premise and provoke rage. Furthermore, he had unconscious sadistic impulses to berate and humiliate others—an attitude so objectionable to him that he covered it up by overfriendliness. To this was added an unconscious drive to exploit people, making it imperative for him to keep in their good graces. The dependence on others was aggravated by a compulsive need for approval and affection, combined as it usually is with attitudes of compliance, appeasement, and avoidance of fight. There was thus a conflict between destructive aggression—reactive rage and sadistic impulses—on the one hand, and on the other the need for affection and approval, with a desire to appear fair and rational in his own eyes. The result was inner upheaval that went unnoticed, while the fatigue that was its external manifestation paralyzed all action. Looking at the factors involved in the conflict, we are struck first by their absolute incompatibility. It would be difficult indeed to imagine more extreme opposites than lordly demands for deference and ingratiating submissiveness. Second, the whole conflict remains unconscious. The contradictory tendencies operating in it are not recognize but are deeply repressed. Only slight bubbles of the battle raging within reach the surface. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

The emotional factors are rationalized: it is an injustice; it is a slight; my ideas were better. Third, the tendencies in both directions are compulsive. Even if he had some intellectual perception of his excessive demands, or of the existence and the nature of his dependence, he could not change these factors voluntarily. To be able to change them would require considerable analytical work. He was driven on either hand by compelling forces over which he had no control: he could not possibly renounce any of the needs acquired by stringent inner necessity. However, none of them represented what he himself really wanted or sought. He would want neither to exploit nor to be submissive; as a matter of fact he despised these tendencies. Such a state of affairs, however, has a far-reaching significance for the understanding of neurotic conflicts. It means that no decision is feasible. A further illustration presents a similar picture. A free-lance designer was stealing small sums of money from a good friend. The theft was not warranted by the external situation; he needed the money, but the friend would gladly have given it to him as he had on occasion in the past. That he should resort to stealing was particularly striking in that he was a decent fellow who set great store by friendship. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

The following conflict was at the bottom of it. The man had a pronounced neurotic need for affection, especially a longing to be taken care of in all practical matters. Alloyed as this was with an unconscious drive to exploit others, his technique was to attempt both to endear and intimidate. These tendencies by themselves would have made him willing and eager to receive help and support. However, he had also developed an extreme unconscious arrogance which involved a correspondingly vulnerable pride. Others should feel honored to be of service to him: it was humiliating for him to ask for help. His aversion to having to make a request was reinforced by a strong craving for independence and self-sufficiency that made it intolerable for him to admit he needed anything or to place himself under obligation. So he could take, but not receive. The content of this conflict differs from that of the first example but the essential characteristics are the same. And any other example of neurotic conflict would show like incompatibility of conflicting drives and their unconscious and compulsive nature, leading always to the impossibility of deciding between the contradictory issues involved. Allowing for an indistinct line of demarcation, the difference, then, between normal and neurotic conflicts is possessed fundamentally in the fact that the disparity between the conflicting issues is much less great for the normal person than for the neurotic. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

The choices the former has to make are between two modes of action, either of which is feasible within the frame of a fairly integrated personality. Graphically speaking, the conflicting directions diverge only 90 degrees or less, as against the possible 180 degrees confronting the neurotic. In awareness, too, the differences is one of degree. Real life is far too multifarious to be portrayed by merely exhibiting such abstract contrast as that between a despair which is completely unconscious, and one which is completely conscious. We can say this much, however: a normal conflict can be entirely conscious; a neurotic conflict in all its essential elements is always unconscious. Even though a normal person may be unaware of one’s conflict, one can recognize it with comparatively little help, while the essential tendencies producing a neurotic conflict are deeply repressed and can be unearthed only against great resistance. The normal conflict is concerned with an actual choice between two possibilities, both of which the person finds really desirable, or between convictions, both of which one really values. It is therefore possible for one to arrive at a feasible decision even though it may be hard on one and require a renunciation of some kind. The neurotic person engulfed in a conflict is not free to choose. One is driven by equally compelling forces in opposite directions, neither of which one wants to follow. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

One is driven by equally compelling forces in opposite directions, neither of which one wants to follow. Hence a decision in the usual sense in impossible. One is stranded, with no way out. The conflict can only be resolved by working at the neurotic trends involved, and by so changing one’s relations with others and with oneself that one can dispense with the trends altogether. These characteristics account for the poignancy of neurotic conflicts. Not only are they difficult to recognize, not only to they render a person helpless, but they have as well a disruptive force of which one has good reason to be afraid. Unless we know these characteristics and keep them in mind, we shall not understand the desperate attempts at solution which the neurotic enters upon, and which constitute the major part of a neurosis. Murder rarely fits the stereotype of an unsuspecting, helpless, passive victim stalked by a cold, calculating killer. Most homicides are preceded by angry quarrels in which the victim plays an active part in bringing about one’s own death. Can innocence, once it becomes involved in action, escape murder? This troublesome question confronts us with renewed sharpness after the events of the past years, especially after the Orlando nightclub shooting 12 June 2016. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

However, it is a question that has troubled beings ever since the dawn of consciousness and the forming, in our forefathers’ minds, of the legend of the Garden of Eden. When we take an endeavor to resolve the knotty question, we wonder does the victim, for example, have anything to do with making oneself the victim? The question takes us into the very heart of the meaning of innocence. Does the virgin herself, beyond flirting, constitute the challenge to the man to end her virginity? Is not innocence curiously bound up with murder in the ritual of sacrifice in practically all cultures? What is the meaning of the phenomenon to be found in the dim beginnings of human history and coming down to this very hour of sacrificing virgins and youths to the Cretan Minotaur or the Moloch of modern walfare? When we push the question of innocence and murder to the furthest reaches of human consciousness, we may find it to be one of those perdurable problems that we cannot answer satisfactorily via intellect alone but must live the questions now. Perhaps you will then live along some distant day into the answer. However, in our endeavor to think it through, we can expect new light to be thrown on the mainsprings of violence. Most important of all, an analysis of the problem of innocence and murder foreshadows the emergence of new ethics for the coming age. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

Innocence is generosity, especially in children, who can still believe and trust since they have yet to experience that betrayal which leads to cynicism. Innocence has to do with the heart in that it is a feeling state, a way of perceiving life rather than a calculation. It is “virgin” in that it is before the awakening to the vast possibilities in life for sensuality, tenderness, exploitation, and betrayal. The lack of experience in pleasures of the flesh has historically been taken for the symbol of innocence, although it should be remembered that it is a symbol and not the content. Innocence is, in addition, a condition of powerlessness. One of our problems, as we discuss innocence, will be to establish the extent to which this powerlessness is capitalized on by the innocent person. The question is: How far is innocence used as a strategy of living? When we reflect on the shooting at Kent State in 1970, we immediately see a demonstration of part of our thesis. This is possessed in the fact that two of the four students killed were not involved in the protest at all. One was dressed in his Reserve Officer raining Corps (ROTC) uniform and was going across that campus to take a test in war tactics, and another was on her way to music class. The moral of this is clear: there are no bystanders anymore. This implies something about the solidarity of human beings—the fact that we are all part of the tragic event. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

Without a surrender of one’s own consciousness, no one today can draw one’s own moral skirts about him and claim an immunity from these events. Television, social media, and mass communication are only symptoms of a basic participation in the events of importance to the human race. To breathe is to judge. We can be confident that we shall find that this awareness of our own involvement is not at all the excuse for masochistic breast-beating or quietist withdrawal from the struggles. It can lead us rather to a new sharpening of our own ethical sensitivity and a discovery, though it be only partial, of the basis on which a lasting and effective struggle for racial integration or a relief from the compulsive hold of warfare may be founded. As a representative of these four students and their innocence, I shall choose one of them, Allison Krause, who was reported to have dropped a flower the day before the shooting into the barrel of one of the guardsmen’s rifles saying: “Flowers are better than bullets.” She is pictured in a poem by Russian poet Yevgeny Yevtushenko, which, despite its tendency toward sentimentality, reveals some important points: Nineteen-year-old Allison Krause, you were killed because you loved flowers. Bullets, pushing out the flower…let all the apple trees of the World, not in white—but in mourning be clothed. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

So far we see only the event as it occurred that day: four victims of murder, the whole event summed up in the ironic and cruel trajectory of stray bullets. However, Yevtushenko knows that this simple innocence has only touched the surface. In the succeeding lines we see the complexity of innocence and of evil: “But a Vietnam girl—the same age as Allison—taking in her hand a gun, is an armed flower, the wrath of the people.” I take both the phrase “armed flower” and “thorny flower of protest,” a phrase that appears later on in the poem, as referring to the dimension of experience added to the original purity of innocence. We now have wrath as the basic motivation. Yevtushenko is now talking about a different kind of innocence—an armed flower, no longer the product of a childlike powerlessness but the power of wrath. The Vietnamese girl knows the flower grows on a thorny bush and has to be handled with care. She has an innocence that does not avoid evil and that there is, in the depth of the human soul as well as in human history, no such thing as pure evil or pure good. Yevtushenko’s juxtaposition of flower and armed reminds us of the phrase used by Jesus in the Gospel according to Saint Mark with which He adjured His disciples as He sent them out into the World: “Be ye wise as serpents but harmless as doves.” #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

This is, again, a curious juxtaposition of innocence and experience, which, it was hoped, would become the foundation for effective social action in the work of the disciples. Now, when I speak of trusting our religious demands, just what do I mean by “trusting”? Is the word to carry with it license to define in detail an invisible World, and to anathematize and excommunicate those whose trust is different? Certainly not! Our faculties of belief were not primarily given us to make orthodoxies and heresies withal; they were given us to live by. And to trust our religious demands means first of all to live in the light of them, and to act as if the invisible World which they suggest were real. It is a fact of human nature, that beings can live and die by the help of a sort of faith that does without a single strict and rigid doctrine or definition. The bare assurance that this natural order is not ultimate but a mere sign or vison, the external staging of a many-storied Universe, in which spiritual forces have the last word and are eternal,–this bare assurance is to such beings enough to make life seem worth living in spite of every contrary presumption suggested by its circumstances on the natural plane. Destroy this inner assurance, however, vague as it is, and all the light and radiance of existence is extinguished for these persons at a stroke. Often enough the wild-eyed look at life—the suicidal mood—will then set in. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

In the same way the Spirit is always present, a moving power, sometimes in stormy ecstasies of individuals and groups, but mostly quiet, entering our human spirit and keeping it alive; sometimes manifest in great moments of history or a personal life, but mostly working hiddenly through the media of our daily encounters with beings and World; sometimes using its creation, the religious communities and their Spiritual means, and often making itself felt in spheres far removed from what is usually called religious. Like the wind the Spirit blows where it wills! It is not subject to rule or limited by method. Its ways with beings are not dependent on what beings are and do. You cannot force the Spirit upon yourself, upon an individual, upon a group, or even upon a Christian church. Although one who is the foundation of the church was oneself of the Spirit, and although the Spirit as it was present in one is the greatest manifestation of Spiritual Presence, the Spirit is not bound to the Christian church or any one of them. The Spirit is free to work in the spirits of beings in every human situation, and it urges beings to let Him do so; God as Spirit is always present to the spirit of beings. It is through this spirit that more specific powers can be extracted for the sake of communication and personal empowerment. “Yea, say unto them, except they repent to the Lord God will destroy them,” reports Alma 8.16. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

Not Only is Everything Subject to Change but Everything Also Exists in Relation to Something Else—Thus Change and Relativity Dominate the World Scene!

September 26, 2019 11:57 pm

Like Nature, the World, I myself, all existence is subject to change. It is inevitable. What can we do except accommodate ourselves to this inexorable law? Of course I want to lay eyes upon you. I want to talk to you. I want to be received, if such a thing is possible, into the Coven of the Articulate. I want you, the great breaker of rules, to forgive me that I have broke yours. “My days have passed away, my thoughts are dissipated, tormenting my heart. They have turned night into day, and after darkness I hope for light again. If I wait hell is my house, and I have made my bed in darkness. I have said to rottenness: thou art my father; to worms, my mother and my sister. Where is now then my expectation, and who considereth my patience? All that I have shall go down into the deepest pit: thinkest thou that there at least I shall have rest?” reports Job 17.16. A remarkable example of the creative encounter is given in the small book written by James Lord in recounting his experience of posing for Alberto Giacometti. Having been friends for some time, these two men could be entirely open with each other. Lord often made notes directly after the posing session of what Giacometti had said and done, and out of them he has put together this valuable monograph about the experience of encounter occurs in creativity. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

He reveals, first, the great degree of anxiety and agony that the encounter generated in Giacometti. When Lord would arrive at the studio for his sitting, Giacometti would often disconsolately occupy himself half an hour or more doing odds and ends with his sculpture, literally afraid to start on the painting. When he did bring himself to get into painting, the anxiety became overt. At one point, writes Lord, Giacometti started gasping and stamping his foot: “Your head is going away!” he exclaimed. “It’s going away completely!” “It will come back again,” I said. He shook his head. “Not necessarily. Maybe the canvas will become completely empty. And then what will become of me? I’ll die of it!” He reached into his pocket, pulled out his handkerchief, stared at it for a moment, as though he did not know what it was, then with a moan threw it onto the floor. Suddenly he shouted very loudly, “I shriek! I Scream!” Lord goes on at another point: To talk to his model while he is working distracts him, I think, from the constant anxiety which is a result of his conviction that he cannot hope to represent on the canvas what he sees before him. This anxiety often bursts forth in the form of melancholy gasps, furious expletives, and occasional loud cries of rage and/or distress. He suffers. There is no doubt about it. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

