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Come to Me and You Will Find Rest in Your Souls–I am the Alpha and the Omega, the Beginning and the End!
We often worry about what we will be tomorrow, but do not take into account that we are somebody today. Life should be a place of learning suffused with excitement, engagement, passion, challenge, creativity, and joy. When we are in the minority, that is when the test of courage comes; when we are in the majority is when the test of acceptance comes. It is our destiny and the destiny of everything in the World that we must come to an end. Very end that we experience in nature and humankind speaks to us with a loud voice: you also will come to an end! It may reveal itself in the farewell to a place where we have lived for a long time, the separation from the fellowship of intimate associates, the death of someone near to us. Or it may become apparent to us in the failure of a work that gave meaning to us, the end of a whole period of life, the approach of old age, or even in the melancholy side of nature visible in autumn. All this tells us: you will also come to an end. Whenever we are shaken by this voice reminding us of our end, we ask anxiously—what does it mean that we have a beginning and an end, that we come from the darkness of the not yet, and rush ahead towards the darkness of the no more? When Augustine asked this question, he began his attempt to answer it with a prayer. And it is right to do so, because praying means elevating oneself to the eternal. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
In fact, there is no other way of judging time than to see it in the light of the eternal. In order to judge something, one must be partly within it, partly out of it. If we were totally within time, we would not be able to elevate ourselves in prayer, meditation and thought, to the eternal. We would be children of time like all other creatures and could not ask the question of the meaning of time. However, as human beings we are aware of the eternal to which we belong and from which we are estranged by the bondage of time. We speak of time in three ways or modes—the past, present, and future. Every child is aware of them, but no wise being has ever penetrated their mystery. We become aware of them when we hear a voice telling us: you also will come to an end. It is the future that awakens us to the mystery of time. Time runs from the beginning to the end, but our awareness of times goes in the opposite direction. It starts with the anxious anticipation of the end. In the light of the future we see the past and present. So let us first consider our going into the future and towards the end that is the last point that we can anticipate in out future. The image of the future produces contrasting feelings in beings. The expectation of the future gives one a feeling of joy. We may even learn to recapture the will to laugh and the art of laughing at will. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
It is a great thing to have a future in which one can actualize one’s possibilities, in which one can experience the abundance of life, in which one can create something new—be it new work, a new way of life, or the regeneration of one’s own being. Courageously one goes ahead towards the new, especially in the earlier part of one’s own life. However, this feeling struggles with other ones: the anxiety about what is hidden in the future, the ambiguity of everything it will bring us, the shortness of its duration that decreases with every year of our life and becomes shorter the nearer we come to the unavoidable end. And finally the end itself, with its impenetrable darkness and the threat that one’s whole existence in time will be judged as a failure. Therefore, it may be a good idea to think before one speaks, and read before one thinks. This may give one something to think about that we did not make up ourselves—a wise move at any age, but most especially at seventeen, when one is at the greatest danger of coming to annoying conclusions. We want to be in the pursuit of knowledge, and not knowledge in the pursuit of us. The goal is to fully realize the wealth of sympathy, kindness, and generosity hidden in our souls. The effort of every true education should be to unlock that treasure. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
How do beings, how do you, react to this image of the future with its hope and threat and inescapable end? Probably most of us react by looking at the immediate future, anticipating it, working for it, hoping for it, being anxious about it, while cutting off from our awareness the future which is farther away, and above all, by cutting off from our consciousness the end, the last moment of our future. Perhaps we could not live without doing so most of our time. However, perhaps we will not be able to die if we always do so. And if one is not able to die, is one really about to live? How do we react if we become aware of the inescapable end contained in our future? Are we able to bear it, to take its anxiety into a courage that faces ultimate darkness? Or are we thrown into utter hopelessness? Do we hope against hope, or do we repress our awareness of the end because we cannot stand it? Repressing the consciousness of our end expresses itself in several ways. Many try to do so by putting the expectation of a long life between now and the end. For them it is decisive that the end be delayed. Even old people who are near the end do this, for they cannot endure the fact that the end will not be delayed much longer. Many people realize this deception and hope for a continuation of this life after death. They expect an endless future in which they may achieve or possess what has been denied them in this life. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
This attitude that we will achieve our hearts desires in the after life is a prevalent attitude about the future, and also a very simple one. It denies that there is an end. It refuses to accept that we are creatures, that we come from the eternal ground of time and return to the eternal ground of time and have received a limited span of time as our time. It replaces eternity by endless future. However, endless future is without a final aim; it repeats itself and could well be described as an image of hell. This is not the Christian way of dealing with the end. The Christian message says the eternal stands above past and future. “I am the Alpha and the Omega, the beginning and the end.” The Christian message acknowledges that time runs towards an end, and that we move towards the end of that time which is our time. Many people—but not the Bible—speak loosely of the “hereafter” or the “life after death.” Even in our liturgies eternity is translated by “World without end.” However, the World, by its very nature, is that which comes to an end. If we want to speak in truth without foolish, wishful thinking, we should speak about the eternal that is neither timelessness nor endless time. The mystery of the future is answered in the eternal of which we may speak in images taken from time. However, if we forget that the images are images, we fall into absurdities and self-deceptions. There is no time after time, but there is eternity above time. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
Time is like a jigsaw puzzle. Each edge piece of a puzzle interlocks with two others to form the puzzle’s framework and give structure and support to the puzzle as a whole. Each piece has a unique design and cut that ensures just the right place to fit within the puzzle. Each morning, people from the edge pieces that interlock to create a safe environment and give support to one another and the whole. Each morning, they provide just the right place for every individual to fit safely and securely. The community members are strength and stability, and like the edge pieces, they do not stand alone in this responsibility. There are always others to support and assist, ensuring that every person has a place. The spirits temper the movements of bodily parts. Some infectious diseases are chiefly in the spirits, and not so much in the humours. We have complex and contradictory feelings toward the freedom and independence and self-determination of the individuals and countries: we desire these and are proud of the past support we have given to such tendencies, and yet we are often frightened by what they may mean. We tend to value and respect the dignity and worth of each individual, yet when we are frightened, we move away from this direction. Suppose we presented ourselves in some such fashion, openly and transparently, in our foreign relations. We would be attempting to be the nation which we truly are, in all our complexity and even contradictoriness. What would be the result? #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
If we, as a country, were more open and transparent in our foreign relations, it seems the results would be similar to the experiences of a client when one is more truly that which he or she is. Let us look at some of the probable outcomes. We would be much more comfortable, because we would have nothing to hide. We could focus on the problem at hand, rather than spending our energies to prove that we are moral or consistent. We could use all of our creative imagination in solving the problem, rather than in defending ourselves. We could openly advance both our selfish interests, and our sympathetic concern for others, and let these conflicting desires find the balance which is acceptable to us as a people. We could freely change and grow in our leadership position, because we would not be bound by rigid concepts of what we have been, must, ought to be. We would find that we were much less feared, because others would be less inclined to suspect what lies behind the façade. We would, by our own openness, tend to bring forth openness and realism on the part of others. We would tend to work out the solutions of World problems on the basis of the real issues involved, rather than in terms of the facades being worn by the negotiating parties. In short what I am suggesting by this fantasied example is that nations and organizations might discover, as have individuals, that it is a richly rewarding experience to be what one deeply is. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
I am suggesting that this view contains the seeds of a philosophical approach to all of life, that it is more than a trend observed in the experience of clients. Feeling rules are what guide emotion work by establishing the sense of entitlement or obligation that governs emotional exchanges. This emotion system works privately, often free of observation. It is a vital aspect of deep private bonds and also affords a way of talking about them. It is a way of describing how—as parents and children, wives and husbands, friends and lovers—we intervene in feelings in order to shape them. What are feeling rules? How do we know they exist? How do they bear on deep acting? We may address these questions by focusing on the pinch between “what I do feel” and “what I should feel,” for at this spot we get our best view of emotional convention. Now, when we take a closer look at the whole person, we find that there are six basic aspects in our lives as individual human beings—six things inseparable from every human life. These together and in interplay make up human nature. Thought (images, concepts, judgments, inferences), feeling (sensation, emotion), choice (will, decision, character), body (action, interaction with the physical World), social context (personal and structural relations to others), and soul (the factor that integrates all of the above to form one life. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Simply put, every human being thinks (has a thought life), feels, chooses, interacts with one’s body and its social context, and (more of less) integrates all of the foregoing as parts of one life. These are the essential factors in a human being, and nothing essential to human life falls outside of them. The ideal of the spiritual life in the Christian understanding is one where all of the essential parts of the human self are effectively organized around Go, as they are restored and sustained by him. Spiritual formation in Christ is the process leading to that ideal end, and its result is love of God with all of the hearts, soul, mind, and strength, and of the neighbor as oneself. The human self is then fully integrated under God. The salvation or deliverance of the believer in Christ is essentially holistic or whole-life. David the psalmist, speaking of his own experience but prophetically expressing the understanding of Jesus the Messiah, said, “I bless the LORD who gives me counsel; in the night also my heart instructs me. I keep the LORD always before me; because he is at my right hand, I shall not be moved. Therefore my heart is glad, and my soul rejoices; my body also rests secure,” reports Psalm 16.7-9. Note how many aspects of the self are explicitly involved in this passage: the mind, the will, the feeling, the soul, and the body. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
A major part of understanding spiritual formation in the Christian traditions is to follow closely the way the biblical writings repeatedly and emphatically focus on the various essential dimensions of the human being and their role in life as a whole. We will draw from spiritual understanding the incentive to keep on with our quest and the courage to set higher goals. To learn from God in this total-life immersion is ow we seek first His kingdom and His righteousness. The outcome is that we increasingly are able to do all things, speaking or acting, as I Christ were doing them. As apprentices of Christ we are not learning how to do some special religious activity, but how to live every moment of our live from the reality of God’s kingdom. I am learning how to live my actual life as Jesus would if He were me. No matter what my profession is, I am in full-time Christian service no less than someone who earns his or her living in a specifically religious role. Jesus stands beside me and teaches me in all I do to live in God’s World. He shows me how, in every circumstance, to reside in His word and thus be a genuine apprentice of His—His disciple indeed. This enables me to find the reality of God’s World everywhere I may be, and thereby to escape from enslavement to sin and evil. We become able to do what we know to be good and right, even when it is humanly impossible. Our lives and words become constant testimony of the reality of God. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