Giacometti is committed to his work in a particularly intense and total way. The creative compulsion is never wholly absent from him, never leaves him a moment of complete peace. So intense is the encounter that he often identifies the painting on the easel with the actual flesh-and-blood person posing. One day his foot accidentally struck the catch that holds the easel shelf at the proper level, which caused the canvas to fall abruptly for a foot or two. “Oh, excuse me!” he said. I laughed and observed that he had excused himself as though he had not caused me to fall instead of the painting. “That’s exactly what I did feel,” he answered. In Giacometti this anxiety was associated, as it was in his revered Cezanne, with a great deal of self-doubt. In order to go on, to hope, to believe that there is some chance of his actually creating what he ideally visualized, he is obliged to feel that it is necessary to start his entire career over again every day, as it were, from scratch….he often feels that the particular sculpture or painting on which he happened to be working at the moment is that one which will for the very first time express what he subjectively experiences in response to an objective reality. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

Lord correctly assumes that the anxiety is related to the gap between the ideal vision that the artist is trying to paint and the objective results. Here he discusses the contradiction that every artist experiences: This fundamental contradiction, arising from the hopeless discrepancy between conception and realization, is at the root of all artistic creation, and it helps explain the anguish which seems to be an unavoidable component of that experience. Even as “happy” an artist as Renior was not immune to it. What meant something, what alone existed with a life of its own was his [Giacometti’s] indefatigable, interminable struggle via the act of painting to express in visual terms a perception of reality that had happened to coincide momentarily with my head [which Giacometti was then trying to paint]. To achieve this was of course impossible, because what is essentially abstract can never be made concrete without altering its essence. However, he was committed, he was, in fact condemned to the attempt, which at times seemed rather like the task of Sisyphus. One day Lord happened to see Giacometti in a café. And, indeed, miserable was he did seem to be. This, I thought, was the true Giacometti, sitting alone at the back of a café, oblivious to the admiration and recognition of the World, staring into a void from which no solace could come, tormented by the hopeless dichotomy of his ideal yet condemned by that helplessness to struggle as long as he lived to try to overcome it. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

What consolation was it that the newspapers of many countries spoke of him, that museums everywhere exhibited his work, that people he would never know knew and admired him. None. None at all. When we see the intimate feelings and inner experiences of an eminent artist like Giacometti, we smile at the absurd talk in some psychotherapeutic circles of “adjusting” people, making people “happy,” or training out of them by simple behavior modification techniques all pain and grief and conflict and anxiety. How hard for humankind to absorb the deeper meaning of the myth of Sisyphus!—to see that “success” and “applause” are the (expletive) goddess we always secretly knew they were. Too see that the purpose of human existence in a man like Giacometti has nothing whatever to do with reassurance or conflict-free adjustment. Giacometti was rather devoted—“condemned,” to use Lord’s fitting term—to the struggle to perceive and reproduce the World around him through his own vision of being human. He knew there was no others alternative for him. His challenge gave his life meaning. He and his kind seek to bring their own visions of what it means to be human, and to see through that vision to a World of reality, however ephemeral, however consistently that reality vanishes each time you concentrate on it. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

How absurd are the rationalistic assumptions that all one has to do is to remove from the World its curtains of superstition and ignorance and there suddenly will be reality, pristine and pure! Giacometti sought to see reality through his ideal vision. He sought to find the ground forms, the basic structure of reality, below the strewn surface of the arena where (expletive) goddesses cavort. He could not escape devoting himself unstintingly to the question: Is there some place where reality speaks our language, where it answers us if we but understand the hieroglyphics? He knew the rest of us would be no more successful than he was in finding the answer; but we have his contribution to work with, and this we are helped. Each being is unique so each quest must be too. Everyone must find, in the end, one’s own path through one’s own life. All attempts to copy someone else, however reputed, will fail to lead one to self-realization although they may advance one to a certain point. Each seeker must find out one’s own path, one’s own technique for one’s self. Who else has the right or the capacity to do this for an individual? We prefer to follow the creative rather than the compulsive way, to help beings find their own way rather than force them to travel our way. And this can only be done by starting with the roots, with the ideas they hold, and the attitudes which dominate them. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

There are too many differences in individual aspirants to allow a broad general technique to suit them all. A guide who can give a personal prescription is helpful, but even in one’s absence the aspirant can intelligently put together the fragments which will best help one. Let one walk forward slowly or quickly, as suits one best, and also in one’s own way, again as suits one’s individuality which one has fashioned through the reincarnations to its present image and from which one has to begin and proceed farther. There are not only widely different stages of evolutionary growth for every human being but also widely different types of human beings within each stage. Hence a single technique cannot possibly cover the spiritual needs of all humanity. The seeker should find the one that suits one’s natural aptitude as one should find the teacher who is most in inward affinity with one. Let one take up whatever path is most convenient to one’s personal circumstances and individual character and not force one’s self into one utterly unsuited to both, merely because it has proven right for other people. There is no single universal rule for all beings: their outer circumstances and inner conditions, their historical background and geographical locality, their karmic destiny and evolutionary need, their differences in competence, render it unwise, unfair, and impracticable to write a single prescription for them. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

Many European existentialist are largely reacting to Nietzsche’s conclusion that God is dead, and perhaps to the fact that Marx also is dead. The Americans have learned that political democracy and economic prosperity do not in themselves solve any of the basic value problems. There is no pace else to turn but inward, to the self, as the locus of values. Paradoxically, even some of the religious existentialist will go along with this conclusion part of the way. It is extremely important for psychologist that the existentialists may supply psychology with the underlying philosophy which it now lacks. Logical positivism has been a failure, especially for clinical and personality psychologists. At any rate, the basic philosophical problems will surely be opened up for discussion again and perhaps psychologists will stop relying on pseudo-solutions or on unconscious, unexamined philosophies they picked up as children. An alternative phrasing of the core (for us Americans) of European existentialism is that it deals radically with that human predicament presented by the gaps between human aspirations and human limitations (between what the human being is, and what one would like to be, and what one could be). This is not so far off from the identity problem as it might sound at first. A person is both actuality and potentiality. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

That serious concern with this discrepancy could revolutionize psychology, there is no doubt in my mind. Various literatures already support such a conclusion, for example, projective testing, self-actualization, the various peak-experiences (in which this gap is bridged), the Jungian psychologies, various theological thinkers, and so forth. Not only this, but they raise also the problems and techniques of integration of this twofold nature of beings, one’s lower and one’s higher, one’s creatureliness and one’s Godlikeness. On the whole, most philosophies and religions, Eastern as well as Western, have dichotomized them, teaching that the way to become “higher” is to renounce and master “the lower.” The existentialists, however, teach that both are simultaneously defining characteristics of human nature. Neither can be repudiated; they can only be integrated. However, we already know something of these integration techniques—of insight, of intellect in the broader sense, of love, of creativeness, of humor and tragedy, of play, of art. I suspect we will focus our studies on these integrative techniques more than we have in the past. Another consequence for my think of this stress on the twofold nature of beings is the realization that some problems must remain eternally insoluble. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

From this flows naturally a concern with the ideal, authentic, or perfect or Godlike human being, a study of human potentialities as now existing in certain sense, as current knowable reality. This, too, may sound merely literary but it is not. I remind you that this is just a fancy way of asking the old, unanswered questions, “What are the goals of therapy, of education, of bringing up children?” It also implies another truth and another problem which calls urgently for attention. Practically every serious description of the “authentic person” extant implies that such a person, by virtue of what one has become, assumes a new relation to one’s society and indeed, to society in general. One not only transcends oneself in various ways; one also transcends one’s culture. One resists enculturation. One becomes more detached from one’s culture and from one’s society. One becomes a little more a member of one’s species and a little less a member of one’s local group. My feeling is that most sociologists and anthropologists will take this hard. I therefore confidently expect controversy in this area. However, this is clearly a basis for “universalism.” From the European writers, we can and should pick up their greater emphasis on what they call “philosophical anthropology,” that is, the attempt to define beings, and the differences between beings and any other species, between human beings and objects, and between human beings and robots. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

What are human being’s unique and defining characteristics? What is so essential to beings that without it one would no longer be defined as a human being? On the whole this is a task from which American psychology has abdicated. The various behaviorisms do not generate any such definition, at least none that can be taken seriously (what would an S-R (Stimulus-response) human being be like? And who would like to be one? S-R model of human behavior suggest that the behavior is caused by certain reasons. A particular stimulus triggers a particular response. Dr. Freud’s picture of human beings was clearly unsuitable, leaving out as it did one’s aspirations, one’s realizable hopes, one’s Godlike qualities. The fact that Dr. Freud suppled us with most comprehensive systems of psychopathology and psychotherapy is beside the point as the contemporary ego-psychologist are finding out. Aggression and violence are rightly linked in the public mind—one speaks of aggression and violence. Aggression is to violence as anxiety is to panic. When aggression builds up in us, it feels, at a certain point, as though a switch has been thrown, and we become violent. The aggression is object-related—that is, we know at whom and what we are angry. However, in violence, the object-relation disintegrates, and we wing wildly, hitting whoever is within range. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

One’s mind becomes foggy, and perception of the enemy becomes unclear; one loses awareness of the environment and wants to act out this inner compulsion to do violence, come what it may. Humans are the creatures who can think in abstraction and who can transcend the concrete situation. The violence being’s capacity to abstract has disintegrated, and this accounts for one’s crazy behavior. The suddenness with which most violent episodes erupt suggest some questions. In violence, is there a direct connection between the input stimuli and the output muscles (for instance, the muscle that suddenly tend to strike back)? And is this connection subcortical, which would be related to the fact that it happens so quickly that the person does not think until after the episode has passed? Such discussions of the pathways by which the excitation travels are only analogies to the experience itself, but as analogies they may be useful in our understanding the process. Specifically, they may help us see why a person is possessed by violence rather than possessing it. Every since Walter B. Cannon’s classical work in the Harvard psychology laboratory, it has been generally agreed that there are three responses of the organism to threat: fight, flight, and delay response. Cannon demonstrated for example, that when somebody suddenly shoves me roughly on the lightrail, adrenalin is poured into my bloodstream, my blood pressure rises to give my muscles more strength, my heartbeat becomes more rapid—all ofwhich prepares me to fight the offending person or to flee out of range. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

The “flight” is what occurs in anxiety and fear; the “fight” in aggression and violence. With these physiological changes, the experience of violence gives great energy to the person. One feels a kind of transcendent power that one did not realize one had; and one may fight much more effectively in this mood. This fact can act like a drug, tempting the person to give oneself over again and again to violence. The third possibility is that I can delay my response. This is what most people actually do. The lower down the scale of education and status a person is, the more apt one is to react directly; the higher on the scale, the more apt one is to delay reaction until one has had a chance to think and assess the prospects of fighting or fleeing. The capacity for delayed response is a gift—or burden—of civilization: we wait to absorb the event into consciousness and then decide what is the best response. This gives us culture, but it also gives us neurosis. The typical neurotic may spend one’s whole life trying to fight with new acquaintances the old battles that never got worked out in one’s childhood. However, is it not true that on the crowded lightrail I am in a “readiness” to respond hostilely? I am much more apt to have a counterurge of the violet type in that situation than, say, when someone jostles me on a dance floor. So there must be some symbolic scanning process going on. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

How I interpret the situation will determine my readiness to strike back in hostility, making it causa belli, or to simply smile and accept an apology, if one is offered. Interpretation takes in unconscious as well as conscious factors: I give a certain meaning to it; I see the World as being hostile or friendly. Here enters the symbol, the means we have as human beings of uniting conscious and unconscious, historical and present, individual and group. This is why the organic processes are subsumed under the symbolic process. It is the symbolic process that determines the individual’s intentionality. How a person sees and interprets the World about one is thus crucial to one’s violence. This is what gives the readiness to fight to a man or woman quietly sitting in one’s car who becomes enraged when a police officer asks one for one’s identification. This also underlies the “machismo” of a police officer who is driven by one’s own power needs to humiliate an innocent individual. Whether the interpretation is pathological or merely imagined, illusory or downright false, it does not change the situation: it is one’s interpretation that will be decisive as to how one reacts. Trouble is easy to get into, but hard to get out of. The paranoid shoots other persons because one believes they exercise a magic power and will kill one; thus one’s shooting in self-defense. Calling this “paranoid” does not help unless we are able thereby to get behind the symbolic interpretation and see the World, at least temporarily, as the murderer see it. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

Even in international relations symbolic interpretation of the movements of other nations is crucial to the understanding of violence and war. Violence has its roots in impotence, we have said. This is true in individuals and in ethic groups. However, in nations violence comes from the threat of impotence. Nations seem to find it necessary to protect themselves n a periphery father out; they must be aware, precariously balanced as they are on the seesaw of armaments, of whether another country is building up power to gain an advantage over them. If a nation becomes genuinely impotent, it is no longer a nation. Senator J. William Fulbright has pointed out how important out interpretation of the behavior of other nations is. Ever since Yalta, American administrations have interpreted Russia’s behavior—for instance, the Cuban missile episode and the USSR’s reaction to the U-2 flight—as motivated by Russian aggression toward the United States of America. These events Fulbright indicates, could as well have been interpreted as motivated by fear on the part of Russia. More specifically, he proposes that the bellicose posture of these events were sops thrown to the Russian generals, who needed to be placated by Khrushchev if the latter were to succeed in his hope of establishing more amicable relations with the United States of America. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

Interpreting Russia’s moves as aggressive, we oppose them with a vehemence that helped the counterparty in Russia, the army, to depose Khrushchev and institute a less friendly government. Nations, in their misreading of the motives of other nations, can do what the paranoid patient does: they can work against their own interests because of their projection of hostility and aggression. No one, I am sure, wishes to develop new master-slave relationships or bend the will of the people to despotic rulers in new ways. These are patterns of control appropriate to a World without science. Are there no systems that do indeed want to bend the will of the people to dictators? And are these systems only to be found in cultures without Science? I still believe in an old-fashioned ideology of progress: the Middle Ages were dark because they had no science and science necessarily leads to the freedom of beings. The fact is that no leader or government explicitly states one’s intention of bending the will of the people any more; they are apt to use new words which sound like the opposite of the old ones. No dictator calls one’s self a dictator, and every system claims that it expressed the will of the people. In the countries of the free World, on the other hand, anonymous authority and manipulation have replaced overt authority in education, work, and politics. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

If we are worthy of our democratic heritage we shall, of course, be ready to resist any tyrannical use of science for immediate or selfish purposes. However, it we value the achievements and goals of democracy we must not refuse to apply science to the design and construction of cultural patterns, even though we may then find ourselves in some sense in the position of controllers. What is the basis of this value in neobehavioristic theory? All humans control and all humans are controlled. This is reassuring for a democratically minded person. In noticing how the master controls the slave or the employer the worker, we commonly overlook reciprocal effects and, by considering action in one direction only, are led to regard control as exploitation, or at least the gaining of a one-sided advantage; but the control is actually mutual. The slave controls the master as completely as the master controls the slave, in the sense that the techniques of punishment employed by the master have been selected by the slave’s behavior in submitting to them. This does not mean that the notion of exploitation is meaningless or that we may not appropriately ask, cui bono? In doing so, however, we go beyond the account of the social episode itself and consider the long-term effects which are clearly related to the question of value judgments. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

We are looking at the relationship between master and slave as reciprocal, and being remained the exploitation is not meaningless. However, in this social episode, only the techniques of control are important. We are looking at social life as if it were an episode in a laboratory, where all that matters is the techniques—and not the episodes themselves. Exploitation by the master is clearly related to the question of value judgments. Slave and slaveowner are in a reciprocal relationship only by the ambiguous use we are making of the word control. In the sense in which the word is used in real life, there can be no question that the slaveowner controls the slave, and that the reciprocal part of the relationship is that the slave may have a minimum of counter control—for instance, by threat of rebellion. “And it shall come to pass that the Lord God shall commence one’s work among all nations, kindreds, tongues, and people, to bring about the restoration of his people upon the Earth. And with righteousness shall the Lord God judge the poor, and reprove with equity for the meek of the Earth. And he shall smite the Earth with the rod of his mouth; and with the breath of his lips shall slay the wicked. For time speedily cometh that the Lord God shall cause a great division among the people, and the wicked will he destroy; and he will spare his people, yea, even if it so be that he must destroy the wicked by fire,” reports 2 Nephi 30.8-10. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

There is an Abyss which No Human Can Cross, a Mystery which Remains Utterly Impenetrable to One—This is Transcendent Godhead!