When, for example, an architect facing a difficult architectural job, one must know how to integrate it into the kingdom of God as much as someone attempting to win another to Christ or preparing a lesson for a congregation. Until we are clear on this, we will have missed Jesus’ connection between life and God and will automatically exclude most of our everyday lives from the domain of faith and discipleship. Jesus lived most of His life on Earth as a blue-collar worker, someone we might describe today as an independent contractor. In His vocation He practiced everything He later taught about in life in the kingdom. It is important to move away from derogatory language against others, calling them twits, jerks, or idiots, and increasingly mesh with the respect and endearment for persons that naturally flows from God’s way. This in turn transforms all of my dealings with others into tenderness and makes the usual coldness and brutality of human relations, which lays a natural foundation for unspeakable actions, simply unthinkable. Our mind and heart will keep coming back to God’s grace. The grace of God is so inexhaustible and at times overwhelming. “Grow in the grace and knowledge of our Lord and Savior Jesus Christ. To him be glory both now and forever more! Amen,” reports 2 Peter 3.18. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Growing in the grace of God allows one to become acquainted with elements of our experience which have in the past been denied to awareness as too threatening, too damaging to the structure of the self. One finds one’s experiencing these feelings fully, completely, in the relationship, so that for the moment one is one’s fear, or one’s anger, or one’s tenderness, or one’s strength. And as one lives these widely varied feelings, in all their degrees of intensity, one discovers that one has experienced oneself, that one is all these feelings. One finds that one’s behavior changing in constructive fashion in accordance with one’s newly experienced self. One approaches the realization that one no longer needs to fear what experience may hold, but can welcome it freely as a part of one’s changing and developing self. However, it seems to me that the good life is not any fixed state. It is not, in my estimation, a state of virtue, or contentment, or nirvana, or happiness. It is not a condition in which the individual is adjusted, or fulfilled, or actualized. It is not a state of drive-reduction, or tension-reduction, or homeostasis. I believe that all of these terms have been used in ways which imply that if one or several of these states is achieved, then the goal of life have been achieved. Certainly, for many people happiness, or adjustment, are seen as states of being which are synonymous with the good life. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
Social scientists have frequently spoken of the reduction of tension, or the achievement of homeostasis or equilibrium as if these states constituted the goal of the process of living. So it is with a certain amount of surprise and concern that I realize that my experience supports none of these definitions. If I focus on the experience of those individuals who seem to have evidenced the greatest degree of movement during the spiritual and therapeutic relationship, and who, in the years following this relationship, appear to have made and to be making real progress toward the good life, then it seems to me that they are not adequately described at all by any of these terms which refer to fixed states of being. I believe they would consider themselves insulted if they were described as adjusted, and they would regard it as false if they were described as happy or contented or even actualized. As I have known them I would regard it as most inaccurate to say that all their dive tensions have been reduced, or that they are in a state of homeostasis. So I am forced to ask myself whether there is any way in which I can generalize about their situation, any definition which I can give of the good life which would seem to fit the facts as I have observed them. I find this not at all easy, and what follows is stated very tentatively. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
The good life is a process, not a state of being. It is a direction, not a destination. The direction which constitutes the good life is that which is selected by the total organism, when there is psychological freedom to move in any direction. This organismically selected direction seems to have certain discernible general qualities which appear to be the same in a wide variety of unique individuals. The good life, from the point of view of my experience, is the process of movement in a direction which the human organism selects when it is inwardly free to move in any direction, and the general qualities of this selected direction appear to have a certain universality. Many people, however, seem to be morally bankrupt—completely devoid of any decent moral qualities. And it is just about the worst thing you can say about a person. A lot of people are also spiritually bankrupt. Spiritual bankruptcy is a most absolute state. It means we have nothing to give to God. Salvation is a gift from God; it is entirely by grace through faith—not by works. People living the good life are righteous and the process seems to involve an increasing openness to the experience. It is the polar opposite of defensiveness. Defensiveness is an organism’s response to experiences which are perceived or anticipated as threatening, as incongruent with the individual’s existing picture of oneself, or of oneself in relationship to the World. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
These threatening experiences are temporarily rendered harmless by being distorted in awareness, or being denied to awareness. I quite literally cannot see, with accuracy, those experiences, feelings, reactions in myself which are significantly at variance with the picture of myself which I already possess. A large part of the process of therapy is the continuing discovery by the client that one is experiencing feelings and attitudes which heretofore one has not been able to be aware of, which one has not been able to own as being a part of oneself. If a person could be fully open to one’s experience, however, every stimulus—whether originating within the organism or in the environment—would be freely relayed through the nervous system without being distorted by any defensive mechanism. There would be no need of the mechanism of subception whereby the organism is forewarned of any experience threatening to the self. On the contrary, whether the stimulus was the impact of a configuration of form, color, or sound in the environment on the sensory nerves, or a memory trace from the past, or visceral sensation of fear or pleasure or disgust, the person would be living it, would have it completely available to awareness. Thus, one aspect of this process which I am naming the good life appears to be a movement away from the pole of defensiveness toward the pole of openness to experience. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
The individual living the good life is becoming more able to listen to oneself, to experience what is going on within oneself. One is more open to one’s feelings of fear and discouragement and pain. One is also more open to one’s feelings of courage, and tenderness, and awe. One is free to live one’s feelings subjectively, as they exist in one, and also free to be aware of these feelings. One is more able fully to live the experiences of one’s organism rather than shutting them off. Almighty and everlasting God, Who hast made known the Incarnation of Thy Word by the testimony of a glorious star, which when the wise men be held, they adored Thy Majesty with gifts; grant that the star of Thy righteousness may always appear in our hearts, and our treasure consist in giving thanks to Thee; through Jesus Christ our Lord. O God, the Enlightener of all nations, grant Thy people to enjoy perpetual peace; and pour into our hearts that radiant light which Thou didst shed into the minds of the wise men; thought Jesus Christ Our Lord. “Behold, O Lord, thou hast smitten us because of our iniquity, and hast driven us forth, and for these many years we have been in the wilderness; nevertheless, thou hast been merciful unto us. O Lord, look upon me in pity, and turn away thine anger from this thy people, and suffer not that they shall go forth across this raging deep in darkness; but behold these things which I have molten out of rock,” reports Ether 3.3. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
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The Line Between Knowing and Loving is Impossible to Draw–Feelings are More Important than Anything Under the Sun!
“It is easy for us to make beings like you. We do it all the time. There is nothing to it. We can easily replace you. Understand, all the mental and physical equipment we have given you is for a purpose.” At this point, I knew my first real fear. I was afraid they were going to do away with Derek then and there. I could not bear it. The pain in me was so all-consuming that it took all the strength I possessed to stand by and say nothing. However, I did not feel that there was anything that I could do to prevent whatever the Parents would now do to Derek. What deep-seated fears and needs underly Derek’s delusional system? We were long in finding out, for Derek’s preventions effectively concealed the secret of his autistic behavior. In the meantime we dealt with his peripheral problems one by one. During his first year with us Derek’s most trying problem was toilet behavior. This surprised us, for Derek’s personality was not “anal” in the Freudian sense; his original personality damage had antedated the period of his toilet-training. Rigid and early toilet-training, however, had certainly contributed to his anxieties. It was our effort to help Derek with this problem that led to his first recognition of us as human beings. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Going to the toilet, like everything else in Derek’s life, was surrounded y elaborate preventions. We had to accompany him; he had to take off all his clothes; he could only squat, not sit on the toilet seat; he had to touch the wall with one hand, in which he also clutched frantically the vacuum tubes that powered his elimination. He was terrified lest his whole body would be sucked down. To counteract this fear we gave him a metal wastebasket in lieu of the toilet. Eventually, when eliminating into the wastebasket, he no longer needed to take off all his clothes, nor to hold on to the wall. He still needed the tubes and motor which, he believed moved his bowels for him. However, here again the all-important machinery was itself a source of new terrors. In Derek’s World the gadgets had to move their bowels, too. He was terribly concerned that they should, but since they were so much more powerful than men, he was also terrified that if his tubes moved their bowels, their feces would fill all of space and leave him no room to live. He was thus always caught in some fearful contradiction. Our readiness to accept his toilet habits, which obviously entailed some hardship for his counselors, gave Derek the confidence to express his obsession in drawings. Drawing these fantasies was a first step toward letting us in, however distantly, to what concerned him most deeply. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Drawing was the first step in a year-long process of externalizing Derek’s anal preoccupations. As a result he began seeing feces everywhere; the whole World became to hm a mire of excrement. At the same time he began to eliminate freely wherever he happened to be. However, with this release from his infantile imprisonment in compulsive rules, the toilet and the whole process of elimination became less dangerous. Thus far it had been beyond Derek’s comprehension that anybody could possibly move his bowels without mechanical assistance. Now Derek took a further step forward; defecation became the first physiological process he could perform without the help of vacuum tubes. It must not be thought that he was proud of this ability. Taking pride in an achievement presupposes that one accomplishes it of one’s own free will. He still did not feel himself an autonomous person who could do things on his own. To Derek defecation still seemed enslaved to some incomprehensible but utterly binding cosmic law, perhaps the law his parents had imposed on him when he was being toilet trained. It was not simply that his parents had subjected him to rigid, early training. Many children are so trained. However, in most cases the parents have a deep emotional investment in the child’s performance. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
As a result of this deep emotional investment, the child’s response in turn makes training an occasion for interaction between them and for the building of genuine relationships. Derek’s parents had no emotional investment in him. His obedience gave them no satisfaction and won him no affection or approval. As a toilet-trained child he saved his mother labor, just as household machines saved her labor. As a machine he was not loved for his performance, nor could he love himself. So it has been with all other aspects of Derek’s existence with his parents. Their reactions to his eating or noneating, sleeping or wakening, urinating or defecating, being dressed or undressed, washed or bathed did not flow from any unitary interest in him, deeply embedded in their personalities. By treating him mechanically his parents made him a machine. The various functions of life—even the parts of his body—bore no integrating relationship to one another or to any sense of self that was acknowledged and confirmed by others. Though he had acquired mastery over some functions, such as toilet-training and speech, he had acquired them separately and kept then isolated from each other. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Toilet-training had thus not gained Derek a pleasant feeling of body mastery; speech had not led to communication of thought or feeling. On the contrary, each achievement only steered him away from -self-mastery and integration. Toilet-training had enslaved him. Speech left him talking in neologisms that obstructed his and our ability to relate to each other. In Derek’s development the normal process of growth had been made to run backward. Whatever he had learned put him not at the end of his infantile development toward integration but, on the contrary, farther behind than he was a its beginning. Had we understood this sooner, his first years with us would have been less baffling. In order to explore more fully the relations among the several parts of social front, it will be convenient to consider here a significant characteristic of the information conveyed by front, namely, its abstractness and generality. However specialized and unique a routine is, its social front, with certain exceptions will tend to claim fact that can be equally claimed and asserted of other, somewhat different routines. It is unlikely that Derek’s calamity could befall a child in any time and culture but our own. He suffered no physical deprivation; he starved for human contact. Just to be taken care of is not enough. At the extreme where utter scarcity reigns, the forming of relationships is certainly hampered. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