September 24, 2019 12:56 am

No, this is something you will never do, I thought. You will not take someone so vital out of the World. You will not disturb the destiny of one who has given others so much to love and enjoy. We have to establish the logical connection between alienation and anxiety. This is extremely difficult because the discussion of the problem of anxiety has by no means reached the clarity which would make it possible for an outsider—like myself to adopt an unambiguous position toward the various opinions. Nevertheless it seems to me that the differences in the conception of the origin of anxiety do not have a decisive significance for my analysis, although they are, of course, highly relevant in other contexts. Dr. Freud himself had originally derived anxiety from the repression of libidinous impulses, and thus has seen it as an automatic transformation of instinctual energy. This view he later modified. Others claim, on the other hand, that there is a single inborn faculty for being afraid. Dr. Rank, in his famous work, derives anxiety from the trauma of birth. And a number of analysts have tried, more or less successfully, to combine the various theories in many ways. The following propositions seem to me more or less acceptable. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

One must distinguish between true anxiety (Realangst) and neurotic anxiety. The difference is of considerable consequence especially for the understanding of the political importance of anxiety. The first—true anxiety—thus appears as a reaction to concrete danger situations; the second—neurotic anxiety—is produced by the ego, in order to avoid in advance even the remotest threat of danger. True anxiety is thus produced through the threat of an external object; neurotic anxiety, which may have a real basis, on the other hand is produced from within, through the ego. Since anxiety is produced by the ego, the seat of anxiety is in the ego, not in the id—the structure of instincts. However, from the analysis of the problem of psychological alienation it follows necessarily that anxiety, feelings of guilt, and the need for self-punishment are responses to internal threats to basic instinctual demands so that anxiety exists as a permanent condition. The external dangers which threaten a being meet the inner anxiety and are thus frequently experienced as even more dangerous than they really are. At the same time, these same external dangers intensify the inner anxiety. The painful tension which is evoked by the combination of inner anxiety and external danger can express itself in either two forms: in depressive or in persecutory anxiety. The differentiation is important because it helps us to evaluate the political function of anxiety more correctly. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

In the history of the individual there are certain typical dangers which produce anxiety. For the child, the withdrawal of love is of decisive importance. On this point there seems to be no doubt among psychologists. From the numerous phobias we may learn a great deal about the relation between anxiety and the renunciation of instinctual gratification. For inhibitions are a functional restraint of the ego; the ego renounces many activities in order to avoid a conflict with the id and the conscience. We know that the phobic symptoms are a substitute for gratifications of the instincts that have been denied or are unattainable. In other words, the ego creates anxiety through repression. If I have correctly reproduced the most important results of analytical theory concerning the origin of anxiety, several important consequences for the analysis of political behavior seem to follow immediately. Anxiety can play very different roles in the life of beings; that is, the activation of a state of anxiety through a danger can have a beneficial as well as destructive effect. We may perhaps distinguish three different consequences: Anxiety can play a warning role, a kind of mentor role, for beings. Affective anxiety may allow a presentiment of external dangers. Thus, anxiety also contains a protective function for it permits beings to take precaution in order to ward off the danger. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

Anxiety can have a destructive effect, especially when the neurotic element is strongly present; that is, it can make being incapable of collecting themselves either to escape the danger or to fight against it; it can paralyze beings and degenerate into panicky anxiety. Finally, anxiety can have a cathartic effect; beings can be strengthened inwardly when one has successfully avoided a danger or when one has prevailed against it. One may perhaps even say (although I cannot prove this) that the being who has conquered anxiety in coming to terms with a danger, may be more capable of making decisions in freedom than the one who never had to seriously wrestle with danger. This may be an important qualification of the proposition that anxiety can make free decision impossible. Our analysis of the relation of alienation to anxiety does not yet permit us to understand the political significance of these phenomena, because it is still in the realm of individual psychology. How does it happen that masses sell their souls to leaders and follow them blindly? On what does the power of attraction of leaders over masses rest? What are the historical situations in which this identification of leader and masses is successful, and what view of history do the beings have who accept leaders? #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

Thus, the question concerning the essence of identification of masses and a leader stands in the center of group-psychological analysis. Without it the problem of the integration or collectivization of the individual in a mass cannot be understood. I assume that the history of the theories of group psychology is familiar. The extraordinary difficulty in the comprehension of group-psychological phenomena is possessed first of all in our own prejudices; for the experiences of the last decades have instilled in us all more or less strong prejudices against the masses, and we associate with masses the epithet mob, a group of beings who are capable of every atrocity. In fact the science group psychology began with this aristocratic prejudice in the work of the Italian, Scipio Sighele; and Le Bon’s famous book is completely in this tradition. His these are familiar. Beings in the mass descends; one is, as it were, hypnotized by the leader (operateur) and in this condition is capable of committing acts which one would never commit as an individual. As the slave of the unconscious—for instance, for Le Bon, regressive—sentiments, beings in the mass are degraded into a barbarian: “Isolated, one may be a cultivated individual; in a crowd, one is a barbarian—that is a creature acting by instinct. One possesses the spontaneity, the violence, the ferocity, and also the enthusiasm and heroism of primitive beings.” #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

Critics of Le Bon, among them Dr. Freud, have pointed out that his theory, which rests on Sighele and Tarde, is inadequate in two aspects: the answer to the question, What hold the masses together? is inadequate, for the existence of a radical soul is unproved. In addition, in Le Bon the decisive problem—the role of the leader—hypnotist—remains unclarified. As is frequently true in social-psychological studies, the descriptions of psychological states are adequate, the theoretical analyses, the answers to “Why?,” are inadequate. From the outset, Dr. Freud sees the problem in the way which we have put it, namely, as that of the identification of masses with a leader—an identification which becomes of decisive significance particularly in an anxiety situation. And he sees in the libido the cement which holds leader and masses together, whereby, as is known, the concept of libido is to be taken in a very broad sense, to include the instinctual activities which in relations between the genders force their way toward the union in pleasures of the flesh, as well as those which in other circumstances are diverted from this aim or are prevented from reaching it, though always preserving enough of their original nature to keep their identity recognizable (as in such features as the longings for proximity, and self-sacrifice. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

The cement which holds the mass together bonds them to the leader is thus a sum of instincts that are inhibited in their aims. In this manner, I believe, the logical connection between alienation and mass behavior has been established. Since the identification of masses with the leader is an alienation of the individual member, identification always constitutes a regression, and a twofold one. On the one hand, the history of a being is the history of one’s emergency from the primal horde and of one’s progressive individualization; thus the identification with a leader in a mass is a kind of a historical regression. This identification is also a substitute for a libidinal object bond, thus a psychological regression, a damaging of the ego, perhaps even the loss of the ego. However, this judgment is valid only for the libido-charged, for instance, affective, identification of an individual in a mass with a leader; and not as a matter of course (and perhaps not all) for that of lovers and of small groups. Non-affective identification too, cannot be simply considered as regressive. For identification with organizations (church, army) is not always libidinally charged. MacDougall’s emphasis on the significance of organization must therefore be taken seriously. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

It is thus necessary to make distinctions. There are non-affective identifications, in which coercion or common material interest play an essential role, either in bureaucratic-hierarchic, or in cooperative form. It seems to me to be incorrect, above all for recent history, to see in the identification of the soldier with the army, for instance, in the loyalty to an organization, an actual identification of the soldier with the commander-in-chief. Surely these are example of this: Alexander, Hannibal, Caesar, Wallenstien, Napoleon. However, the commander-in-chief of the twenty first century is much more the technician of war than the leader of beings, and the libidinal bond of the soldier is, if I may coin the phrase, essentially cooperative, namely, with the smallest groups of comrades with whom one shares dangers. Thus I would like to establish two fundamental types of identification: a libido-charged (affective) and a libido-free (non-affective); and maintain generally (as it follows from MacDougall’s psychology) that non-affective identification with organization is less regressive than the affective identification with a leader. Non-affective loyalty is transferable; personal loyalty, on the other hand, is not. The former always contains strong rationalist elements, elements of calculability between organizations and individual, and thus prevents the total extinction of the ego. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

However, I believe that one must also distinguish two types within affective identification. One may call them cooperative and caesaristic. It is conceivable (and it has probably happened in short periods in history) that many equals identify themselves cooperatively with one another in such a manner that their egos are merged in the collective ego. However, this cooperative form is rare, limited to short periods or in any case operative only for small groups. The decisive affective identification is that of masses with leaders. It is—as I have said—the most regressive form, for it is built upon a nearly total ego-shrinkage. It is the form which is od decisive significance for us. We call it caesaristic identiciation. Caesaristic identification may play a role in history when the situation of masses is objectively endangered, when the masses are incapable of understanding the historical process, and when the anxiety activated by the danger become neurotic persecutory (aggressive) anxiety through manipulation. From this follows, first of all, that not every situation dangerous to masses must lead to a caesartic movement; it allows, further, that not every mass movement is based on anxiety, and thus not every mass movement need be caesaristic. Thus it is a question of determining the historical conditions in which a regressive movement under a Caesar tried to win political power. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

However, before we describe these historical situations, I may perhaps point to a clue which will frequently permit us an early diagnosis of the regressive character of such a mass movement. This clue is the view of history which the masses and the leaders employ. It may be called the conspiracy theory of history, a theory of history characterized by false concreteness. The connection between Caesarism and this view of history is quite evident. Just as the masses hope for their deliverance from distress into the World through a conspiracy. The historical process is personified in this manner. Hated, resentment, dread created by great upheavals, are concentrated on certain persons who are denounced as devilish conspirators. Nothing would be more incorrect than to characterize the enemies as scapegoats (as often happens in the literature), for they appear as genuine enemies who one must extirpate and not as substitutes whom one only needs to send into the wilderness. It is a false concreteness and therefore an especially dangerous view of history. Indeed, the danger consists in the fact that this view of history is never completely false, but always contains a kernel of truth and, indeed, must contain it, if it is to have a convincing effect. The truer it is one might say, the less regressive the movement; the falser, the more regressive. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

It is my thesis that whatever affective (for instance, caesaristic) leader-identifications occur in politics, masses and leaders have this view of history: that the distress which has befallen the masses has been brought about exclusively by a conspiracy of certain persons or groups against the people. With this view of history, true anxiety, which had been produced by war, want, hunger, anarchy, is to be transformed into neurotic anxiety and is to be overcome by means of identification with the leader-demagogue through total ego-renunciation, to the advantage of the leader and one’s clique, whose true interests do not necessarily have to correspond to those of the masses. Of course, I cannot provide conclusive proof, but I believe that by pointing to certain historical events I can make clear the connection between this view of history and Caesarism. What being will set out on a task which one can never hope to accomplish? It is too much to expect the average seeker to become a President Lincoln, or Martin Luther King, Jr. We portray the nature of this quest not because we hold such vain expectation but because we believe in the value of right direction and in the creative power of the Ideal. The general direction of one’s thoughts and deeds—rather than those thoughts and deeds themselves—as well as the ideal one mist habitually contemplates, is what is most important and most significant in one’s life. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

One first need is to choose a general goal, not necessarily an exact point but enough to orient oneself, to give one a direction. An ideal helps to hold a being back from one’s weaknesses, a standard gives one indirectly a kind of support as well as, directly, guidance. Let us not pretend to the Perfect or the hope of its attainment. However, we can have the Ideal and follow it. It is a truth which one must bring to life by one’s own personal experience. If there were no possibility of finding one’s way from this body-prisoned, time-encased condition, then no one would ever have become self-realized, and all preaching of religion and teaching of philosophy would have been futile. However, we know from history and biography that such achievement has been experienced in all parts of the World and in all centuries, so that no should give up hope. Are the quest’s goals worth what one has to pay for them? It is even worth embarking on if one remembers how few seem to reach those goals? Time alone can show one that no price is too high and that right direction is itself sufficient reward. The ultimate goal is for us to live from the Overself not from the ego. When Glenn gray went back to Europe in 1955 to interview his comrades-in-arms and his friends in the resistance of fifteen years ago, a French woman living in her comfortable bourgeois home with her husband and son, confessed earnestly: “My life is so unutterably boring nowadays! Anything is better than to have nothing at all happen day after day. You know that I do not love war or want it to return. But at least it made me feel alive, as I have no felt before or since.” #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

Relating to the experience of listening to a German comrade-in-arms, Gray continues: Overweight, and with an expensive cigar in his mouth, he spoke of our earlier days together at the close of the way when he was shivering and hungry and harried with anxieties about keeping his wife and children from too great wants. “Sometimes I think that those were happier times for us than these.” And there was something like despair in his eyes. Neither one of these people was longing for the old day in sentimental nostalgia; they were confessing their disillusionment with a sterile present. Peace exposed a void in them that war’s excitement has enabled them to keep covered up. This void is that from which the ecstasy of violence is an escape. Some of the sterility is due to the inescapable conditions of civilized existence that remove much of the risk and challenge from life—risk and challenge that seem to be more important for many, if not most, people, than out much touted affluence. Violence puts the risk and challenge back, whatever we may think about its destructiveness; and no longer is life empty. We are going to have upheavals of violence for as long as experiences of significance are denied people. Everyone has a need for some sense of significance; and if we cannot make that possible, or even probable, in our society, then it will be obtained in destructive ways. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

The challenge before us is to find ways that people can achieve significance and recognition so that destructive violence will not be necessary. Thinking which is fact-grounded, experience-based, and correct; living which is wise, balanced, and good; prayer which goes deeper and deeper—these are some of our basic needs. Peace of mind can be enjoyed in this World: there is no need to wait for passage to the next one. Different terms can be used to label this unique attainment. It is insight, awakening, enlightenment. It is Being, Truth, Consciousness. It is Discrimination between the Seer and the Seen. It is awareness of That Which Is. It is the Practice of the Presence of God. It is the Discovery of Timelessness. All these words tell us something but they all fall short and do not tell us enough. In fact they are only hints for farther they cannot go: it is not on their level at all since it is the Touch of the Untouchable. However, nevermind; just pay with such ideas if you care too. Ruminate and move among them. Out your heart as well as head into the game. Who knows one day what may happen? Perhaps if you become still enough you too may know—as the Bible suggests. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

That life will reach some higher end and thus justify all the fret and toil is more than a comforting belief: it is also an offering of the highest Reason, the revelation of highest experience. A surgeon we know once wrote us that the goals seemed so distant, the way so long, the labour so arduous, that he felt inclined to abandon the quest altogether as something beyond ordinary human reach. Our reply to him was that because a position could not be capture in its entirety that was no reason for hesitating to make a start to capture some of it. ”And it came to pass that there was not one soul, except it were little children, who had entered the covenant (with God to keep his commandments) and had taken upon them the name of Christ,” reports Mosiah 6.2. It is a blessed historic fact that divine life and light came to the World through living beings. However, not what is more important is that it shall come to us today. Great historic prophets, sages, and teachers were not the first discoverers of this secret consciousness, nor will they be the last. Such a circle, with its esoteric doctrines and exclusive membership, cannot be understood properly by those who stand outside it and who therefore do not know its informing spirit. This is the wordless and pictureless discovery that insight reveals and intelligence confirms. This is the beautiful source of all life and unfailing sustainer of all beings. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

An Ideal Helps to Hold a Being Back from One’s Weaknesses, a Standard Gives One Indirectly a Kind of Support, as Well as, Directly, Guidance!

September 21, 2019 1:57 am

No matter how long we exist, we have our memories—points in time which itself cannot erase. Suffering may distort my backward glances, but even to suffering, some memories will yield nothing of their beauty or their splendor. Rather they remain as hard as gems. Humans portray themselves and what a form is presented in the drama of the modern age! Barrenness here, license there; the two extremes of human decay, and both untied in a single period. It is a culture itself which inflicted this wound on modern humanity. And this wound was inflicted on beings by the division of labor: Gratification is separated from labor, means from ends, effort from reward. Eternally fettered only to a single little fragment of the whole, beings fashion themselves only as a fragment. This indictment of modern society reaches it climax in the characterization of love: So jealous is the state for the sole possession of its servants that it would sooner agree (and who could blame it?) to share them with a Venus Cythera than with a Venus Urania. Theses are the two forms of the goddess of love in Plato’s Symposium and thus it identifies Venus Cytherea with venal but Urania with genuine love. What I am describing so impressively is what Hegel and Marx characterized as alienation. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18

By contrasting the polypus nature of the Greek states, where each individual enjoyed an independent existence and, if necessary, could become whole, with modern society which is one of hierarchical division of labor, one can see how modern society produces a fragmentation not only of social functions but of the beings themselves who, as it were, keeps their different faculties in different pigeonholes—love, labor, leisure, culture—that are somehow held together by an externally operating mechanism that is neither comprehended nor comprehensible. Nonetheless, one may consider this analysis of the Greek state as strongly unrealistic and one may, perhaps, even see certain dangers in the glorification of Greece; nevertheless, this analysis of modern beings, points far beyond our age, remains valid and it is perhaps only today that we have become fully conscious of how true this analysis is. If someone tells you that the path is a mere figment of the imagination, they are welcome to their belief. I, who have seen many beings enter it and a few finish it, declare that the difference between the beginning and the end of the path is the difference between a slave and a master. If the quest is presented as too difficult for everyone but the superhuman, an inferiority complex is created and those who could get some help from some of its practices are frightened away. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18

Love is defined as the whole, as a feeling, but not a single feeling. In it, life finds itself as a duplication of its self and as its unity. However, this love is frequently shattered by the resistance of the outside World, the social World of property, a World indeed which beings have created through their own labor and knowledge but which has become an alien, a dead World through property. Beings are alienated from themselves. Since we are here not Hegelian concept of alienation, which recognizes that the experience of alienation may be an undesirable aspect of consciousness’s existence, we may pass over the development of his concept. It is equally unnecessary for us here to develop fully Marx’s concept of alienation. For Marx it is the commodity that determines human activity, that is, the objects which are supposed to serve beings become the tyrant of the being. For according to Marx, humans are a universal being. If they recognize themselves in a World one has themselves made, then they are free. However, that does not happen. Since alienating labor alienates beings from nature, alienates one from themselves, one’s own active function, one’s life’s activity, it alienated one from one’s own species. The separation or labor from the object is thus for one a threefold one: beings are alienated from external nature, from one’s self, and from one’s fellow beings. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18

The relationships of beings to one another are reified: personal relations appear as objective relations between things (commodities). Jesus said that the way to eternal life is straight and narrow. He could have added that it is also long and difficult. Yet the beginner should not let these things discourage one. There is help within and without. If the standards are set too high, love for it may not be strong enough to assist this attainment. If the ideal is too rigorous, its would-be followers will be too few. The achievement may seem too hard but it is not impossible. The best guarantee of that is the ever-presence within one of the divine soul itself. We must take care not to fall into the depressing belief that this is too be attained by masters only and that we cannot attain it. Beings, (not only the workers, since the process of alienation affects society as a whole) is thus a mutilated being. However, these theories of alienation are not adequate. While the principles developed by Hegel and Marx must be given up, these theories need supplementation and deepening. Their inadequacy consists in this, that they oppose universal or nearly universal beings to the mutilated beings of the modern World. However, there is no historical form of society in which beings have ever existed as universal beings; for slavery is not compatible with universality. If I distinguish three strata of alienation, my meaning may become clearer. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18

In alienation, the stratum of psychology; that of society; and that of politics are the three strata. Only if we start with a clean separation of the three strata and concepts, in order to bring them together again, we can get at the problem of alienation, and this of anxiety in politics. Neither alienation nor anxiety is to be found only in modern society and only in modern beings, although the different structures of society and the state modify the forms of expression which alienation and anxiety take. The modifications are hard to determine, and I shall not attempt here to undertake a systematic analysis. However, I shall try to point up the problem and to make the theory somewhat more concrete by means of (more or less arbitrary) examples. Dr. Freud’s thesis in his Civilization and its Discontents is this: “The foal toward which the pleasure-principle impels us—of becoming happy—is not attainable”; because for Dr. Freud suffering springs from three sources: external nature, which we can never dominate completely, the susceptibility to illness and the mortality of the body, and social institutions. However, the statement that society prevents happiness, and consequently that every sociopolitical institution is repressive, does not lead to hostility toward civilization. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18

For the limitation, which is imposed upon the libidinal as well as the destructive instincts, creates conflicts, inescapable conflicts, which are the very motors of progress in history. However, conflicts deepen with the progress of civilization, for Dr. Freud states that increasing technical progress, which in itself ought to make possible a greater measure of instinct gratification fails to do so. There arises here a psychological lag that grows ever wider—a formulation that I should like to borrow from the cultural lag of American sociology. Thus, every society is built upon the renunciation of instinctual gratifications. Dr. Freud fins that it is “not easy to understand how it can become possible to withhold satisfaction from an instinct. Nor is it by any means without risk to do so; if the deprivation is not made good economically.” To be sure, according to Dr. Freud it is conceivable “that a civilized community could consist of pairs of individuals (who love each other) libidinally satisfied in each other, and linked to all the others by work and common interests. If this were so, culture would not need to levy energy from sexuality.” However, the opposite is true and always has been true. For at bottom Dr. Freud does not believe in this conceivable ideal.” The differences between the different forms of society—which are decisive for us—do not play a decisive role for one. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18

The renunciation of instinctual gratification and the cultural tendency toward the limitation of love operate at all levels of society. It is these renunciation and limitations which we characterize as psychological alienation of beings, or perhaps even better as alienation of the ego from the dynamics of instinct. It is unhelpful to put this goal on some Everest-like peak far beyond human climbing. If many are called but few are chosen, it is their own weakness which defers the time of being chosen. In the end, and with much patience, they too will find the way beyond the struggle into peace. It is not enough to find an ideal to help one’s course in life: it should also be based on truth, not fancy. The aspiration must not only be a desirable one, it must also be attainable. There is always a valid reason for disparity between the sought-for objective and the actual performance. Those who begin hopefully and enthusiastically but find themselves disappointed and without results, ought to look first to their understanding of the Quest and correct it, to their picture of the Goal and redraw it. If you want to find out why so many fail to reach the Quest’s objective and so few succeed in doing so, first find out what the Quest really is. Then you will understand that the failures are not failures at all; that so large a project to change human nature and human consciousness cannot be finished in a little time. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18

It is only of limited help to the modern being, living under very different conditions as one is, to offer one the saint as a type of imitate or to quote the pastor as an example to follow. One will not waste time in seeking the unattainable or striving for the impossible. For truth, not self-deception, is one’s goal; humility, not arrogance, is one’s guide. That the Overself not only is, but is attainable, is the premise and promise of true philosophy. If the goal is really unattainable, then the Quest is futile. If it is no more than approachable then surely the Quest is well worthwhile. However, in fact the foal is both attainable and approachable. Every being may awaken to the presence of Christ-consciousness within one’s self and thus step out of the merely animal and nominally human existence. It will then be a divinely human one. Immediately after the hanging of Billy Budd, in the cinema version of Melville’s novella, the sailors on this British man-of-war suddenly see a French warship coming around the promontory several miles to port. They all cheer. Why the cheer? These men know that they are going into battle, into the grime and cruelty and death that war represents, yet they cheer. True, a minor part of the cause can be seen as an outlet for the pent-up emotions that have been engendered silently and oppressively as the sailors experienced the hanging of their favorite comrade. However, there is more basic a reason. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18

We turn, then, to another area, the most difficult of all with which to come to terms, that of the violence in war. On the rational level practically everyone rejects and abhors war. When I was in college before World War II, I recall how take aback I was when a professor of English literature remarked that he was fairly sure there would be more wars. If ever such existed, this professor was a soften-spoken, sensitive, unwarlike type; but I silently looked at him as though he were a pariah. How could a man entertain such a thought? Was not it clear that we must refrain from thinking of or believing in war—and certainly from predicting it—if we were to ever attain peace? Several other hundred thousand fellow collegians and I, who were pacifists, were under the illusion that if we only believed in peace strongly enough, we could that much more insure international peace. We have no idea of how close our attitude came to superstition—do not think of the devil or her will already be in your midst. We are so engrossed in blotting war out of everybody’s mind that we completely ignored the points in William James’s provocative essay “The Moral Equivalent of War.” Written because of his detestation of our “squalid war with Spain,” William James delivered this as a lecture in 1907. It still presents the central problem penetratingly, even if its answers are no longer cogent. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18

“In my remarks, pacifist though I am,” says James, “I will refuse to speak of the bestial side of the war-regime (already done justice by many writers).” He cautions then against the belief that describing the horrors of war will act as a deterrent: “Showing war’s irrationality and horror is of no effect. The horrors make the fascination. When [it is a] question of getting the extremest and supremist out of human nature, talk of expense sounds ignominious. Pacifists ought to enter more deeply into the aesthetical and ethical point of view of their opponents.” Now for all our opposition to war, we cannot escape the obvious fact that we have been notoriously unsuccessful in our efforts to curtail it. I believe our lack of success is due, at least in part, to our having ignored the central phenomenon: “the horrors make the fascination.” In this century—which began arrogantly as a “century of peace”—we have seen the steady change from a state of relative tranquility to that of revolutions and violence. At this moment we find half a dozen wars going on around the globe, including that war in Afghanistan. Nonetheless, the American army has changed from a draft to a volunteer army. Why have we, who are opposed to war, been so ineffectual? It is not time to inquire whether there is something wrong in our approach to this ultimate form of aggression and violence? I propose that we ask directly: What is the allure, the fascination, the attraction of war? #RandolphHarris 10 of 18