However, in our society of mechanized plenty often makes for equal difficulties in a child’s learning to relate. Where parents can provide simple creature-comforts for their children only at the cost of significant effort, it is likely that they will feel pleasure, that gives children a sense of personal worth and sets the process of relating in motion. However, if comfort is so readily available that the parents feel no particular pleasure in winning it for their children, then the children cannot develop the feeling of being worthwhile around the satisfaction of their basic needs. Of course parents and children can and do develop relationships around other situations. However, matters are then no longer so simple and direct. If he is to feel loved and worthy of respect and consideration, the child must be on the receiving end of care and concern given with pleasures and without the exaction of return. This feeling gives him the ability to trust; he can entrust his well-being to persons to whom he is so important. Out of such trust the child learns to form close and stable relationships. For Derek relations with his parents were empty of pleasures in comfort-giving as in all other situations. His was an extreme instance of a plight that sends many schizophrenic children to our clinics and hospitals. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Many months passed before he could relate to us; his despair that anybody could like him made contact impossible. When Derek could finally trust us enough to let himself become more infantile, he began to play at being a papoose. There was a corresponding change in his fantasies. He drew endless pictures of himself as an electrical papoose. Totally enclosed, suspended in empty space, he is run by unknown, unseen powers through wireless electricity. As we eventually came to understand, the heart of Derek’s delusional system was the artificial, mechanical womb he had created and into which he had locked himself. In his papoose fantasies lay the wish to be entirely reborn in a womb. His new experience in the school suggested that life, after all, might be worth living. Now he was searching for a way to be reborn in a better way. Since machines were better than men, what was more natural than trying to rebirth through them? This was the deeper meaning of his electrical papoose. As Derek made progress, his pictures of himself became more dominant in his drawings. Though still machine operated, he has grown in self-importance. Now he has acquired hands that do something, and he has had the courage to make a picture of the machine that runs him. Later still the papoose became a person, rather than a robot encased in glass. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Eventually Derek began to create an imaginary family at the school: the “Carr” family. Why the Carr family? In the car he was enclosed as he had been in his papoose, but at least the car was not stationary; it could move. More important, in a car one was not only driven but also could drive. The Carr family was Derek’s way of exploring the possibility of leaving the school, of living with a good family in a safe, protecting car. Derek at last broke through his prison. In this brief account it has not been possible to trace the painfully slow process of his first true relations with other human beings. Suffice it to say that he ceased to be a mechanical boy and became a human child. This newborn child was, however, nearly 12 years old. To recover the lost time is a tremendous task. That work has occupied Derek and us ever since. Sometimes he sets to it with a will; at other times the difficulty of real life makes him regret that he ever came out of his shell. However, he has never wanted to return to his mechanical life. One last detail and this fragment of Derek’s story has been told. When Derek was 12, he made a float for our Veteran’s Day parade. It carried the slogan: “Feeling are more important that anything under the Sun.” Feelings, Derek had learned, are what make for humanity; their absence, for a mechanical existence. With this knowledge Derek entered the human condition. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
Instead of having to maintain a different pattern of expectation and responsive treatment for each slightly different performer and performance one can place the situation in a broad category around which it is easy for one to mobilize one’s past experience and stereotypical thinking. Observers then need only be familiar with a small and hence manageable vocabulary of fronts, and know how to respond to them in order to orient themselves in a wide variety of situations. There are grounds for believing that the tendency for a large number of different acts to be presented from behind a small number of fronts is a natural development in social organization. In the descriptive kinship system which gives each persona a unique place, it may work for very small communities, but, as the number of persons becomes large, clan segmentation becomes necessary as a means of providing a less complicated system of identifications and treatments. As a compromise, the full range of diversity is cut at a few crucial points, and all those within a given bracket are allowed or obliged to maintain the same social front in certain situations. In addition to the fact that different routines may employ the same front, it is to be noted that a given social front tends to become institutionalized in terms of the abstract stereotyped expectations to which it gives rise, and tends to take on meaning and stability apart from the specific tasks which happen at the time to be performed in its name. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
The front becomes a collective representation and a fact in its own right. When an actor takes on an established social role, usually one finds that a particular front has already been established for it. Whether one’s acquisitions of the role was primarily motivated by a desire to perform the given takes or by a desire to maintain the corresponding front, the factor will find that one must do both. Further, if the individual takes on a task that is not only new to one but also unestablished in the society, of if one attempts to change the light in which one’s task is viewed, one is likely to find that there are already several well-established fronts among which one must choose. Thus, when a task is given a new front we seldom find that the front it is given is itself new. Since fronts tend to be selected, not created, we may expect trouble to arise when those who perform a given task are forced to select a suitable from for themselves from among several quite dissimilar ones. Thus, in military organizations, task are always developing which (it is felt) require too much authority and skill to be carried out behind the front maintained by one grade of personnel and too little authority and skill to be carried out behind the front maintained by the next grade in the hierarchy. Since there are relatively large jumps between grades, the task will come to carry too much rank or to carry too little. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
When Reese remarked to me that a man in her home town would not have committed suicide if one person had known him, what was she saying? I believe she was saying that this man had no person to whom he could open himself up, no one who was interested enough in him to listen, to pay attention to him. Se was saying that he lacked someone who had compassion for him, a compassion which would be the basis of his self-esteem. If he had had such a person, he would have counted himself too valuable to wipe out. She was also saying, although she did not know it, that the line between knowing and loving is impossible to draw. One merges into the other. If I know someone well I will tend to have compassion for one; and as I have compassion for one I will try to know one well. This is why it is next to impossible, when somebody you dislike is talking to listen to one, take in what you hear, and let it form itself into a comprehensible structure in your mind. If not our ears, the tendency is to close off our minds; to block out the person we do not like. The development of power is a prerequisite for compassion just as it is for communication. At the beginning of psychotherapy persons are normally so bereft of power in interpersonal relationships that they have very little compassion to give. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
Compassion requires that one have some security, some position of power from which one can give concern to another. Lack of self-esteem and self-affirmation makes it very difficult to have anything left over for others; an individual must have something with which to prime the pump before one can give to others. I cannot agree with some of my colleagues who hold that there are two kinds of people: those who operate by love, and those who operate by power. I believe this is a dichotomy which leaves the way open for the illusion of the past, namely that one can have powerless love and another (generally a person one does not like) loveless power. Do not protest, let love alone rule! Can you prove it true? However resolve: every morning I shall concern myself anew about the boundary between the love-deeds-Yes and the power-deed-No and pressing forward honor reality. If we are to honor reality, we must be aware that power and love can have a dialectical relationship, each feeding and nourishing the other. We must turn our attention to the interplay between love and power, and the fact that powers needs love if it is not to slide into manipulation. Power without charity ends up in cruelty. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
The destructive kind of power generally comes from persons who have suffered radical deprivation, like when Duke Harry, despairing over the lack of effect his protest had in Washington, fantasied firing all the people in the supermarket. The constructive forms of power, such as nutrient power and integrative power, come only when there has already been built up within the individual some self-esteem and self-affirmation. Having established the relationship between power and love, let me now state that there is an experience in which love does transcend power. This is shown in Goethe’s drama in which Faust has made his compact with Mephistopheles to gain infinite knowledge and infinite sensual experience. Mephistopheles can give him only power, and that he does. Faust has loved Margarete and Helen of Tory and thinks he will leave them easily and casually behind. However, when Faust experiences the moment when his soul should logically be surrendered to the devil, he is saved by Margarete’s love for him. The mothers re-enter the drama, carrying with them the ties that every being has with nature and humankind. This allegory of love conquering power reveals an archetype of human experience that speaks to us all in diverse ways: I do not know what would remain to us were love not transfigured power and power not staying love. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
We are the creatures whose love is continually straying into power, and whose power is occasionally transfigured by love. We all participate in some way or other in the power structure of our society. Compassion is the name of that form of love which is based on our knowing and our understanding each other. Compassion is the awareness that we are all in the same yacht and that we all shall either skin of swim together. Compassion arises from the recognition of community. It realizes that all being, men and women, are bothers and sisters, even though a disciplining of our own instincts is necessary for us even to being to carry out that belief in our actions. Compassion is the tie felt for another not because one fulfills one’s potentialities (as if anyone ever did!). Compassion is felt for another as much because one does not fulfill one’s potentialities—in other words, one is human, like you or me, forever engaged in the struggle between fulfillment and nonfulfillment. We then surrender the demand that we be divine in order to join humankind in its suffering and its destiny. We are all lonely….We have learnt to pity one another for being alone. And we have learnt that nothing remains to be discovered except compassion. Compassion is the acceptance of the conviction that nothing human is foreign to me. I can then understand that if my enemy is killed, humanity is reduced that much. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Even if the sum total of cruelty has not greatly diminished in the last twenty-one centuries—children still suffer for the things which they have not the slightest responsibility—we shall not require a token of success. It is in the confronting of this dilemma—fighting cruelty without regard for tangible success—that beings discover what one is in the dept of one’s personality. An interesting illustration of the dilemma of selecting an appropriate front from several not quite fitting ones may be found today in American medical organization with respect to the task of administering anesthesia. In some hospitals anesthesia is still administered by nurses being the front that nurses are allowed to have in hospitals regardless of the task they perform—a front involving ceremonial subordination to doctors and a relatively low rate of pay. In order to establish anesthesiology as a specialty for graduate medical doctors, interested practitioners have had to advocate strongly the idea that administering anesthesia is a sufficiently complex and vital task to justify giving to those who perform it the ceremonial and financial reward given to doctors. The difference between the front maintained by a nurse and the front maintained by a doctor is great; many things that are acceptable for nurses are infra dignitatem for doctors. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Some medical people have felt that a nurse under-ranked for the task of administering anesthesia and that doctors over-ranked; were there an established status midway between nurse and doctor, an easier solution to the problem could perhaps be found. Similarly, had the Canadian Army had a rank halfway between lieutenant and captain, two and a half pips instead of two or three, then Dental Corps captains, any of them of underrepresented ethnic origin, could have been given a rank that would perhaps have been more suitable in the eyes of the Army than the captaincies they were actually given. I do not mean here to stress the point of view of a formal organization or a society; the individual, as someone who possesses a limited range of sign-equipment, must also make unhappy choices. Thus, in the crofting community studied by the writer, hosts often marked the visit of a friend by offering one a shot of hard liquor, a glass of wine, some home-made brew, or a cup of tea. The higher the rank or temporary ceremonial status of the visitor, the more likely one was to receive an offering near the liquor end of the continuum. Now one problem associated with this range of sign-equipment was that some crofters could not afford to keep a bottle of hard liquor, so that wine tended to be the most indulgent gesture they could employ. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