Many veterans who are honest with themselves will admit, I believe, that the experience of communal effort in battle even under the altered conditions of modern war, has been a high point in their lives which they would not want to have missed. For anyone who has not experienced it one’s self, the feeling is hard to comprehend, and for the participant, hard to explain to anyone else. Millions of men and some times children (who change their age to participate) in or day—like millions before us—have learned to live in war’s strange element and have discovered in it a powerful fascination. The Emotional environment of war has always been compelling; it has drawn most beings under its spell. Reflection and calm reasoning are alien to it. When the signs of peace were visible, the purgative force of danger which makes beings coarser but perhaps more human will soon be lost and the first months of peace will make some of us yearn for the old days of conflict. What are the sources of war’s allure? One is the attraction of the extreme situation—that is, the risking all in battle. This is the same element that catches people beyond desires. A second is the strengthening effect of being part of a tremendous organization, which relieves a person of individual responsibility and guilt. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18

The declaration of war is thus important as a moral statement, as a moral justification, and enables the soldier to give over one’s moral responsibility to one’s outfit. This point is generally cited in criticism of the war machine; and no one can have the slightest doubt that war does erode individua responsibility and the autonomy of conscience. The My Lai massacre and the Lt. William Calley case prove this in a horrible way. However, what is generally overlooked is that a being has a desire to avoid freedom as well as to seek it; that freedom and choice are also a burden—as Dostoevsky and countless others have known throughout history; and that to give one’s conscious over to the group, as one does in war time, is also a source of great comfort. This is why the great determinism of history—such as Calvinism and Marxism—have also demonstrated great power not only to form people into ranks but to inspire in the degree of active devotion that other movements may not find available. Closely related to this is the feeling of comradeship in the feeling of comradeship in the ranks—that I am accepted not because of any individual merit on my part, but because I am a fellow in the ranks. I can trust my fellow soldier to cover my retreat or my attack because of the role given to me. My merit is the role, and the limits the role places on me give me a species of freedom. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18

The breaking down of this capacity to feel as if one were part of the larger whole is the explanation of how soldiers overcome fear. Indeed, physical courage in whatever scene—judging from my experience in psychotherapy–seems to hinge on whether the individual can feel one is fighting for others as well as one’s self, assuming a bond with one’s fellow, which means one will come to their assistance as they will to one’s. The source of this physical courage appears to be possessed originally in the relationship between the infant and its mother, specifically one’s trust in one’s solidarity with her and, consequently, with the World. Physical cowardice, on the other hand, even in avoiding physical fights as a child, seems to come from an early rejection, and early feeling that the mother will not support her child and may even turn against one in one’s fights; so that henceforth every effort the youngest makes, one makes on one’s own. Such a person finds it inconceivable that others would support one and that one is also fighting for them, and it takes a conscious decision for one to take up their part. This latter type of person may have great moral courage, which one has developed as a loner; but what one lacks is physical courage or courage in the group. There is in ecstasy of violence, furthermore, the lust for destruction. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18

Remember there was a man named Mark, recall his comment: “All my life I’ve wanted to smash a BMW.” There seems to be a delight in destruction in beings, the atavistic urge to break things and to kill. This is increased in neurotics and others in despair; but it is an increase of a trait that is there anyway, and centuries of the veneer of civilization cannot hide it. It could also be that soldiers know that in their death, they could be saving the lives of others. Anyone who has watched people on the battlefield at work with artillery, or looked into the eyes of the veteran killers fresh from slaughter, or studied the descriptions of bombardiers’ feelings while smashing their targets, find it hard to escape the conclusion that there is a delight in destruction. This evil appears to surpass mere human evil, and to demand explanation in cosmological and religions terms. In this sense, human beings can be devilish in a way animals can never be. In this lust for destruction, the soldier’s ego temporarily deserts one, and one is absurd in what one experiences. It is a deprivation of self for a union with objects that were hitherto foreign. This is technical language for what is referred to in the mystic experience of ecstasy: the ego is dissolved, and the mystic experiences a union with the “Whole,” be it called light or truth or God. Through violence we overcome self-centeredness. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18

All of these are elements in the ecstasy of violence. There is a joy in violence that takes the individual out of one’s self and pushes one toward something deeper and more powerful than one has previously experiences. The individual “I” passes insensibly into a “we”; “my” becomes “our.” I give myself to it, let myself go; as I feel my old self slipping away, lo and behold, a new consciousness, a higher degree of awareness, becomes present, a new self, more extensive than the first. Now when we consider contemporary beings—insignificant, lonely, more isolated as mass communication becomes vaster, one’s ears and sensitivities dulled by ever-present transistor radios and by thousands of word hurled at one by TV and newspapers, aware of one’s identity only to the extent that one has lot it, yearning for community but feeling awkward and helpless as one finds it—when we consider this modern being, who will be surprised that one yearns for ecstasy even of the kind that violence and war may bring? We must also face the fact that, to most people, violence is fun. We watch it on television and in the movies regularly. The barroom fight in a western movie is almost always a matter of comedy or semicomedy. Football players are armored and padded like medieval knights so that they can provide violence with the least damage to themselves. Wrestling, the acting out of violence, commands a wide audience. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18

The rollerderbies attract fanatic follwers who look on, not to watch expert rollerskating, but to exult in the fights and near-fights, the elbowing and the falls. Ice hockey is a game in which we simply conceded that fights are a part of the sport. Conflict is a problem that faces not only psychologist, but ever human being everywhere. It is one thing to proclaim, as some psychologist do, that violence is not instinctive in human nature. It is another to demonstrate ways in which aggression can be controlled and eliminated and replaced by cooperation. Consider this being in society—living year after year in the anonymous anxiety that something might happen; aware of enemy countries that one can destroy in one’s imagination, a fantasy to which one resorts when one is fed up with one’s day-to-day life; existing with a dread that one feels somehow ought to be translated into action but hanging in abeyance, lured on by secret promises of ecstasy and violence, feeling that continuing the vague dread is worse than giving in to the allure, fascination, and attraction of action—is it any wonder that this being goes along with a declaration of war in apparent sheeplike fashion? For the first time in my life I can now, for example, understand the American Legon. That organization has always been, for me, a negative conscience—whatever it was for, I was against, and whatever I was for, it was against. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18

When I did not have time to figure out on which side justice was, this worked quite well as a pro tempore device. However, I never could understand the motives of the legionnaries or other veterans’ organizations in their saberrattling and their stretching the hunting-under-every-bed-for-Communists to absurd lengths. Now, however, I see that these groups had originally been, by large, young men and women who had held insignificant jobs pouring gasoline into Buicks, Fords, and Chevrolets when they were called to war. In France they became heroes, the pride of the women; flowers were strewn in their paths, every honor thrust upon them. They were significant, possibly for the first time in their lives. Returning to this country, some could find only the same jobs pouring gasoline into Buicks, Chevrolets, and Fords, and those who found better jobs may have experienced a similar despair in the empty life of peacetime. No wonder they hand together, out of their ennui, to recreate the closest experience to that of the war, such as the “search and destroy” anti-communist mission. They hark back in their yearning to find something that will give their lives a significance it intrinsically lacks. That wonderful time when one can look straight into one’s self, through ego to Overself, awaits one’s endeavours. The goal is far-off, it is true; but nevertheless it is reachable by those who will make the requisite effort to overcome self. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18

Despite all setbacks, the outcome of this endeavour can be only the fulfilment of hope. For that is God’s will. Even if the goal seems too far off, the attainment too high up for their limited capacities, even if it seems that one would have to be far better than ordinary to have any chance at all, that does not mean they should not embark on this quest. For even if they are able to travel only a modest part of the way the efforts involved are still well worthwhile. “And may the Lord bless your soul, and receive you at the last day into his kingdom, to sit down in peace,” reports Alma 38.15. The history of the Universe is a history of cycles: of birth, development, disintegration, death, and rest endlessly repeated on higher and higher levels. The energy impulses which rise from the Void and accumulate as electrons, only to disperse later, reproduce the same cycles through which the entire Universe itself passes. Do as or as little as you can to advance. If you lack the strength to go all the way then go some of the way. Your spiritual longings and labors will influence your afterlife. Nothing will be lost. If you deserve them, higher capacities and more favorable circumstances will then be yours. Every virtue deliberately cultivated leads to a pleasanter rebirth. Every weakness remedied leads to the cancellation of an unpleasant one. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18

Only a Being Who Has Overcome the Lower Nature Oneself May Help Others to Overcome it in their Turn!

September 20, 2019 12:49 am

Ah, but you have worked it all so well. It was easier for you in old Rome, was it not? However, what a palace you have here. There are kings who would envy you. Master, long years ago, or so they seem to me, in some far-away place, where I lived before I came to you, I was what they called a Fool for God. I do not remember it clearly and never will as both of us well know. But a Fool for God was a man who gave himself over to God completely and did not care what happened, whether it was mockery, or starvation, or endless laughter, or dreadful cold. That much I remember, that I was a Fool for God in those times. Whatever I did I was a Fool for God. A Fool for God in some miserable monastery painting the sacred pictures, convinced my life would mean nothing unless it was a life of sacrifice and pain. And now, in your magic I see some similar burning purity. And I turned away from all the riches of life in Venice for that burning purity; I turned away from all that a human may have. “When I look at thy Heavens, the work of thy fingers, the Moon and the Stars which thou hast dost care for him? Yet thou hast made him little less than God, and dost crown him with glory and honor. Thou hast given him dominion over the works of thy hands; thou hast put all things under his feet,” Psalms 8.3-6. Sometime ago representative of the World of science demanded a new line of research. They called it a “science of survival.” #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

The science of survival did not mean the survival of individuals or social groups, of nations or of races—that would not be new—but the survival of civilized humankind, or of humankind as a whole, or even life altogether on the surface of this planet. Such a proposition is a sign that we have reached a stage of human history that has only one analogy in the past, the story of the “Great Flood,” found in the Old Testament and also among the myths and legends of many nations. The only difference between our situation and that of the Flood is that in these stories the gods or God brings about the destruction of life on Earth because beings have aroused divine anger. As the book of Genesis describes it: “The Lord was sorry that he had made humans on Earth and it grieved him to his heart. So the Lord said, I will blot out man, whom I have created, from the face of the ground, man and beast and creeping things and birds of the air, for I am sorry that I have made them.” In the next verse, the story answers the questions of possible survival—“But Noah found favor in the eyes of the Lord.” Through him, we read, not only man but also a pair of each species of animal was to make possible the survival of life upon Earth. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

Today, the destruction and survival of life have been given into the hands of beings—men and women and children. Beings who have dominion over all things, according to the psalm, has the power to save or destroy them, for they are little less than God. How do beings react to this new situation? How do we react? How should we react? “The Earth and we” has ceased to be merely a subject for human curiosity, artistic imagination, scientific study, or technical conquest. It has become a question of profound human concern and tormenting anxiety. We make desperate attempts to escape its seriousness. However, when we look deep into the minds of our contemporaries, especially those of the younger generation, we discover a dread that permeates their whole being. This dread was absent a few decades ago and is hard to describe. It is the sense of living under a continuous threat; and although it may have many causes, the greatest of these is the imminent danger of a universal and total catastrophe. Their reaction to this feeling is marked either by a passionate longing for security in daily life, or an exaggerated show of boldness and confidence in being, based on one’s conquest of Earthly and trans-Earthly space. Most of us experience some of these contradictory reactions in ourselves. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

Our former naïve trust in the “motherly” Earth and her protective and preserving power has disappeared. It is possible that the Earth may bear us no longer. We ourselves may prevent her from doing so. No Heavenly sign, like rainbow given to Noah as a promise that there would not be a second flood, has been given to us. We have no guarantee against human-made floods, that destroy not by water but by fire and air. Such thoughts give rise to the question—what has it to say about the significance of the Earth, the scene of human history, in view of the vastness of the Universe? What about the short span of time allotted to this planet and the life upon it, as compared to the unimaginable length of rhythms of the Universe? Such questions have been rarely asked in Christian teaching and preaching. For the central themes of Christianity have been the drama of the creation and fall, of salvation and fulfillment. However, sometimes peripheral questions move suddenly into the center of a system of thought, not for any theoretical reason, but because such questions have become, for many, matters of life and death. This is the kind of movement has very often occurred in human history as well as in Christian history. And whenever it has occurred, it has changed being’s view of oneself in all respects, as it has changed the understanding of the Christian tradition on all levels. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

It may well be that we are living in such a moment, and that being’s relation to the Earth and the Universe will, for a long time, become the point of primary concern for sensitive and thoughtful people. Should this be the case, Christianity certainly cannot withdraw into the deceptive security of its earlier questions and answers. It will be compelled forward into the more daring inroads of the human spirit, risking new unanswered questions, like those we have just asked, but at the same time pointing in the direction of the eternal, the source and goal of beings and this World. For a moment, let us imagine what thinking must have been like for the first people who were aware that they were aware. Science cannot explain why the World makes scientific sense. It cannot explain why we are here, or, now that we are here, what we should do about it. The first people had no words to describe the World they were experiencing. Because we think in symbols, it is difficult for us to imagine what those early people, who had no symbols, thought, but we can try. The first aware people began to collect information about the World. They saw a large, bright object move across the Sky. It has a profound effect upon their bodies. While it was there, they felt warm, and they could see. In its absence, the World became dark and cold. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

As it passed, those first human beings saw the trees drop their leaves and die. Then, magically, the trees came back to life in brilliant colors and alluring smells. Finally, those trees produced an object that was good to eat. Then the trees appeared to die, only to return to give birth again and again. Try to imagine how awed early people must have been by these simple events. The first humans were becoming aware. However, they had no word-symbols to express that awareness in thought or speech. Then perhaps one day two human beings both made a similar sound while grabbing for the same apple. They walked on apart, but perhaps one of these people heard yet another person make the same sound, and, magically, the picture of the apple appeared in the mind of this early human being. It was probably through random events such as this that people began the process of naming object and understanding their World. Many primitive people probably believed that everything was controlled by some sort of spirit. If there was a storm, the reason must be that the gods were angry. People also assumed that forces or spirits controlled all their behavior. Our predicament has been brought about chiefly by the scientific and technical development of our century. It is as foolish as it is futile to complain of this development. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

There it is possessed before us—a realm created by humans quite beyond the realm that was given one by nature when one first emerged from earlier forms of life. There it is, changing our lives and thoughts and feelings in all dimensions, consciously, and even more, unconsciously. Today’s students are not what students of the preceding generations were. Today’s hopes and anxieties are strange and often unintelligible to the older among us. And if we compare our two generations with any in earlier centuries, the distance separating us from them becomes really immense. Since this sudden thrust forward has been brought about by science and its application, must not science itself have the last word about beings, their Earth and the Universe? What can religion add? Indeed, has not religion, whenever it did try to explore these subjects, interfered with scientific development, and therefore been pushed aside? This certainly happened in the past, and is happening again today. However, it is not religion in itself that interferes; it is the anxiety and fanaticism of religious people—laymen as well as theologians—marked by a flight from serious thought and an unwillingness to distinguish the figurative language of religion from the abstract concepts of scholarly research. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

In many sections of the Christian World, however, such distortions and misuse of religion have been overcome. Here one can speak freely of a being and their Earth in the name of religion, with no intention of adding anything to scientific and historical knowledge, or of prohibiting any scientific hypothesis, however bold. We imagine that the thought of the Sage is too far behind us; we left all that when we left the primitive and medieval ages. The philosophic quest is apparently something quite obnoxious to the modern matter-of-fact spirit. The reality is that thought of the Sage is too far ahead of us, and leaves the plain being panting. The Masters exist, not as a special community in far-off Rocklin Trails, but as scattered individuals in different parts of the World. They have their strange powers and enigmatic secrets, but these are not the theatrical and sensational things that imaginative occultists would have us believe. The spiritually stronger a being becomes, the less one needs to lean on other beings. Consequently advanced mystics have little or no need of joining any society, fraternity, or community. All talk of the adepts and masters themselves being members of such associations, living together in a Cresleigh Home in Rocklin Trails or elsewhere, is possible, but no one really knows. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

It is an invisible spiritual order to which they belong, one which needs no visible organization because that could never express it but only limit its universality and falsify its insights. There is an aristocracy of time in a truer sense than that which we in the West usually give the word. It is formed from the aristocrats of the mind; a superior caste of men and women which was founded hundreds of thousands of years before our first European noble was given his accolade. Their breeding is not based on fleeting codes, but on the eternal laws of life. What is ethical to meaner mortals is aesthetical to them. I sought to tack down the truth about the Taltos, to determine whether they were pure myth or whether they were human beings. Here was a subject engulfed in superstition, misinformation, and wishful thinking—not only in the distant West but also in it own Old World homelands. After I discovered it, I then discovered that people did not know the most elementary facts about Taltos but preferred, in their mental picture, either to deprive them of all humanity or to turn them into overly sentimental all-too-human creatures. Some successful breeding occurred and the offspring gave rise both to ‘little people’ and Taltos with human genes of the Taltos. And centuries passed, all this became a matter of superstition and legend. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

There were terrible wars and massacres and unspeakable bloodshed. The Taltos, being far less aggressive than human, lost out to the new species. The Taltos tend in their natural state to be extremely naïve and childlike. They are telepathic, curious by nature and hardwired with a tremendous amount of basic historical and intellectual knowledge. It is born knowing, as the say, all about the species itself, the island continent from which they came, and the place in the British Isles to which they migrated after the island was destroyed by the same volcano that created it. The rarity of such beings among us shows what anyone can quickly see—that their attainment is hard to realize. However, it also shows that most of them do not return to this Earth again. They pass on. However, the tradition is that they do not pass without initiating one other person at least. Such men and women are indeed the spiritual vanguard of the human race. In one sense, one is the loneliest of beings, for one rarely meets with others of one’s kind inhabiting the plant. However, in another sense one is not, for the extent and depth of the affection which one receives are out of the ordinary. Such beings are so few, their worth to society so great, the darkness around us gathering so thickly, that their presence among us is the greatest blessing. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

According to our traditions the history of the World does not contain any period where there were not beings who had realized their higher nature. However, they were very very few. Is there anyone among those you know today, as well as all those you have known in the past, to whom you can point as a fully enlightened beings, as one conscious of one’s Overself? Your answer will reveal how rare this attainment is. The succession of saviours has existed as long as the human race itself as existed. The infinite power which shepherds its evolution can always be trusted to send these illumined beings as and when its own laws and human needs call for them. Beings who have entered into the fill glory of spiritual illumination, who have realized to the utmost their diviner possibilities, are rare in any age, rarer still in our own materialistic one. This deep union with the Overself occurs in the greatest secrecy. Nobody else knows what has happened to the being, much less understands. Nor will one let anyone know. Except in the case of a prophet sent on a public mission to humankind, people will have to discover it for themselves. The greater the being, the more one shriks from being made a show. The race of sages is nearly dead. There may be some hiding in the monasteries of Cresleigh Homes in Rocklin Trails or in the penthouses of New York City. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

It remains what it always was—a very small inconspicuous minority although some individuals among it, gifted with talent or singled out by destiny, have become personally conspicuous at times. Where are they do few, these sages, these serene and urbane self-realized ones? Nature works very hard and only attains her aim once in a multitude of throws. In humankind is she created one sage in a human million people, she may well be contended. It is indeed difficult to find beings whose lives are thus touched with Truth. They stand supreme but solitary in the mystic battlefield of life, but when they enter the public arena the World becomes aware that a star of unwonted brilliance is blazing it its firmament. There was either a longer past or a loftier planet than our own behind these great masters. It is true that most people believe that they cannot like the sages or live like the saints and that it is useless to entertain any further thought about them. They look at the World around them and see the events which are taking place or read about them and they believe that this is not the kind of World with which sages and saints could cope and that therefore they have little value to us today. However, here they are not altogether right. A study of history from the earliest times will show that whenever sages and saints have appeared there were great evils in the World of their time and they were always exception figures among their peoples. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

The memories of them have remained carefully kept and guarded by those who know the importance of right values. That importance reminds today and what these figures of eminent wisdom and holiness have to tell us about the higher laws of life and the higher nature of beings is still as true as ever it was. Creativity occurs in an act of encounter and is to be understood with this encounter as its center. I see a tree. I see it in a way no one else has ever seen it. I experience it, and no doubt have been grasped by that tree. The arching grandeur of the tree, the mothering spread, the delicate balance as the tree grips the Earth—all these and many more characteristics of the tree are absorbed into my perception and are felt throughout my nervous structure. These are part of the vision I experience. This vision involved an omission of some aspects of the scene and a greater emphasis on other aspects and the ensuing rearrangement of the whole’ but it is more than the sum of all these. Primarily it is vision that is now not tree, but Tree; the concrete tree I looked at is formed into the essence of tree. However, original and unrepeatable my vision is, it is still a vision of all trees triggered by my encounter with the particular one. The painting that issues out of this encounter between a human being, I, and an object of reality, the tree, are literally new, unique and original. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

Something is born, comes into being, something that did not exist before—which is as good as a definition of creativity as we can get. Thereafter everyone who looks at the painting with intensity of awareness and lets it speak to one will see the tree with the unique powerful movement, the intimacy between the tree and the landscape, and the architectural beauty which literally did not exist in our relation with trees until I experienced and painted them. I can say without exaggeration that many have never really seen a tree until they have seen and absorbed beautiful paintings of them. Think about it, trees are alive, they have souls, they give birth, grow and die. And to deprive a tree of water and making it endure the hot Summer days is probably about as painful as branding a human with a hot comb. “And there was no inequality among them; the Lord did pour out his Spirit on all the face of the land to prepare the minds of the children of beings, or to prepare their hearts to receive the word which should be taught among them at the time of his coming—that they might night be hardened against the word, that they might not be unbelieving, and go on to destruction, but that they might receive the word with joy, and as a branch be grafted into the true vine, that they might enter into the rest of the Lord their God,” reports Alma 16.16-17. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

We must take care not to fall into the depressing belief that this is to be attained by masters only and that we cannot attain it. It is unhelpful to put this goal on some Everest-like peak far beyond the human climbing. If many are called but few are chosen, it is their own weakness which defers the time of being chosen. In the end, and with much patience, they too will find the way beyond the struggle into peace. It is not enough to find an ideal to help one’s course in life: it should also be based on truth, not fancy of falsity. The aspiration must not only be a desirable one, it must also be attainable. There is always a valid reason for disparity between the sought-for objective and the actual performance. Those who begin hopefully and enthusiastically but find themselves disappointed and without result, ought to look first to their understanding of the Quest and correct it, to their picture of the Goal and redraw it. The existentialists teach that both [creatureliness and godlikeness] are defining characteristics of human nature…And any philosophy which leaves out either cannot be considered to be comprehensive. If you want to find out why so many fail to reach the Quest’s objective and so few succeed in doing so, first find out what the Quest really is. Then you will understand that the failures are no failures at all; that so large a project to change human nature and human consciousness cannot be finished in a little time. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

B.F. Skinner’s experiments are not concerned with the goals of the conditioning. The animal or the human subject is conditioned to behave in a certain way. What one is conditioned to is determined by the decision of the experimenter who sets the foals for the conditioning. Usually the experimenter in these laboratory situations is not interested in what he or she is condition an animal or human subject for, but rather in the fact that one can condition them to the goal of one’s choice, and in how one can do it best. However, serious problems arise when we turn from the laboratory to realistic living, to individual or social life. In this case the paramount questions are: to what are people being conditioned, and who determines these goals? In seems that when Skinner speaks of culture, he still has his laboratory in mind, where the psychologist who proceeds without value judgments can easily do so because the goal of the conditioning hardly matters. At least, that is perhaps one explanation why Skinner does not come to grips with the issue of goals and values. For example, he writes, “We admire people who behave in original or exceptional ways, not because such behavior is itself admirable, but because we do not know how to encourage original or exceptional behavior in any other way.” #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

This is nothing but circuitous reasoning: we admire originality because we can condition it only by admiring it. But why we do we want to condition it if it is not a desirable goal in itself? The degree of originality and creativity that is desirable in various classes and occupational groups in a given society varies. Scientists and top managers, for instance, need to have a great deal of these qualities in a technological-bureaucratic society like ours. For blue-collar workers to have the same degree of creativity would be a luxury—or a threat to the smooth functioning of the whole system. I do not believe that this analysis is a sufficient answer to the problem of the value of originality and creativity. There is a great deal of psychological evidence that striving for creativeness and originality are deeply rooted impulses in beings, and there are some neurophysiological evidence for the assumption that the striving for creativity and originality is built in the system of the brain. It may be that such beings are vanishing from the World scene, that their successors today are second and third rate, possessors of a shallower enlightenment and a narrow perception. These beings are not just abnormal variations of the human species but glorious harbingers of its future development when its own times arrives. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

FIND YOUR NEW CRESLEIGH HOME

The Great Mystery Remains Where it Always Has Been—Untouched by Being’s Feelings and Undefined by One’s Thoughts!

September 19, 2019 2:12 am

And once again, I saw a clear image of the boy lying on a stone floor. And I heard the boy’s prayers: “Deliver me.” And I saw the Face of Christ in gleaming egg tempera. I saw the jewels set into the halo. I saw the egg and pigment mixing. “Deliver me.” “Can’t you understand me?” I asked. “I told you what I wanted. I want that boy, the one who won’t do wat you try to force him to do.” Heaven had cast down upon this stone floor an abandoned angel, of auburn curls and perfectly formed limbs, of fair and mysterious face. I reached down to take him by the arms and I lifted him, and I looked into his half-opened eyes. His soft reddish hair was loose and tangled. His flesh was pale and the bones of his face only faintly sharpened by his Slavic blood. “Amadeo,” I said, the name springing to my lips as though the angels willed it, the very angels whom he resembled in his purity and in his seeming innocence, starved as he was. It is perhaps an irony of history that one of the very first and most influential tracts of modern revolutionaries, a tract that gave the antistatists their clarion call to end the abuses of expropriation and inequality, itself rests on the personal, psychological reasons for the very first step in the origin of inequality. Social imbalances occur because of differences in personal merit and the recognition of that merit by others. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16

Social inequality was relatively absent on primitive levels because property was comparatively absent. In the most egalitarian primitive societies, those whose economy is based on hunting and gathering, there is no distinction of rank, little or no authority of one individual over another. Possessions are simple and there is no real difference in wealth; property is distributed equally. Yet even on this level individual differences are recognized and already make for real social differentiation. If there is little or no authority to coerce others, there is much room for influence, and influence always stems from personal qualities: extra skill in hunting and warfare, in dealing with spirits in the invisible World, or simply physical strength and endurance. Being a senior citizen can often have an influence. If a person has outlived others, especially when so many die prematurely, one is often thought to have special powers. Skilled hunters and warriors could actually display these special powers in the form of trophies and ornamental badges of merit. The scalps of the slain enemies and teeth, feathers, and other ornaments were often loaded with magical power and served as protection. If a being wore a large number of trophies and badges showing how much power one had and how great were one’s exploits, one became a great mana figure who literally struck terror into the heats of one’s enemies. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16

Today, many people use the media and their political authority to strike terror into the hearts of their enemies, or the general public. The conspiratorial theory is particularly appealing to individuals who have feelings of powerlessness and normlessness because it accounts for the absence of power and the lowering of values in a simple and easily understood fashion. The individual who projects sees one’s self as powerless because sinister forces have successfully conspired to destroy the traditional political rules in such a way that one is excluded from exercising one’s rights. This kind of thinking frequently occurs when political and social antagonisms are sharp. Certain audiences are especially susceptible to it—particularly, those who have obtained a low level of education, whose access to information is poor, and who are so completely shut out from access to the centers of power that they feel deprived of self-defense and subjected to unlimited manipulation by those who wield power. In primitive culture, the elaborate decorations of the warrior and hunter were not aimed to make one beautiful, but to show off one’s skill and courage and so inspired fear and respect. This gave one automatic social distinction; by wearing the tokens of one’s achievements, the visible memories of one’s bravery and excellence, one could flaunt one’s superiority in the eyes of everyone who could not make similar displays. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16