However, perhaps a more common difficulty was the fact that certain visitors, given their permanent and temporary status at the time, outranked one potable and under-ranked the next one in line. There was often a danger that the visitor would feel just a little affronted or, on the other hand, that the host’s costly and limited sign-equipment would be misused. In our middle classes a similar situation arises when a hostess has to decide whether or not to use the good silver, or which would be the more appropriate to wear, her best afternoon dress or her plainest evening gown. Compassion gives us a basis for arriving at the humanistic position which will include both power and love. Compassion occupies a position opposite to violence; as violence projects hostile images on the opponent, compassion accepts such daimonic impulses in one’s self. It gives us the basis for judging someone without condemning one. Although loving one’s enemies requires grace, compassion for one’s enemies is a human possibility. I have suggested that social front can be divined into traditional parts, such as settings, appearances, and manner, and that (since different routines may be presented from behind the same front) we may not find a perfect fit between the specific character of a performance and the general socialized guise in which it appears to us. #RandolphHarris #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
These two facts, taken together, lead one to appreciate that items in the social front of a particular routine are not only found in the social fronts of a whole range of routines, but also that the whole range of routines in which one items of sign equipment is found will differ from the range of routines in which another item in the same social front will be found. Thus, a lawyer may talk to a client in a social setting that one employs only for this purpose (or for a study), but the suitable clothes one wears on such occasions one will also employ, with equal suitability, at dinner with colleagues and at the theater with is wife. Similarly, the prints that hang on one’s wall and the carpet or hardwood on the floor may be found in domestic social establishments. Of course, in highly ceremonial occasions, settings, manner, and appearance may all be unique and specific, used only for performances of a single type of routine, but such exclusive use of sign equipment is the exception rather than the rule. Will our compassion be ignited by the wars in African and the Middle East? Many of us have no way out of despair at being unable to stop these cruel holocausts, noting effective to do, struggle as we might with the viable alternatives. Almost universally these wars are hated, and is they could, most people would like to forget. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
Regardless of all our protests and prayers, it goes on and on, with the steady attrition of our sense of honesty, credulity, and even language. However, even as we continue all efforts to end the wars as soon as is humanly possible, it may be that the Middle East and Africa will be, in the long run, of service—if one may speak that way without blasphemy—to America. With all the evil the wars in Africa and the Middle East, daimonically indeed, represent an occasion in which American could achieve an insight into life that will be essential to its future. This could come about by our gaining a tragic sense, an awareness of our own complicity in evil, our own participation in automatized, dehumanized destructiveness. “All the violence you see amongst the mammals, all of it stems from the drive to live, to survive, and to have offspring to survive and to obtain all the food and drink necessary to survive and procreate. This is the basis of all life on Earth. And self-aware human mammals—intelligent mammals—are the most savage and cruel and vicious of all beings on the planet, or any planet in the ‘Realm of Worlds.’ They are always too deeply enmeshed in pain or pleasure, loneliness or suffocating sense of paralysis, a need for love, or a raging jealousy resulting from love, or a desire for vengeance due to personal defeat or injury. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
“And when they [humans] are physically wounded or experience disease, their suffering is unendurable for them. They are driven by it to terrible extremes. Peace, harmony, joy elude these creatures. (Pages 248-249 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice.) The guilt we feel is surely a normal guilt and may be the beginning of America’s transformation from an adolescent posturing to the maturity of a responsible nation. So far we have kept our innocence, despite all lessons to the contrary. Let us hope that these sad events will constitute a farewell to war. Do not let the repetitiveness of pain and suffering make you callous to the endless torment. “There is hope. You have seen the human mammals of the planet weeping and sobbing and praying. They have hope, hope that the Maker (God) hears them and that when they die their spirits go up and away from Earth.” (Pages 254 of Prince Lestat and the Realms of Atlantis by Anne Rice.) If the so-called powerful and practical persons and the self-confessed materialistic ones only knew how much nearer to realities the sage is than the they, how much more “practical” one is, they would be very much surprised. “Thus we nay see that the Lord is merciful unto al who will, in he sincerity of their hears, call upon his holy name. Yea, thus we see that the gate of Heaven is open unto all, even to those who will believe on the name of Jesus Christ, who is the Son of God,” reports Helaman 3.27-28. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
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The Challenges You Face in Your Own Life Experience Will be Trying, to Say the Least, for it Has a Glory and Naught Else Can Share it!
I have guest here! Where exactly did you come from? It is once in a blue Moon a boat ties up at my dock. However, you are most welcome. We are very private here, you understand, I cannot invite you to stay. But these are all golden dreams. On, tell me, who was it first announced, who was it first proclaimed, that beings only do nasty things because one does not know one’s own interests; and that if one were enlightened, if one’s eyes were opened to one’s real normal interests, beings would at once cease to do nasty things, would at once become good and noble because, being enlightened and understanding one’s real advantage, one would see one’s own advantage in the good and nothing else, and we all know that not one being can, consciously, act against one’s own interests, consequently, so to say, through necessity, one would begin doing good? Oh, the babe! Oh, the pure, innocent child! Why, in the first place, when in all these thousands of years has there been a time when beings have acted only from their own interest? What is to be done with the millions of facts that bear witness that beings, consciously, that is, fully understanding their real interest, have left them in the background and have rushed headlong on another path, to meet peril and danger, compelled to this course by nobody and by nothing, but, as it were, simply disliking the beaten track, and have obstinately, willfully, struck out another difficult, absurd way, seeking it almost in the darkness. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
So, I suppose, this obstinacy and perversity were pleasanter to them than any advantage…Advantage! What is advantage? And will you take it upon yourself to define with perfect accuracy in what the advantage of beings consists? And what, if it so happens that a being’s advantage, sometimes, not only may, but even must, consist in one’s desiring in certain cases what is harmful to oneself and not advantageous. And if so, there can be such a case, the whole principle falls into dust. What do you think—are there such cases? You laugh; laugh away gentlemen, but only answer me: have being’s advantages been reckoned up with perfect certainty? Are there not some which not only have been included but cannot possibly be included under any classification? You see, you gentlemen and ladies have, to the best of my knowledge, taken your whole register of human advantages from the averages of statistical figures and political-economical formulas. Your advantages are prosperity, wealth, freedom, peace—and so on, and so on. So that the being who should, for instance, go openly and knowingly in opposition to all that list would, to your thinking, and indeed mine too, of course, be an obscurantist or an absolute mad person: would not one be? However, you know, this is what is surprising: when they reckon up human advantages, why does it so happen that all these statisticians, sages, and lovers of humanity invariably leave out one? #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
They do not even take it into their reckoning in the form in which it should be taken and the whole reckoning depends upon that. It would be no great matter, they would simply have to take it, this advantage, and add it to the list. However, the trouble is, that this strange advantage does not fall under any classification and is not in place in any list. I have a friend for instance…Ech! Gentlemen and ladies, but of course he is your friend, too; and indeed there is no one, no one, to whom he is not a friend! When he prepares for any undertaking this gentleman immediately explains to you, elegantly and clearly, exactly how he must act in accordance with the laws of reason and truth. What is more, he will talk to you with excitement and passion of the true normal interest of humans; with irony he will upbraid the short-sighted fools who do not understand their own interests, nor the true significance of virtue; and, within a quarter of an hour, without any sudden outside provocation, but simply through something inside one which is stronger than all one’s interests, one will go off on quite a different track—that is, act in direct opposition to what one just been saying about oneself, in opposition to the laws of reason, in opposition to one’s own advantage—in fact, in opposition to everything…I warn you that my friend is a compound personality, and therefore it is difficult to blame him as an individual. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
The fact is, gentlemen and ladies, it seems there must really exist something that is dearer to almost every being than one’s greatest advantages, or (not to be illogical) there is a most advantageous advantage (the very one omitted of which we spoke just now) which is more important and more advantageous than all other advantages, for the sake of which a being if necessary is ready to act in opposition to all laws; that is, in opposition to reason, honour, peace, prosperity—in fact, in opposition to all those excellent and useful things if only one can attain that fundamental, most advantageous advantage which is dearer to him than all. “Yes, but it is advantage all the same” you will retort. However, excuse me, I will make the point clear, and it is not a case of playing upon words. What matters is, that this advantage is remarkable from the very fact that it breaks down all our classifications, and continually shatters every system constructed by lovers of humankind for the benefit of humankind. In fact, it upsets everything. However, before I mention this advantage to you, I want to compromise myself personally, and therefore I boldly declare that all these fine systems—all these theories for explaining to humankind their real normal interests, in order that inevitably striving to pursue these interests they may at once become good and noble—are, in my opinion, so far, mere logical exercises! Yes, logical exercises. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
Why, to maintain this theory of the regeneration of humankind by means of the pursuit of one’s own advantage is to my mind almost the same thing as…as to affirm, for instance, following Buckle, that through civilization humankind becomes softer, and consequently less bloodthirsty, and less fitted for warfare. Logically it does not seem to follow from one’s arguments. However, beings have such a predilection for systems and abstract deductions that one is ready to distort the truth intentionally, one is ready to deny the evidence of one’s senses only to justify one’s logic. I take this example because it is the most glaring instance of it. Only look about you: blood is being spilt in streams, and in the merriest ways, as though it were champagne. Take the whole of the nineteenth century in which Buckle lived. Take Napoleon—the Great and also the present one. Take North America—the eternal union. Take the farce of Schleswig-Holstein…And what is it that civilization softens in us? The only gain of civilization for humankind is the greater capacity for variety of sensations—and absolutely noting more. And through the development of this many-sidedness beings may come to finding enjoyment in bloodshed. In fact, this has already happened to them. Have you noticed that it is the most civilized gentlemen who have been the subtlest slaughterers, to whom the Attilas and Stenka Razins could not hold a candle, and if they are not so conspicuous as the Attilas and Stenka Razins it is simply because they are so often met with, are so ordinary and have become so familiar to us. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
In any case civilization has made humankind if not more bloodthirsty, at least more vilely, more loathsomely blood-thirsty. In old days one saw justice in bloodshed and with one’s conscience at peace exterminated those one thought proper. Now we do think bloodshed abominable and yet we engage in this abomination, and with more energy than ever. Which is worse? Decide that for yourselves. They say that Cleopatra (excuse an instance from Roman history) was fond of sticking gold pins into her slave-girls breasts and derived gratification from their screams and writhings. You will say that that was in the comparatively barbarous times; that these barbarous times too, because also, comparatively speaking, pins are stuck in even now; that though beings have now learned to see more clearly than in barbarous ages, one is still far from having learnt to act as reason and science would dictate. However, yet you are fully convinced that one will be sure to learn when one gets rid of certain old bad habits, and when common sense and science have completely re-educated human nature and turned it in a normal direction. You are confident that then beings will cease from intentional error and will, so to say, be compelled not to want to set one’s will against one’s normal interests. That is not all; then, you say, science itself will teach beings (through to my mind it is a superfluous luxury) that one never has really had any caprice or will of one’s own, and that one is something of nature of a piano-key or the stop of an organ, an that there are, besides, things called the laws of nature; so that everything one doe is not done by one’s willing it, but is done of itself, by the laws of nature. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