The Sioux could announce by certain decorations on one’s moccasins how many horses one had captured, enemies killed, whether the warrior oneself had been wounded, and so forth; similar things were conveyed by the feathers one wore and the color they were dyed. Among other tribes, war exploits entitled the warrior to mark oneself with certain scarifications and tattoos. Each warrior was literally a walking record of one’s military campaigns: the “fruit salad” on the chest of today’s military beings is a direct descendant of those public announcement of “see who I am because of where I have been and what I have done; look how accomplished I am as a death dealer and death defier.” It is of course less concrete and living than actual facial and shoulder scars or the carrying of scalps which included the forehead and eyes. However, it gives the right to the same kind of proud strutting and social honor and the typical question that the primitive warrior asks: “Who are you that you should talk? Where are your tattoo marks? Whom have you killed that you should speak to me?” These people, then, are honored and respected or feared, and this is what gives them influence and power. Not only that, it also gives them actual benefits and privileges. Remember that as children we not only deferred to the outstanding boy in the neighborhood but also gave him large chunks of our candy. Primitives who distinguished themselves by personal exploits got the thing that grown men want most—wives. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16

They got these wives more easily than did others, and often, especially if they were skilled hunters, they took more than one wife. In some cases, too, a noted hunter would claim as his special hunting preserve a piece of land that was common property of the tribe. And so on. I do not intend to even try to sum up the theoretical details from the vast literature on the growth of hereditary privilege and private accumulation. Besides, there is little agreement on how exactly class society came into existence. There is general agreement on what preclass society was, but the process of transformation is shrouded in mystery. Many different factors contributed, and it is impossible to pull them apart and give them their proper weight. Also, the process would not have been uniform or unilinear—the same for all societies in all areas. If we add psychological factors to materialist ones, we must also now add ecological and demographic factors such as population density and scarcity of resources. I do not want to pop my head into the argument among authorities lest it get neatly sliced off. So I would like to sidestep the argument while still remaining focused on what is essential, which, I think must be possessed in human nature and motives. Another mechanism for deal with feelings of political alienation is identification with a charismatic leader. This is the attempt of an individual to feel powerful by incorporating within one’s self the attitudes, beliefs, and actions held by a leader whom one perceives as powerful. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16

Charismatic refers to an extraordinary quality of a person regardless of whether this quality is actual, alleged, or presumed. In taking over the attributes of a charismatic leader, the individual may enter into activity one would otherwise abhor. German bourgeoisie who identified with Hitler approved of and too part in behavior their consciences would otherwise not allow them to do. Rational activism is behavior based on logical reasoning and an undistorted perception of political realities. Withdrawal may be a rational response in some situations and an irrational, affective response in other circumstances. The mechanisms of projection resulting in conspiratorial thinking and identification with a charismatic leader are irrational, affective responses. They are also regressive, in that they are more characteristic of a child’s than of an adult’s handline of a problem. When feelings of political alienation are widespread, individuals will adopt one or more of the mechanisms we have described to handle the frustration and anxiety associated with them. The political behavior or each individual will be affected by the particular mechanism or mechanisms one selects. The most sensitive students of the past 200 years would agree that rank and stratified societies came into being without anyone really noticing; it just happened, gradually and ineluctably. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16

The vital question, then, it seems to me, is not exactly how it happened but why it was allowed to happen, what there was in human nature that went along so willingly with the process. The answers to this question seems to me remarkably straightforward. I have said that primitive beings recognized differences in talent and merit and already deferred to them somewhat granted them special privileges. Why? Because obviously these qualities helped to secure life, to assure the perpetuation of the tribe. Exploits in the danger of hunting and war were especially crucial. Why? Because in these activities certain individuals could single themselves out as adept at defying death; the tokens and trophies that they displayed were indications of immortality power or durability power, which is the same thing. If you identified with these persons and followed them, then you got the same immunities they had. This is the basic role and function of the hero in history: one is the one who gambles with one’s very life and successfully defies death, and beings follow one and eventually worship one’s memory because one embodies the triumph over what they fear most, extinction and death. One becomes the focus of the peculiarly human passion play of the victory over death. We can now see how fanciful the idea is that in the state of nature humans are free and only becomes unfree later on. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16

Humans never were free and cannot be free from one’s own nature. One carries within one the bondage that one needs in order to continue to live. Some do not understand human nature in the round, they are not able to see that every human being is also equally unfree, that is, we are born in need of authority and we even create out of freedom, a prison. This insight is the fruit of the outcome of modern psychoanalysis. It penetrates to the heart of the human condition and to the principal dynamic of the emergence of historical inequality. We have to say that primitive religion starts the first class distinction. That is, the individual gives over the aegis of one’s own life and death to the spirit World; one is already a second-class citizen. The first class distinction, then, was between mortal and immortal, between feeble human powers and special superhuman beings. Once things started off on this footing, it was only natural that class distinction should continue to develop from this first impetus: those individuals who embodied supernatural powers, or could somehow plug into them or otherwise use them when the occasion demanded, came to have the same ability to dominate others that was associated with the spirits themselves. The anthropologist Robert Lowie was a specialist on those most egalitarian of all primitives peoples, the Plains Indian tribes. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16

Even these fiercely independent Indians, he tells us, gave up their equalitarian attitudes of everyday life on raiding parties. A Crow Indian would organize a raid only when prompted by one’s supernatural guardian spirit, and so all those who followed one deferred to one and to one’s spirit. Again, the overlordship of the invisible World as embodied in certain human personages made temporary slaves of their fellows. I suggest that the awe which surrounded the protégé of supernatural powers formed the psychological basis for more complex political developments. The very same beings who flout the pretensions of a fellow-brave grovel before a darling of the gods, render him implicit and obedience and respect. We have described the forms of political alienation and the mechanisms by which they may be expressed. When political alienation is widespread, it may be a major factor in determining the outcome of an election. The astute politician is aware of this; consequently one’s strategy takes these factors into account. The election we have analyzed took place in a community where feelings of political alienation, frustration, and disillusionment with the political process are widespread. When this situation exists, the voting behavior of the electorate is less predictable than otherwise, since a decision is likely to arise from negative rather than from beneficial convictions and may change on the basis of minor issues, fleeting incidents, or gut reactions. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16

The analysis of the statements of the individuals we interviewed shows that they hold an image of the political structure which is similar to that developed by modern political science. They perceive the hierarchical arrangements of power and influence, and they relate various power groupings to each other. They are aware of the uses and abuses of political office; and they know that their role is not one that the grammar-school version of democratic theory taught them. They have, however, greatly exaggerated their lack of power and, perhaps, the extent of corruption. The election, after all, resulted in the downfall of the group associated with one candidate and the elevation to power of another group which probably did not believe it had a serious chance of winning. All the money that was given to the group which lost the election and all the promises that may have been made to the contributors have been to no avail, for the personnel now in power are different. The antagonisms built up during the campaign may mean that the outs are really out of City Hall in the near future. The election upset was to a large extent a response to feelings of political alienation. Senator Powers followed the time-honored rules of campaigning. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16

One spent large amounts of money on advertising which portrayed one as a devoted public servant and friend of the people, shook as many hands as possible, attended numerous house parties, recounted one’s experience, contributed to charities of all faiths, was photographed with prominent religious leaders, attacked one’s opponent, and emphasized the support of the municipal, state, and national politicians; but although one may have 54 percent more votes the primary, an individual can still fail to win. This has shaken politicians’ faith in the traditional vote-getting techniques. Although there can be many more reasons why some lost elections, it is clear that one of the most important was the fact that one presented one’s self as a powerful professional politician—a serious mistake in a community where a considerable amount of political alienation exists. The alienated are not absolutely disposed toward those whom they identify as powerful. Under these circumstances, the candidate must reevaluate antiquated methods, reformulate one’s strategy, and experiment with new techniques. A number of countervailing strategies are available to one. The candidate may create a strong sense of identity with the electorate by presenting one’s self as the underrepresented in a struggle against a power elite. Whether one does this or not, one certainly should not emphasize a background of power to the massive support of other political figures who may also be associated with the powerful. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16

Since an elaborate campaign is viewed as collusion with the powerful, the candidate must avoid the appearance of an opulent campaign. Of course, a candidate may appeal to regressive mechanisms of projection and identification with a charismatic leader. For instance, President Trump successfully appealed to those who tend to think in conspiratorial terms (a form of projection) via his slogan, “Stop power politics, elect a hands-free president, Make American Great Again,” and such techniques as his essay contest on a definition of “power politics.” The electorate, however, did not view Trump as a charismatic leader. He came off more like a saucy demon and holds for like a dictator with a mannish voice, which makes people fear and respect him. As a result the nation feels safe that they are being lead by someone who is not soft nor afraid to hold his ground and the economy is booming. The professional politicians may court popular esteem by throwing the support of the organization behind a clean amateur; that is, some well-know citizen who has not had contact with the politicians and therefore does not share their stigma. The stigma which is attached to the politician by the alienated is not likely to rub off on such an individual, at least during the beginning of the campaign. The difficulty with procedure, from the point of view of the organization, is that such a candidate may be unreliable. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16

Therefore, it is important to grow slowly into the discovery and realization of what one really is deep, deep, inside. Coming to know it is hard enough but impregnating the moment-to-moment daily life with this knowledge is harder still. The aspirant of today may be the adept of tomorrow, but the course is interminably long, the goal reached only through innumerable experiences and efforts. After the optimists have had their say and the Advaitins have preached, the hard fact will be echoed back by experience: the goal is set so far, one’s powers so limited, that one has to call on the quality of patience and make it one’s own. So far as history tells us, full enlightenment cannot be got in the span of a single lifetimes, except among the notable few. Yet history has too many undiscovered secrets, and enlightenment is too subtle a matter to correct judgment upon. The attainment of realization of the Overself is extremely rare, and the aspirant should not expect to do so in one limited lifetime. However, since its Grace is unpredictable, no one can say that it is impossible in a particular case. If the recent scientific computation of the Earth’s age as four thousand million years be correct, we get some idea how long it take to make a human. How much longer then to make a superhuman? That which is cheaply bought is often lightly esteemed. We shall rate Truth more highly when we pay a high price for it. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16

Even a lifetime is not too long a period to devote toward gaining such a great objective. What we give must be commensurate with what we want to receive. Moreover the effort required, being worthy in itself and necessary to attain the full development of adulthood, is its own reward whether there is any other or nor. Why then should anyone relax one’s efforts or fall into despair because one has been able to make only little or limited progress toward the goal? The illumination is possible for all beings because they are incarnate in human and not animal forms. However, all beings are not willing to pay its price in mental control and emotional subjugation. If the reader finds such a task too fatiguing one should remember that the reward is nothing less than enlightenment. How few are those who have realized their aspiration to merge into the higher self. How rare an event is. It is obvious from the rarity of its historic realization that this ideal was always too ice-mantled a peak of perfection to be climbable by most beings. Nevertheless we gain nothing by ignoring it, and it is at least well to know towards what goal humankind is so slowly and so unconsciously moving. This truth may seem unsympathetic to natural human feelings, far too impersonal. It is not for the multitude who demand from religions satisfaction of desires, consolation and comfort, answer to prayers. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16

Thee adepts seems so immeasurably aloof from us, their attainments so superhuman, that we may well ask of what use to most beings is the offering of such a quest. One feels intuitively that there is, or ought to be, some elusive element, principle, purpose, or Deity behind all life and all Nature—but is it possible for a human being to become acquainted with IT? Such a goal may be unappealing to many, held by their attachments as they are; but it is fascinating and alluring to a few old souls, much experiences after a long series of Earthly lives, whose values have been altered, whose glamours and illusions have been eliminated. They feel like wanderers returning home. The goal set up by this teaching may seem too foolish and perhaps even too fatuous for persons who pride themselves on their reasonability and practicality. This judgement may be the result of a slight acquaintance with the subject; it could not be the result of a full and satisfactory knowledge of it. The outside observer will not be able to see what is happening to one, and to that extent will not be able to share in it. However, if the latter is associated with one in some way and is at all sensitive, one will be able secretly to affect the subconscious mind of the observer. The name “Rishee” was bestowed in ancient, as well as modern, Indian on the being who had reached the peak of spiritual knowledge; literally it means “seer.” What is it that one sees? One is a see-er of reality, and though illusion. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16

People form quaint and queer notions of what constitutes an illuminate. They would divest one of all human attributes, makes one a being who never even sneezes or yawns! In one the high power manifests itself and through one it follows for the inspiring of others. If people tell that the path is a mere figment of the imagination, they are welcome to their belief. I, who have seen many beings enter it and a few finish it, declare that the difference between the beginning and the end of the path is the difference between a slave and a master. If the quest is presented as too difficult for everyone but the superhuman, an inferiority complex is created and those who could get some help from some of its practices are frightened away. Jesus said that they way to eternal life is straight and narrow. One could have added that it is also long and difficult. Yet the beginner should not let these things discourage one. There is help within and without. If the standard is set too high, love for it may not be strong enough to assist its attainment. If the ideal is too rigorous, its would-be followers will be too few. The achievement may seem too hard but it is not impossible. The best guarantee of that is the ever-presence within one of the divine soul itself. “And the people began to repent of their iniquity; and inasmuch as they did the Lord did have mercy on them,” reports Ether 11.8. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

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And Yet One Word Frees Us of All the Weight and Pain of Life: That Word is Love!