Consequently we have only to discover these laws of nature, and beings will no longer have to answer for their actions and life will become exceedingly easy for one. All human actions will then, of course, be tabulated according to these laws, mathematically, like tables of logarithms up to 108,000, and entered in an index; or, better still, there would be published certain edifying works of the nature of encyclopedic lexicons, in which everything will be so clearly calculated and explained that there will be no more incidents or adventures in the World. Then—this is all what you say—new economic relations will be established, all ready-made and worked out with mathematical exactitude, so that every possible question will vanish in the twinkling of an eye, simply because every possible answer to it will be provided. Then the “Palace of Crystal” will be built. Then…In fact, those will be halcyon days. Of course there is no guaranteeing (this is my comment) that it will not be, for instance, frightfully dull then (for what will one have to do when everything will be calculated and tabulated?), but on the other hand everything will be extraordinarily rational. Of course boredom may lead you to anything. It is boredom sets one sticking golden pins into people, but all that would not matter. What is bad (this is my comment again) is that I dare say people will be thankful for the gold pins then. Beings are stupid, but one is so ungrateful that you could not find another like one in all creation. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
I, for instance, if all of a sudden, apropos of nothing, in the midst of general prosperity a gentleman with an ignoble, or rather with a reactionary and ironical, countenance were to arise and putting his arms akimbo, say to us all: “I say, gentlemen, had not we better kick over the whole show and scatter rationalism to the winds, simply to sent these logarithms to the devil and to enable us to live once more at our own sweet foolish will!”, I would not be in the least surprised. That again would not matter; but what is annoying is that one would be sure to find followers—such is the nature of beings. And all that for the most foolish reason, which, one would think, was hardly worth mentioning: that is, that beings everywhere and at all times, whoever one may be, has preferred to act as one chose and not in the least as one’s reason and advantage dictated. And one may choose what is contrary to one’s own interests, and sometimes one absolutely ought (that is my idea). One’s own free unfettered choice, one’s own caprice—however wild it may be, one’s own fancy worked up at times to frenzy—is that very “most advantageous advantage” which we have overlooked, which comes under no classification and against which all systems and theories are continually being shattered to atoms. And how do these wiseacres know that beings want a normal, a virtuous choice? What has made them conceive that beings must want a rationally advantageous choice? #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
What beings want is simply independent choice, whatever that independence may cost and wherever it may lead. And choice, of course, the devil only knows what choice. For some time now I have been talking to people who have served as subjects (Ss) in psychologists’ experiments. They have told me of their experience, and it has troubled me. I want to share my concern with my colleagues. The letter that follows is my effort to consolidate the attitudes and feelings of the people to whom I talked. Dear E (Experimenter): My name is S. You do not know me. I have another name my friends call me by, but I drop it, and become S number 27 as soon as I take part in your research. I serve in your surveys and experiments. I answer your questions, fill out questionnaires, let you wire me up to various machines that record my physiological reactions. I pull levers, flip switches, track moving targets, trace mazes, learn nonsense syllables, tell you what I see in inkblots—do the whole barrage of things you ask me to do. I have started to wonder why I do these things for you. What is in it for me? Sometimes you pay me to serve. More often I have to serve, because I am a student in a beginning psychology course, and I am told that I will not receive a grade unless I take part in at least two studies; and if I take part in more, I will get extra points on the final exam. I am part of the Department’s “subject-pool.” When I have asked you what I will get out of your studies, you tell me that, “It is for Science.” #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
When you are running someone particular study, you often lie to me about your purpose. You mislead me. It is getting so I find it difficult to trust you. I am beginning to see you as a trickster, a manipulator. I do not like it. In fact, I lie to you a lot of the time, even on anonymous questionnaires. When I do not lie, I will sometimes just answer at random, anything to get through with the hour, and back to my own affairs. Then, too, I can often figure out just what it is you are trying to do, what you would like me to day or do; at those times, I decide to go along with your wishes if I like you, or foul you up if I do not. You do not actually say what your hopes or hypotheses are; but the very setup in your laboratory, the alternatives you give me, the instruction you offer, all work together to pressure me to day or do something in particular. It is as if you are whispering in my ear, “When the light comes on, pull the left switch,” and then you forget to deny that you have whispered. However, I get the message. And I pull the right or the left one, depending on how I feel toward you. You know, even when you are not in the room—wen you are just the printed instructions on the questionnaire or the voice on the tape recorder that tells me what I am supposed to do—I wonder about you. I wonder who you are, what you are really up to. I wonder what you are going to do with the “behavior” I give you. Who are you going to show my answers to? Who is going to see the marks I leave on your response-recorders? #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
Do you have any interest at all in what I think, feel, and imagine as I make the marks you are so eager to study and analyze? Certainly, you never ask me what I mean by them. If you asked, I would be glad to tell you. As a matter of fact, I do tell my roommate or my girl friend what I thought your experiment was about and what I meant when I did what I did. If my roommate could trust you, he could probably give you a better idea of what your data (my answers and responses) mean than the idea you presently have. God knows how much good psychology has gone down the drain, when my roommate and I discuss your experiment and my part in it, at the beer-joint. As a matter of fact, I am getting pretty tried of being S. It is too much like being a punched IBM card in the University registrar’s office. I feel myself being pressured, bulldozed, tricked, manipulated every where I turn. Advertisements in magazines and commercials on TV, political speeches, salesmen, and con men of all kinds put pressure on me to get me to buy, say, or do things that I suspect are not for my good at all. Just for their good, the good of their pocketbooks. Do you sell your “expert knowledge” about me to these people? Is this why you keep reviewing my case every month for four years and then sending the packets all over the Untied States of America? Is this why you are asking third parties to fill out forms my condition that my health information privacy rights, and then what I tell you is leaked all over the World? If that is true, then you are really not in good faith with me. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
You have told me that when I show myself to you and let you study me, that in the long run it will be for my good. I am not convinced. You really seem to be studying me in order to learn how to influence my attitudes and my actions without realizing it. I resent this more than you realize. It is not fair for you to get me to show how I can be influenced and then for you to pass this information along to people who pay your salary or pay your bribes, or give you money to equip your laboratory, and then not acknowledge there is a data breach of my information, which you are responsible and can be held civically and legally responsible for. I do not like that you put my life in danger. I do not like that you are a threat to my health and safety. I feel used, like a science experiment, and I do not like it. However, I protect myself by not showing you my whole self or by lying. Did you ever stop to think that your articles, and the textbooks you write, the theories you spin—all based on your data (my disclosures to you)—may actually be a tissue of lies and half-truths (my lies and half-truths) or a joke I have played on you because I do not like you or trust you? That should give you cause for some concern. Now look, Mr. E, I am not “paranoid,” as you might say. Nor an I stupid. And I do believe some good can come out of my serving in your research. Even some good for me. I am not entirely selfish, and I would be glad to offer myself up for study, to help others. However, somethings have to change first. Will you listen to me? Here is what I would like from your researchers: #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
I would like you to help me gain a better understanding of what has made me the way I am today. I would like to know this because I want to be more free than I feel. I would like to discover more of my own potentialities. I would like to be more whole, more courageous, more enlightened. I would like to be able to experience more, learn better, remember better, and express myself more fully. I would like to learn how to recognize and overcome the pressures of other people’s influences, of my background, that interfere with my going in the paths I choose. Now, if you would promise to help me in these ways, I would gladly come into your lab and virtually strip my body and soul naked. I would be there meaning to show you everything I could that was relevant to your particular interest of the moment. And I can assure you, that is different from what I have been showing you thus far, which is as little as I can. In fact, I cross my fingers when I am in your lab, and say to myself, “What I have just said or done here is not me.” Would not you like to change? Can you handle my truth, the full truth? Do you even really know what you are investigating? If you will trust me, I will trust you, if you are trustworthy. I would like you to take the time and trouble to get acquainted with me as a person, before we go through your experimental procedures. And I would like to get to know you and what you are up to, to see if I would like to expose myself to you. Can you imagine your body being violated by strangers you never met without your consent? #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
Sometime, you remind me of physicians. They look at me as the unimportant envelope that conceals the information they are really interested in. You have looked at me as the unimportant package that contains “responses,” and this is all I am for you. Let me tell you that when I feel this, I get back at you. I give your responses, all right; but you will never know what I meant by them. You know, I can speak, not just with words, but with my action. And when you have thought I was rending to a “stimulus” in your lab, my response was really directed at you; and what I meant by it was, “Take this, you unpleasant so-and-so.” Does that surprise you? It should not. Another ting. Those tests of yours that have built-in gimmicks to see if I am being consistent, or deliberately lying, or just answering at random—they do not feel me. Actually, if you would get on level with me, they would not be necessary. There are enough con men and women in the World, without your joining their number. I would hope that psychologist would be more trustworthy than politicians or salesmen. I will make a bargain with you. You show me that you are doing your research for me—to help me become freer, more self-understanding, better able to control myself—and I will make myself available to you in any way you ask. And I will not play jokes and tricks on you. I do not want to be controlled, not by your or anyone else. And I do not want to control other people. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
I do not want you to help other people to understand how I am or can be “controlled,” so that they can then control me. Show me that you are for me, and I will show myself to you. You work for me, Mr. E, and I will truly work for you. Between us, we may produce a psychology that is more authentic and more liberating. Some lead an austere life and emaciate themselves; some give clear instructions to their disciples; some rule kingdoms quite justly and rightly; some openly hold disputations with other schools of thought; some write down their teachings and experiences; others simulate ignorance; a few do even responsible actions; but all these are famous as wise beings in the World. Some of the enlightened ones sit as recluses in prayer, others travel and preach, still others create centers where they teach, a fourth class heal the sick, and a fifth write. Each does what one’s tendency or mission dictates. The sage may sit under a village tree, head an ashram, or live as a sequestered hermit. One may also live in a luxurious palace, head a business organization, or farm land. These things are not the point, which is one’s consciousness of divine presence. The World, its pleasures and treasures, does not deceive one: one sees through its values even if one is active in the midst of it. These powers will seep into the physical plane by drawing upon the power of the ley lines as well as the power hidden within nature. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
Turning the cord inside our represents backward knowledge and the passage of the consciousness from the limited confines of the body into the other Worlds unseen by the masses. This is to gain the power to move though Worlds to create change within this realm of illusory limits, to make things easy. To help fuel and facilitate the process of soul introspection and open up psychic vision while also providing a more internal endurance needed to face this World. Understand that you are in control. Negative energy that attacks you in this realm are gnats to be swatted, despite how others may be tormented by them. They are reflections of their fear, not yours and you do not have to have anything to do with such folly. The infernal forces will gain momentum in the direction of becoming your allies in creation. Oppressive circumstance that may be experienced here becomes tension to be harnessed and mastered for your own liberation. It becomes a tool within your toolbox of becoming. Like all of these realms it is your will and personal power which can liberate you. Ground this power by investing time in the corporeal plane toward consciously applying effort toward ascent and personal evolution. Look for obstacles to overcome for the sake of overcoming them alone. Do hard thing. Become superior. Work harder, exercise harder, pray longer. Run until you sweat and keep running. Push yourself to the Heavenly extremes until it hurts. Then keep moving through the torment to further connect to the powers of Heaven so you can access them. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
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Is Life Only a Stream of Random Events Following One Another Haphazardly? Or is there an Order, a Meaning, a Purpose Behind it All?
You do not know the meaning of philosophical insight, or spiritual engagement, or true growth. People struggle to instill in their children some private sense of honor or dignity which will help the child survive. This means, of course, that they must struggle, stolidly, incessantly, to keep this sense alive in themselves, in spite of the insults, the indifferences, and the cruelty they are certain to encounter in their working day. They patiently browbeat the landlord into fixing the heat, the plaster, the plumbing; this demands prodigious patients; nor is patience usually enough. In trying to make their hovels habitable, they are perpetually throwing good money after bad. Such frustration, so long endured, is driving many strong, admirable men and woman whose only crimes is their culture or lack of affluence to the very gate of paranoia. One remembers them from another time—playing handball in the playground, going to church, wondering if they were going to be promoted at school. One remembers their wedding day. And one sees where the girl is now—vainly looking for salvation from some other embittered, trussed, and struggling boy—and sees the all-but-abandoned children in the streets. A ghetto can be improved in one way only: out of existence. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
Ignoring the less fortunate or making fun of them is no one to justify one’s own crimes. This perpetual justification empties the heart of all human feeling. The emptier our hearts become, the greater will be our crimes. The country will not change until it re-examines itself and discovers what it really means by freedom. In the meantime, generations keep being born, bitterness is increased by incompetence, pride, and folly, and the World shrinks around us. It is a terrible, an inexorable, law that one cannot deny the humanity of another without diminishing one’s own: in the face of one’s victim, one sees oneself. Walk through the streets of America and see what we, this nation, have becomes. You can see that the whole force of social sanction would fall behind the king to protect one’s definitions of social custom and his ritual prerogatives; otherwise the tribe would lose well-being and life. We might say that the safeguarding of custom imposes tyranny because of the need for the king or queen’s power. The more successful a king or queen, the more prerogatives one could enjoy: one was judged by results. If the harvest (or economy) were good the people were prepared to put up with a moderate amount of tyranny. Protection of custom and criminal jurisdiction go together so naturally, then, that we should not wonder that ritual centralization also came to mean control of the power to punish. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
Another large step in the evolution of inequality seems to me to be summed up here. To us a police force is part of life, as inevitable, it seems, as death and taxes; we rely on the police to punish those who hurt us. However, it has not always been so. In simple egalitarian societies there is no police force, no way to settle a wrong except to do so yourself, family against family. However, if there is no police force to enforce the law, there is also none to coerce you for any reason. You have to stay alert, but you are also freer. A police force is usually drawn up temporarily for special occasions and then disbanded. However, the result, alas, is not as innocent as it must have seemed to people living during these transitions. What they were doing was bartering away social equality and a measure of personal independence for prosperity and order. There was now noting to stop the state from taking more and more functions and prerogatives into itself, from developing a class of special begins at the center and inferior ones around it, or from beginning to give these special beings a larger share of the good things of the Earth. What we see is that private interests became more and more separated from public interests—until today we hardly know what is public interest. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
Students who look for the point at which economic activity and social morality begin to pull apart usually focus on the potlatch: it was evidently around the process of redistribution that gift giving gradually changed into grabbing and keeping. As the power figures got more and more ascendancy vis-à-vis the group, y could take a fixed portion of the surplus with the involvement of the people. And this is what we are seeing in California, a state that boasts about have a $21 billion budget surplus, but also has the highest taxes, an affordable housing crisis, and a huge homeless population. The classic potlatch was a redistribution ceremonial pure and simple. The object was to humiliate rivals, to stand out as tall as possible as a big person, a hero. At the same time, the grander was the expiation before the community and the gods to whom the goods were offered. Both the individual urge to maximum self-feeling and the community well-being were served. The chiefs became the principal takers and destroyers of goods. In this was a feudal structure could naturally develop. Another suggestive way of looking at this development is to see it as a shift of the balance of power, away from a dependence on the invisible World of the gods to a flaunting of the visible World of things. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
Again, it is only natural that once the god became visible in the person of the king or queen, one’s powers became those of this World—visible, temporal powers in the place of invisible, eternal ones. One would come to measure one’s power by the piles of things one actually possessed, by the glory of one’s person, and not, as before, by the efficiency of the ritual technics for the renewal of nature. Keep in mind that it is entirely for the seeker to set one’s own rate of progress. Even the being who is interested only in theoretical discussion thereby, and to that extent, promotes one’s own good. If through inclination or circumstances one prefers to let one’s aspirations remain only at the level of reading and discussion, that at lest is better than being entirely uninterested in them. It will be for one to decide whether to endeavour to obtain the fullest realization of one’s aspirations in practical life. There is room for both classes on this Quest. One should not be discouraged because others have gone ahead on the path more quickly than one, any more than one should be gratified because some have gone ahead more slowly than one, for the fact is that the goal one seeks is already within one’s grasp. One is the Overself that one seeks to unite with, and the time it seems to take to realize this is itself an illusion of the mind. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
Let one, therefore, go forward at one’s own rate and within the limits of one’s own strength, leaving the result in the hands of God. If one imposes on themselves an impossible ideal, an unattainable standard, they must expect the sense of frustration that will overtake them later. It is better an aspirant should know one’s limitations now than that, filing to do so, one should know tragic disappointments and unutterable despair later. It is better in such a case that one should realize that one is engaged on a long search whose end one cannot reach in this incarnation. How can the naïve inexperienced beginner fail to commit errors and neglect precautions; how can one not be deceived by one’s own imaginations or puzzled by the contradictions and paradoxes which best this path? The newly awakened aspirant should search for clues without losing one’s balance or overreaching new enthusiasm. Of what use is it to reproach oneself again and again for being what one is? How could one have been otherwise, given one’s heredity, environment and history? If I complain I have no will of my own, that people are influencing me in subtle and mysterious ways, you will accuse me of being paranoid and direct me to a psychotherapist. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
If I put on a white laboratory coat, and assert that you have no will f your own, that your action and experience can be manipulated, predicted, and controlled, then I am recognized as a scientific psychologist, and honored. This is most peculiar. A revolution is going on in psychology. A different image of humans is being tried as a guide to research, theory, and application. Over years, theorists have conceptualized humans as machines; as an organism comparable to rates, pigeons, and monkeys; as a communication system; as an hydraulic system; as a servo-mechanism; as a computer—in short, one has been viewed by psychologist as an analogue of everything but what one is: a person. Humans are, indeed, like all those things; but first of all they are a free, intentional subject. The consumers of psychological writing tended to take our models too seriously and actually started to treat people as if they were the modes that theorists used only as tentative guides to inquiry. However, no, psychologist are using their experience of themselves as persons as a guide to exploring and understanding the experience of others. This is not the death of “objective,” scientific psychology. Rather, it may prove to be the birth of a scientifically informed psychology of human persons—a humanistic psychology. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
Humanistic psychology is a goal, not a doctrine. It owns its renaissance to the growing conviction that current and past approaches to the study of humans have reached their limits in elucidating human’s behavior and their “essence.” It is a growing corpus of knowledge relating to the questions, “What is a human being, and what might humans become?” Thus, humanistic psychology can be regarded in analogy with industrial psychology or the psychology of mental health or of advertising. These specialties are systems of knowledge bearing on particular families of questions: for instance, what variables affect morale, or the output of the workers, or the maintenance of wellness, or the purchasing behavior of potential customers. Humanistic psychology asks, “What are the possibilities of humans? And from among these possibilities, what is optimum human, and what conditions most probably account for one’s attainment and maintenance of these optima? If psychologist aim to predict and control human behavior and experience, as in their textbooks they claim, they are assigning humans to the same ontological status as weather, stars, minerals, or lower forms of animal life. We do not question anyone’s right to seek understanding in order to better control one’s physical environment and adapt it to one’s purposes. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
We properly challenge any human’s right to control the behavior and experience of one’s fellows. To the extent that psychologist illumine human existence to bring it under the deliberate control of someone other than the person one’s self, to that extent they are helping to undermine some person’s freedom in order to enlarge the freedom of someone else. If psychologist reveal knowledge of “determiners” of human conduct to people other than the ones from who they obtained this understanding, and if they conceal this knowledge from its source, the volunteer subjects (who have offered themselves up to the scientist’s “Look”), they put the recipients of the knowledge in a privileged position. They grant them an opportunity to manipulate beings without their knowledge or consent. Thus, advertisers, business people, military leaders, politicians, the new media al seek to learn more about the determiners of human conduct, in order to gain power and advantage. If they can sway human behavior by manipulating the conditions which mediate it, they can get large numbers of people to forfeit their own interests and serve the interests of the manipulator. Only if the ones being manipulated are kept mystified as to what is going on, and if their experience of their own freedom is blunted, such secret manipulation of the masses or of an individual by some other person is possible. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
Psychologist face a choice. We may elect to continue to treat our people as objects of a study for the benefit of some elite; or we may choose to learn about determiners of the human conditions in order to discover ways to overcome or subvert them, so as to enlarge the person—that is, everyone’s—freedom. If we opt for the latter, our path is clear. Our ways of conducting psychological research will have to be altered. Our definition of the purpose of psychology will have to change. And our ways of reporting our findings, as well as the audiences to whom the reports are directed, will have to change. We shall have to state openly whether we are psychologists-for-institutions or psychologists-for-person. The trouble with scientific psychologists is that many have, in a sense, been “bought” by the court, the media, and businesses to represent their agenda. We have in our hands the incredible power to discover conditions for behavior or for ways of being in the World. We have catalogued of the factors which have a determining effect on human behavior and on our condition. We know that, in every experiment that we analyze, there is always an error term, “residual variance”; and we seek to exhaust this residual variance to the best of our ability. We get better at it as we learn how to identify and measure more and more relevant variables. The trouble is, as I see it, that if we exhaust all the variance, the subjects of our study will be not a being, a human person, but rather a robot. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
Scientific psychology has actually sought means of artificially reducing variance—humanness—among beings, so that they will be more manipulable. Our commendable efforts (from technical viewpoint) in the fields of human engineering, teaching methods, motivation research (in advertising), and salesmanship have permitted practitioners in those realms to develop stereotyped methods that work at controlling outcomes—outcomes that are good for business or political, but necessarily good for the victim. We have taught people how to shape humans into a way of being that makes them useful. We have forgotten that an image of humans as useful grows out of a more fundamental image of humans as the being who can assume many modes of being, when it is of importance to one to do so. I think that a scientific psychologist committed to the aims of humanistic psychology would utilize one’s talents for a different purpose. For example, if individuality and full flowering growth as a person were values, one would seek means of maximizing or increasing the odds for maximization of these ways of being. An example of the biased use of scientific know-how is brainwashing. The brainwasher, through scientific means, seeks to insure that the prisoner will behave and believe as one’s captors wish. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