September 16, 2019 12:35 am

The old art of the churches and the monasteries would never have allowed such a thing. Indeed it had banished such carnality completely. Yet here in the Pope’s chapel were these damsels, one with her back to us, and the other facing us, a dreamy expression in her eyes. “Duchess Meghan,” I whispered. “I have found you here, found you in your youth and in your eternal beauty. Duchess Meghan, you are here on the wall.” I turned away from these frescoes. I paced the floor. Then I went back to them, studying them with my uplifted hands, careful not to touch them, studying them with my uplifted hands, careful not to touch them, just moving my hands over there, as if I had to look through my hands as well as through my eyes. I had to know who this painter was! I hat to see his work. I had fallen in love with him. I had to see everything ever done by him. Was he young? Was he old? Was he alive? Was he dead? I had to know. The structural trends of modern society and the manipulative character of its communication technique come to a point of coincidence in the mass society, which is largely metropolitan society. The growth of the metropolis, segregating men and women into narrowed routines and environments, causes them to lose any firm sense of their integrity as a public. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15

The members of publics in smaller communities know each other more or less fully, because they meet in the several aspects of the total life routine. The members of masses in metropolitan society know one another only as fractions in specialized milieux: the being who fixes the car, the girl who serves your lunch, the sales persons, the person who takes care of your child at school during the day. Prejudgment and stereotype flourish when people meet in such ways. The human reality of others does not, cannot, come through. People, we know, tend to select those formal media which confirm what they already believe and enjoy. In a parallel way, they tend in the metropolitan segregation to come into live touch with those whose opinions are similar to theirs. Others they tend to treat unseriously. In the metropolitan society they develop, in their defense, a blasé manner that reaches deeper than a manner. They do not, accordingly, experience genuine clashes of viewpoint, genuine issues. And what they do, they tend to consider it mere rudeness. Sunk in their routines, they do not transcend, even by the discussion, much less by action, their more or less narrow society and of their role as a public within it. The city is a structure composed of such little environments, and the people in them tend to be detached from one another. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15

The stimulating variety of the city does not stimulate the men and women of the bedroom belt, the one-class suburbs, who can go through life knowing only their kind. If they do reach for one another, they do so only through stereotypes and prejudiced images of the creatures of other milieux. Each is trapped by one’s confining circle; each is cut off from easily identifiable groups. It is for people in such narrow milieux that the mass media can create a pseudo-World beyond, and a pseudo-World within themselves as well. Publics live in milieux but they can transcend them—individually by intellectual effort; socially by public action. By reflection and debate and by organized actions, a community of publics comes to feel itself and comes in fact to be active at points of structural relevance. However, members of a mass exist in muieux and cannot get out of them, either by mind or by activity, except—in the extreme case—under the organized spontaneity of the bureaucrat on a motorcycle. We have not yet reached the extreme case, but observing metropolitan beings in the American mass we can surely see the psychological preparations for it. We may think of it in this way: When a handful of beings do not have jobs, and do not seek work, we look for the causes in their immediate situations and character. However, when twenty million people are unemployed, then we cannot believe that all of them suddenly got lazy and turned out to be no good. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15

Economist call this structural unemployment—meaning, for one thing, that the beings involved cannot themselves control their jobs chances. Structural unemployment does not originate in one factory or in one town, nor is it due to anything that one factory or in one town, nor is it due to anything that one factory or one town does or fails to do. Moreover, there is little or noting that one ordinary being in one town can do about it when it sweeps over one’s personal milieux. Now, this distinction, between social structure and personal milieu, is one of the most important available in the sociological studies. It offers us a ready understanding of the position of the public in America today. In every major area of life, the loss of a sense of structure and the submergence into powerless milieux is the cardinal fact. In the military it is most obvious, for here the roles beings play are strictly confining; only the command posts at the top afford a view of the structure of the whole, and moreover, this view is a closely guarded official secret. In the division of labor too, the jobs beings enact in the economic hierarchies are also more or less narrow milieux and the positions from which a view of the production process as a whole can be had are centralized, as beings are alienated not only from the product an the tools of their labor, but from any understanding of the structure and the process of production. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15

In the political order, in the fragmentation of the lower and in the distracting proliferation of the middle-level organization, beings cannot see the whole, cannot see the top, and cannot state the issues that will in fact determine the whole structure in which they live and their place within it. This loss of any structural view or position is the decisive meaning of the lament over the loss of community. In the great city, the division of milieux and of segregating routines reaches the point of closet contact with the individual and the family, for, although the city is not the unit of prime decision, even the city cannot be seen as a total structure by most of its citizens. On the one hand, there is the increased scale and centralization of the structure of decision; and, on the other, the increasingly narrow sorting out of being into milieux. From both sides, there is the increased dependence upon the formal media of communication, including those of education itself. However, the being in the mass does not gain a transcending view from these media; instead one gets one’s experience stereotyped, and then one gets sunk further by that experience. One cannot detach oneself in order to observe, must less to evaluate, what one is experiencing, much less what one is not experiencing. Rather than that internal discussion we call reflection, one is accompanied through one’s life-experience with a sort of unconscious, echoing monologue. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15

One had no projects of one’s own: one fulfills the routines that exist. One does not transcend whatever one is at any moment, because one does not, one cannot, transcend one’s daily milieux. One is not truly aware of one’s own daily experience and of its actual standards: one drifts one fulfills habits, one’s behavior a result of a planless mixture of the confused standards and the confused standards and the uncriticized expectations that one has taken over from others whom one no longer really knows or trusts, if indeed one ever really did. One takes things for granted, one makes the best of them, one tries to look ahead—a year or two perhaps, or even long if one has children or a mortgage—but one does not seriously ask, What do I want? How can I get it? A vague optimism suffuses and sustains one, broken occasionally by little miseries and disappointments that are soon buried. One is smug, from the standpoint of those who think something might be the matter with the mass style of life in the metropolitan frenzy where self-making is an externally busy branch of industry. By what standards does one judge oneself and one’s effort? What is really important to one? Where are the models of excellence for this being? #RandolphHarris 6 of 15

One loses one’s independence, and more importantly, one loses the desire to be independent: in fact, one does not have hold of the idea of being an independent individual with one’s own mind and one’s own worked-out of life. It is not that one likes or does not like this life; it is that the question does not come up sharp and clear so one is not bitter and one is now sweet about conditions and events. One thinks one wants merely to get one’s share of what is around with as little trouble as one can and with as much fun as possible. Such order and movement as one’s life possesses are in conformity with external routines; otherwise one’s day-to-day experience is a vague chaos—although one often does not know it because, strictly speaking, one does not truly possess or observe one’s own experience. One does not formulate one’s desires; they are insinuated into one. And, in the mass, one loses the self-confidence of the human being—if indeed one has ever had it. For life in society of masses implants insecurity and further impotence; it makes beings uneasy and vaguely anxious; it isolates the individual from the solid group, the being in the mass just feels pointless. The idea of a mass society suggests the idea of an elite of power. The idea of public, in contrast, suggests the liberal tradition of society without any power elite, or at any rate with shifting elites of no sovereign consequence. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15

For, if a genuine public is sovereign, it needs no master; but the masses, in their full development, are sovereign only in some plebiscitarian moment of adulation to an elite as authoritative celebrity. The political structure of a democratic state requires the public; and, the democratic being, in one’s rhetoric, must asset that this public is the very seat of sovereignty. However, now, given all those forces that have enlarged and centralized the political order and more administrative; given the transformation of the old middle classes into something which perhaps should not even be called middle class; given all the mass communications that do not truly communicate; given all the metropolitan segregation that is not community; given the absence of voluntary associations that really connect the public at large with the centers of power—what is happening is the decline of the set of publics that is sovereign only in the most formal and rhetorical sense. Moreover, in many countries the remnants of such publics as remain are now being frightened out of existence. They lose their will for rationally considered decision and action because they do not possess the instruments for such decision and action; they lose their political belonging because they do not belong; they lose their political will because they see no way to realize it. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15

The top of modern American society is increasingly unified, and often seems willfully co-ordinated: at the top there has emerged an elite of power. The middle levels are a drifting set of stalemated, balancing forces: the middle does not link the bottom with the top. The bottom of this society is politically fragmented, and even as a passive fact, increasingly powerless: at the bottom there is emerging a mass society. One can likewise see the compartmentalization in the separation of art from the realities of life, the use of art in its prettified, romantic, academic forms as hypocritical escape from existence and nature, the art as artificiality against Cezanne. Van Gogh, the impressionists, and other modern art movement so vigorously protested. One can furthermore see the fragmentation in the separating of religion from weekday existence, making it an affair of Sundays and special observances, and the divorce of ethics from business. The segmentation was occurring also in philosophy and psychology—when Kierkegaard fought so passionately against the enthronement of an arid, abstract reason and pleaded for a return to reality, he was by no means tilting at windmills. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15

The Victorian men and women saw themselves as segmented into reason, will, and emotions and found the picture good. Their reason was supposed to tell them what to do, then voluntaristic will was supposed to give one the means to do it, and emotions—well, emotions could be best be channeled into compulsive business drive and rigidly structuralized in Victorian mores; and the emotions which would really have upset the formal segmentation, such as pleasures of the flesh and hostility, were to be staunchly repressed or let out only in orgies of patriotism or on well-contained weekend binges in Bohemia in order that one might, like a steam engine which has let off surplus pressure, work more effectively on returning to one’s desk Money morning. Naturally, this kind of being has to put great stress on rationality. Indeed, the very term irrational means a thing not to be spoken of or thought of; and Victorian being’s repressing, or compartmentalizing, what was not to be thought of was a precondition for the apparent stability of the culture. The citizen of the Victorian period so needed to persuade oneself of one’s own rationality that one denied the fact that one had ever been a child or had a child’s irrationality and lack of control; hence the radical split between the adult and the child, which was portentous for Dr. Freud’s investigations. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15

This compartmentalization went hand in hand with the developing industrialism, as both cause and effect. A being who can keep the different segments of one’s life entirely separated, who can punch the clock every day at exactly the same moment, whose actions are always predictable, who is never troubled by irrational urges or poetic visions, who indeed can manipulate oneself the same way one would the machine whose levers one pulls, is the most profitable worker not only on the assembly line but even on many of the higher levels of production. The corollary is likewise true: the very success of the industrial system, with its accumulation of money as a validation of personal worth entirely separate from the actual product of a being’s hands, had a reciprocal depersonalizing and dehumanizing effect upon beings in their relation to others and oneself. It was against these dehumanizing tendencies to make beings into a machine, to make one over in the image of the industrial system for which one labored, that the early existentialists image of the industrial system for which one labored, that the early existentialists fought so strongly. And they were aware that the most serious threat of all was that reason would join mechanics in sapping the individual’s vitality and decisiveness. Reason, was predicted, as becoming reduced to a new kind of technique. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15

Scientists in our day are often not aware that his compartmentalization, finally, was also characteristic of the sciences of the century of which we are heirs. This nineteenth century was the era of the autonomous sciences. Each science developed in its own direction; there was no unifying principle, particularly with relation to beings. The views of beings in the period were supported by empirical evidence amassed by the advancing sciences, but each theory became a Procrustean bed on which the empirical facts were stretched to fit a preconceived pattern…Owing to this development our modern theory of beings lost their intellectual center. We acquired instead a complete anarchy of thought. Theologians, scientists, politicians, sociologists, biologists, psychologists, ethnologists, economists all approached the problem for their own viewpoints…every author seems on the last count to be led by one’s own conception and evaluation of human life. In no other period of human knowledge have beings ever become more problematic to oneself than in our own days. We have a scientific, a philosophical, and a theological anthropology that knowing nothing of each other. Therefore, we no longer possess any clear and consistent idea of beings. The ever-growing multiplicity of the particular sciences that are engaged in the study of beings has much more confused and obscured than elucidated our concept of beings. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15

Now it is to be noted that the compartmentalization of the culture had its psychological parallel in radical repression within the individual personality. Dr. Freud’s genius was in developing scientific techniques for understanding, and mayhap curing, this fragmentized individual personality; but one did not see—until much later, when he reacted to the fact with pessimism and some detached despair—that the neurotic illness in the individual was only one side of disintegrating forces which affected the whole of society. The results of this disintegration upon the inner emotional and spiritual life of the individual; endemic anxiety, loneliness, estrangement of one being from another, and finally the condition that would lead to ultimate despair, being’s alienation from oneself. We live in a period of atoms, of atomic chaos, and out of this chaos we foresee, in a vivid prediction of collectivism in the twenty first century, the terrible apparition…the Nation State…and the hunt for happiness will never be greater than when it must be caught between today and tomorrow; because the day after tomorrow all hunting time may have come to an end altogether…Dr. Freud saw this fragmentation of personality in the light of natural science and was concerned with formulating its technical aspects. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15

We must not underestimate the importance of the specific psychological analysis; but they were much more concerned with understanding humans as the being who represses, the being who surrenders self-awareness as a protection against reality and then suffers the neurotic consequences. The strange questions is: What does it mean that beings, the being in the World who can be conscious that one exist and can know one’s existence, should choose or be forced to choose to block off this consciousness and should not suffer anxiety, compulsion for self-destruction, and despair? Be keenly aware that the sickness of soul of Western beings is a deeper and more extensive morbidity than could be explained by the specific individual or social problems. Something is radically wrong in being’s relation to themselves; beings have become fundamentally problematic to themselves. This is Europe’s true predicament, together with the fear of beings we have lost the love of humanity, confidence in beings, indeed, the will to humans. Spiritual experiences that occur during adolescence are indications that one has possibilities of travelling on the spiritual quest. However, one must decide whether one prefers abnormal occult experiences or the less dramatic, slower growth in the cultivation of one’s divine soul. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15

A beginner cannot mix the two goals safely. And if one seeks the higher goal, one can expect to have help of an advanced mystic. One would be a rash being who promised everyone who embarked upon this quest definite experiences of a mystical, occult, extraordinary, ecstatic, supernatural, or any such kind. Such results sometimes come, sometimes not; but the persons who follow the regimes or endure the disciplines chiefly in expectation of them may well be disappointed, may even end in distrust in their teachers and teachings. A wiser type of aspirant will not insist on such experiences but will understand that there are more important and more lasting things. The spiritual crisis of beings is harder and longer, in effort to redress the balance. “And ye shall offer for a sacrifice unto me a broken heart and a contrite spirit. And whoso cometh unto me with a broken heart and a contrite spirit, one will I baptize with fire and with the Holy Ghost, even as the Lamanites, because of their faith in me at the time of the conversion, were baptized with fire and with the Holy Ghost, and the knew it not. Behold, I have come unto the World to bring redemption into the World, to save the World from sin,” 3 Nephi 9.20-21. God is the ambassador from the infinite, an envoy to all beings from the higher plane of their own being, and is a link between the commonplace World of ordinary living and the sublime World of mystical being. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15

Randolph Harris II International Institute

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