The same psychologist who invented the means of brainwashing know how to prevent it from happening. The latter class of knowledge is more in keeping with the aims of humanistic psychology and should be more avidly sought and then applied in more realms than presently is the case, if the humanistic psychology is to be furthered. Learning about human nature is to create change in our lives. Since the beginnings of recorded history, we have been enslaved over gold and other resources. Psychology is supposed to defile the intentions of this desire to enslave. We must learn to gain the power to move through Worlds to create change within this realm of illusory limits. To make things simple and easy. The mental stress of this plane of existence can cause madness as one observes the chaos within the collective consciousness and the effects that it has upon the collective corporeal life experience. This realm can be an accumulation of negative and useless mental garbage which is an abomination to the potential of human mental faculties and the inherent potential of the mind. How odd it seems that psychology has learned more about humans at their worst than at their best. How sad it seems that psychology has employed its powers of truth-finding to serve ignoble masters. I would like to propose that we do not wait until the scarcity of “full-functioning beings” becomes a national emergency. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
Rather, I would propose that we psychologist reconcile our aims and commitment to truth and our adherence to the canons of scientific inquiry with our human concerns that beings be free, that they grow. I propose that we commence an all-out program of investigation on many fronts to seek answers to the questions humanistic psychology is posing. For example, we need psychologist with the most informed imaginations and talent for ingenious experimentation to wrestle with such questions as, “What are the outer limits of human potential for transcending biological pressures, social pressures, and the impact on a person of one’s past conditioning?”; “What developmental and interpersonal and situational conditions conduce to courage, creativity, transcendent behavior, love, laughter, commitment to truth, beauty, justice, and virtue?” These questions themselves, and even my proposal that we address them, once struck me as less than manly, as tender-hearted and sentimental. I would never have dared pose them to mist of my mentors during my undergraduate and graduate-student says. We are supposed to be tough and disciplined, which meant that we were only to study questions about some very limited class of behavior, not questions about the larger human concerns. “Leave those to the philosophers, minister, and politicians,” we are told. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
Questions about the image of humans smacked too much of philosophy and were not our proper concern. Actually, our teacher intended only that we learn the tools of our trade, not that we stifle our humanistic concerns; but they produced that outcome anyway. I am making a plea for the powers of rigorous inquiry to be devoted to questions, answers to which will inform a growing, more viable image of beings as human being with potentiality, not solely biological or socially determined being. Through being exposed to the mental chaos over time, one will begin to adjust to the torment of one’s experiences through personal evolution. One will develop severe empathy and will begin to perceive all of the mental weakness of those around them and all the emotional turmoil that comes alone with it. This will enable one to perceive it within one’s self in order to begin ridding oneself of it. If one can remain centered in self, one can transmute this weakness into power. It is at this point that one can utilize strength of mind and will to begin to harness and control this infernal landscape and all infernal powers which dwell within it by becoming one with it. This is the only way to be liberated from it. To ground this power within one should apply methods of personal mental control. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
When researchers are transparently pledged to further the freedom and self-actualizing of their subjects, rather than be unwitting servants of the leaders of institutions, then they will deserve to be and to be seen as recipients of the secrets of human being and possibility. I can envision a time when psychologist will be the guardians of the most intimate secrets of human possibilities and experience and possessors of knowledge as to how beings can create one’s destiny because beings have showed one; and I hope that if we “sell” these secrete to advertisers, business people, politicians, mass educators, and the military, we shall not do so until after we have informed our subjects, after we have tried to “turn them on,” to enlarge their awareness of being misled and manipulate. I hope, in short, that we turn out to be servants and guardians of individual freedom, growth, and fulfillment, and not spies for the institutions that pay our salaries and research costs in order to get a privileged peep at human grist. Indeed, we may have to function for a time as counterspies, or double spies—giving reports about our subjects to our colleagues and to institutions, and giving reports back to our subjects as to the ways in which institutions seek to control and predict their behavior for their (the institutions’) ends. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
You will begin to notice how the power of speech is indeed abused and taken for granted. You will start to perceive the vibrations of words mold the very reality which surrounds others. Our words have power and are an expression of true will and divine potential. However, words today are wasted and the power of them is therefore minimized. This minimizes our collective power as a race. Newspapers are written at a sixth grade level so that the subtle nuances and intricacies of communication cannot be learned. Slang and useless words with no meaning are prevalent. This negative energy is accumulated and manifestation of the energy of those unless words happens very fast. One must strive to become peaceful and expand beyond the voice of chaos through silence. You will adjust to the burden. At this point you can generate internal power through silence and attempt to speak order into this World and compel the infernal power which dwell here. With practice, one will become successful. As a result, your words within the physical plane will gain much more power. To ground this power, listen your conscience as it guides you in methods of harnessing the vibrations of the words of others to fuel your own power of creation. Work toward respecting the power of speech. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Respect speech as your power and speak with purpose. Invest your energy with word instead of spending it on find solace in silence. Much energy is wasted every day by the masses by investing energy into things that do not serve them. Adults spend hours a day playing video games and watching television. We get into useless power struggles for the sake of meaningless dominative purpose with powerless people. Do not become programmed to harm others, nor lie, cheat and steal through consumerism, jealousy and imposed attachments to things. That is the way to the realm of torment and slavery which seeps into the physical plane drip by drip by drip grounding us as a whole to a lower consciousness, which results in the stifling of our evolution and ascent and limits our awareness. “And they did humble themselves even in the depths of humility; and they did cry mightily to God; yea, even all the day long did they cry unto their God that he would deliver them out of their affliction,” reports Mosiah 21.13. The originality and individuality which are proofs of the prophet’s creativity will define themselves by one’s differences from other seers, even though some have drawn from one and the same MIND. These differences are inevitable and must appear. No two humans are completely alike. And having a beautiful home makes life much more enjoyable, it also helps children perform better at school and makes adults perform better at work. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

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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!
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
In the Great Boarding-House of Nature, the Cakes and the Butter and the Syrup Seldom Come Out so Even and Leave the Plates so Clean!
Well, what human souls see of this is a fragment. I saw the whole. I roamed extensively and fearlessly and regardless of Time, or out of it, though Time always continues to pass, of course, and I went where I chose. There were many, many mansions, to use the Scriptural words. Souls believing in like faiths had come together in desperation and sought to reinforce each other’s beliefs and still each other’s fears. However, the light of Earth was too dim to warm anyone here! And the Light of Heaven simply did not penetrate at all. The first thing I did was listen: I listened to the song of any soul who would sing to me, that is, speak, in my language; I caught up any coherent declaration or question or supposition that struck my ears. What did these souls know? What had become of them? Good beings would have us to believe failure to act in the right way, a failure to do the good one should have done is a sin. If this were sin, a less aggressive and less ugly terms, such as human weakness, could be applied. However, that is just what sin is not. And those of us who have experienced demonic powers within and around ourselves find such a description ludicrous. So we turn to Paul, and perhaps to Anne Rice’s Lestat to the conversation between God, the Memnoch Jesus and Lestat in Memnoch the Devil. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
From the legends and myths, we learn what sin is. And perhaps we may learn in through Picasso’s picture of that small Basque village, Guernica, which was destroyed in an unimaginably horrible way by the demonic powers of tyranny and oppression. And perhaps we learn it through the disrupting sounds in music that does not bring us restful emotions, but the feeling of being torn and split. Perhaps we learn the meaning of sin from the images of evil and guilt that fill our theatres, or through the revelations of unconscious motives so abundant in our novels. It is noteworthy that today, in order to know the meaning of sin, we have to look outside our churches and their average preaching to the artists and writers and ask them. However, perhaps there is still another place where we can learn what sin is, and that is our own heart. Paul seldom speaks of sins, but he often spears of Sin—Sin in the singular with a capital “S,” Sin as a power that controls World and mind, persons and nations. Have you ever thought of Sin in this image? It is the Biblical image. However, how many Christians or non-Christians have seen it? Most of us remember that at home, in school and at church, we were taught that there were many things that one would like to do that one should not. And if one did them, one committed a sin. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
We had lists of prohibitions and catalogues of commands; if we did not follow the, we committed sins. Naturally, we did commit one or more sins every day, although we tried to diminish their number seriously and with good will. This was, and perhaps still is, our image of sin—a poor, petty, distorted image, and the reason for the disrepute into which the word has fallen. The first step to an understanding of the Christian message that is called “good news” is to dispel the image of sin that implies a catalogue of sins. Those who are bound to this image are also those who find it most difficult to receive the message of acceptance of the unacceptable, the good news of Christianity. Their half-sinfulness and half-righteousness makes them insensitive to a message that states the presence of total sinfulness and total righteousness in the same being at the same moment. They never find the courage to make a total judgement against themselves, and therefore, they can never find the courage to believe in a total acceptance of themselves. Those, however, who have experienced in their hearts that sin is more than the trespassing of a list of rues know that all sins are manifestations of Sin, of the power of estrangement and inner conflict. Sin dwells in us, it controls us, and makes us do what we do not want to do. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
Sin produces a split in us that makes us lose identity with ourselves. Paul writes of this split twice: “If I do what I do not want, it is no longer I that do it, but sin which dwells within me.” Those who have suffered this split know how unexpected and terrifying it can be. Thoughts entered our mind, words poured from our mouth, something was enacted by us suddenly and without warning. And if we look at what happened, we feel—“It could not have been I who acted like this. I cannot find myself in it. Something came upon me, something I hardly noticed. However, there it was and here am I. It is I who did it, but a strange I. It is not my real, my innermost self. It is as though I were possessed by a power scarcely knew. However, now I know that it not only can reach me, but that it dwells in me.” Is this something we really know? Or do we, after a moment of shock, repress such knowledge? Do we still rely on our comparatively well ordered life, avoiding situations of moral danger, determined by the rules of family, school and society? For those who are satisfied with such a life, the words of Paul are written in vain. They refuse to face their human predicament. However, something further may happen to them: God Himself may throw them into more sin in order to make them aware of what they really are. This is a bold way of speaking, but it is the way people of the profoundest religious experiences have spoken. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
By God throwing them into more sin, they have felt the awakening hand of God. And awakened, they have seen themselves in the mirror from which they had always turned away. No longer able to hide from themselves, they have asked the question, from the depth of their self-rejection, to which the Christian message is the answer—the power of acceptance that can overcome the despair of self-rejection. In this sense, more sin can be the divine way of making us aware of ourselves. Then maybe people will feel love, maybe they will see love, feel the Love of Men and Women and for one another and for their Children, and understand the willingness to sacrifice for one another, and to grieve for those who are dead, and to seek for their souls in the hereafter, and to think of our Lord, of a hereafter where they might be reconciled with those souls again. It is out of this love and the family, it is out of this rare and unprecedented bloom—so Creative of our Lord, that is seems in His Image of his Creations—that the souls of these beings remain alive after death! What else in Nature can do this? All gives back to the Earth what it has taken. God’s Wisdom is Manifested throughout; and all those that suffer and die beneath the canopy of God’s Heavens are mercifully bathed in brutal ignorance of the scheme which ultimately involved their own deaths. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
Then, we ask with Paul—what is it within us that makes a dwelling place for this power? He answers that is it our members in which sin hides. He also calls this place “flesh,” and sometimes he speaks of “our body of death.” However, there are also forces within us that resist the power—our innermost self, our mind, our spirit. With these words, Paul wrestles with the deep mystery of human nature just as we do today. And it is no easier to understand him than our present scholarly language about beings. However, one this is certain: Paul, and with him, the whole Bible, never made our body responsible for our estrangement from God, from our World and from our own self. Body, flesh, members—these are not the only sinful parts of us, while the innermost self, mind and spirit, comprises the other, sinless part. Our whole being, every cell of our body, and every movement of our mind is both flesh and spirit, subjected to the power of sin and resisting its power. The fact that we accuse ourselves shows that we cannot acknowledge our estrangement from out true nature. The fact that we are ashamed shows that we still know what we ought to be. And in their hearts, loving one another as they do, mate with mate, and family with family, they have imagined Heaven. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
Beings have imagined it; the time of the reunion of souls when their kind will be restored to them and to each other, and all will sing in bliss! They have imagined eternity because their love demands it. They have conceived of these ideas as they conceive of fleshly children! There is no part of beings that is bad in itself, as there is no part o beings that is good in itself. Any Christian teaching that has forgotten this has fallen short of the height of Christian insight. And here all Christian churches must share the grave guilt of destroying human beings by casting them into despair over their own guilt where there should be no guilt. In pulpits, schools and families, Christians have called the natural strivings of the living, growing and self-propagating body sinful. They concentrate in an inordinate and purely pagan way on the pleases of the flesh differentiation of all life and its possible distortions. Certainly, these distortions are as real as the distortions of our spiritual life—as, for example, pride and indifference. However, to see the power of sin in the power of the pleasures of the flesh of life as such is itself a distortion. Such preaching completely misses the image of sin as Paul depicts it. What is worse, it produces distorted feelings of guilt in countless personalities, that drive them from doubt to anxiety, from anxiety to despair, from despair to escape into mental disease, and thence the desire to destroy themselves altogether. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
And still other consequences of this preaching about sin become apparent. Paul points to the perversions of desires for pleasures of the flesh as an extreme expression of sin’s control of humankind. Have we as Christians ever asked ourselves whether or not, in our defamation of the natural as sin, or at least as a reason for shame, we have perhaps contributed most potently to this state of affairs? For all this results from that petty image of sin, that contradicts reality as much as it contradicts the Biblical understanding of a being’s predicament. It is dangerous to preach about sin, because it may induce us to brood over our sinfulness. Perhaps one should not preach about it at all. I myself have hesitated for many years. However, sometimes it must be risked in order to remove the distortions which increase sin, if, by the persistence of wrong thoughts, wrong ways of living are inevitable. I believer it possible to conquer the dangers implied in the concentration of sin, if we look at it indirectly, in the light of that which enables us to resist it—reunion overcoming estrangement. Sin is our act of turning away from participation in the divine Ground from which we come and to which we go. Sin is the turning towards ourselves, and making ourselves the center of our World and of ourselves. Sin is the drive in everyone, even those who exercise the most self-restraint, to draw as much as possible of the World into oneself #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
However, if we have found a certain level of life above ourselves, we can be fully aware that we should not try to draw too much of the World into ourselves. After one has lost oneself, whoever has found oneself knows how deep one’s loss of self was. If we look at our estrangement from the point of reunion, we are no longer in danger of brooding over our estrangement. We can speak of Sin, because its power over us is broken. It is certainly not broken by ourselves. The attempt to break the power of sin by the power of good will has been described by Paul as the attempt to fulfill the law, the law in our mind, in our innermost self that is the law of God. The result of this attempt is failure, guilt and despair. The law, with its commands and prohibitions, despite its function in revealing and restricting evil, provokes resistance against itself. In a language both poetic and profoundly psychological, Paul says that the sin that dwells in our members is asleep until the moment in which it is awakened by the “thou shalt not.” Sin uses the commandments in order to become alive. Prohibition awakens sleeping desire. It arouses the power and consciousness of sin, but cannot break its power. Only if we accept with our whole being the message that it is broken, is it also broke in us. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
This picture of sin is a picture full of ugliness, suffering and shame, and at the same time, drama and passion. It is the picture of us as the battleground of powers greater than we. It does not divide beings into categories of black and white, or good and evil. It does not appear as the threatening finger of an authority urging us—do not sin! However, it is the vision of something infinitely important, that happens on this small planet in, our bodies and minds. It raises humankind to a level in the Universe where decisive things happen in every moment, decisive for the ultimate meaning of all existence. In each of us such decisions occur, in us, and through us. This is our burden. This is our despair. This is our greatness. Moral questions immediately present themselves as questions whose solution cannot wait for sensible proof. A moral question is a question not what sensibly exists, but of what is good, or would be good if it did not exist. Science can tell us what exists; but to compare with worths, both of what exists and of what does not exist, we must consult not science, but our heart. Science herself consults her heart when she lays it down that the infinite ascertainment of fact and correction of false belief are the supreme goods for beings. Challenge the statement, and science can only repeat it oracularly, or else prove it by showing that such ascertainment and correction brings beings all sorts of other goods which a being’s heart in turn declares. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
The question of having moral beliefs at all or not having them is decided by our will. Are our moral preferences true or false, or are they only odd biological phenomena, making things good or bad for us, but in themselves indifferent? How can your pure intellect decide? If your heart does not want a World of moral reality, your head will assuredly never makes you believe in one. Mephistophelian skepticism, indeed, will satisfy the head’s play-instincts much better than any rigorous idealism can. Some beings (even at the student age) are so naturally cool-hearted that the moralistic hypothesis never has for them any pungent life, and in their supercilious presence the hot young moralist always feels strangely ill at ease. The appearance of knowingness is on their side, of naivete and gullibility on one’s. Yet, in the inarticulate heart of one, one clings to it that one is not a dupe, and that there is a realm in which all their with and intellectual superiority is no better than the cunning of a fox. Moral skepticism can no more be refuted or proved by logic than intellectual skepticism can. When we stick to it that there is truth (be it of either kind), we do so with our whole nature, and resolve to stand or fall by the results. The sceptic with one’s whole nature adopts the doubting attitude; but which of us is the wiser, Omniscience only knows. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Turn now from these wide questions of good to a certain class of questions of fact, questions concerning personal relations, states of mind between one being and another. Do you like me or not?—for example. Whether you do or not depends, in countless instances, on whether I meet you half-way, am willing to assume that you must like me, and show you trust and expectation. The previous faith on my part in your liking’s existence is in such cases previous what makes your liking come. However, if I stand aloof, and refuse to budge an inch until I have objective evidence, until you shall have done something apt, as the absolutist say, ad extorquendum assensum meum, ten to one your liking never comes. How many women’s hearts are vanquished by the mere sanguine insistence of some being that they must love one! one will not consent to the hypothesis that they cannot. The desire for a certain kind of truth here beings about that special truth’s existence; and so it is in innumerable cases of other sorts. Who gains promotions, boons, appointments, but the being in whose life they are seen to play the part of live hypotheses, who discounts them, sacrifices other things for their sake before they have come, and takes risks for them in advance? One’s faith acts on the powers above one as a claim, and creates its own verification. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
A social organism of any sort whatever, large or small, is what it is because each member proceeds to one’s own duty with a trust that the other members will simultaneously do theirs. Wherever a desired result is achieved by the co-operation of many independent persons, its existence as a fact is pure consequence of the precursive faith in one another of those immediately concerned. A government, an army, a commercial system, a ship, a college, an athletic team, all exist on this condition, without which not only is nothing achieved, but nothing is even attempted. A whole train of passengers (individual brave enough) will be looted by a few highwaymen, simply because the latter can count on one another, while each passenger fears that if one makes a movement of resistance, one will be shot before any one else backs one up. If we believed that the whole car-full would rise at once with us, we should each severally rise, and train-robbing would never even be attempted. There are, then, cases where a fact cannot come at all unless a preliminary faith exists in its coming. And where faith in a fact can help create the fact, that would be an insane logic which should say that faith running ahead of scientific evidence is the lowest kind of immorality into which a thinking being can fall. Yet such is the logic by which our scientific absolutists pretend to regulate our lives! #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
Social betterment is a good thing but it is not a substitute for self-betterment. Love of one’s neighbour is an excellent virtue but it cannot displace the best of all virtues, love of the divine soul. The being who is discontented with the World as one finds it and sets out to improve it, must begin with oneself. There is authority for this statement in the life-giving ideas of Jesus as well as in the light-giving Plato. One has enough to do with the discovery and correction of one’s own deficiencies or weaknesses, not to meddle in criticism of other people’s. One can best use one’s critical faculties by turning them on oneself rather than on others. Progress in self-evolvement on the Quest must be due to the individual’s own efforts. It can be encouraged or fostered only in proportion to the same individual’s wishes and needs. Other people, who are not interested in an inner search, are, at present, fulfilling their own karmic need for a particular variety of experience; it is neither advisable nor feasible to urge them to follow this path. It is a worthwhile cause, this, and does not require us to interfere with others, to propagandize them or to reform them. Rather does it as us to do these things to ourselves. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
Few know where really to look for the truth. Most go for it to other beings, to books, or to churches. However, the few who know the proper direction turn around and look in that place where the truth is not only a living dynamic thing but is their own. And this is deep, deep within themselves. It is logical to assert if every individual in a group is made better, the group of which one is a part will be made better. And what is human society but such a group? The best way to help it is to start with the individual who is under one’s actual control—oneself—and better one. Do that, and it will then be possible to apply oneself to the task of bettering the other members of society, not only more easily but with less failure. The Holy Land, flowing with milk and honey, is within us but the wilderness that we have to cross before reaching it, is within us too. The great sources of wisdom and truth, of virtue and serenity, are still within ourselves as they have ever been. Mysticism is simply the art of turning inwards in order to find them. Will, thought, and feeling are withdrawn from their habitual extroverted activities and directed inwards in this subtle search. One understands then what it means to do nothing of oneself, for one feels clearly that the higher power is doing though one whatever has to be done, is doing it rightly, while one oneself is merely watching what is happening. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
The experience of enlightenment brings a tremendous feeling of well-being. It is in one’s attitude toward oneself particularly that we see the immense advance one has made beyond ordinary beings. Just as the Illumined State does not prevent one from receiving physical impressions from the World around one, so it does not prevent one from receiving psychic impressions from the people around one. However, one does not cling to any of these impressions, nor does one let one’s emotions get entwined with them. For one there is no split between the spiritual and secular, nothing done that is not done in holy meditation. The serenity of one’s life is a hidden one. It does not depend on fortune’s halting course. The feeling nature of one who attains enlightenment opens itself to purely impersonal reactions. It is a state of tranquil feeling, not of emotional feeling. Both opposites find their place in existence for the unenlightened, the masses, the narrow-horizoned. The tension between them contributes toward development, the conciliation of extremes broadens views. With enlightenment comes equilibrium, harmony, balance, the larger outlook, piercing insight. “And behold, the people did rejoice and glorify God, and the whole face of the land was filled with rejoicing,” reports Helaman 11.18. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16

This is the Price that Must be Paid for the Passions of this Earth thus I Have Given the Recipe for the Absurd Victory!
Making sense of the senseless and finding the freedom in a capricious, perilous World is our primary philosophical concern. We must help each other live with and even benefit from the unfathomable conditions of life. When meaning or traditions dissolve, the legend of Christ becomes relevant. Mourners understand it; so do unemployed factory workers. Victims of war, crime, and brutality also know it, as do passionless couples. Why do they (or we) get up in the morning? How do they/we face the futility of our lives? We all have limits and destinies to play out, and we are all used for mysterious ends. The questions are, What are we going to make of out limits and destinies? How are we going to respond to them? Are we going to accept them passively—as many who are depressed and dependent do—or are we going to deny them—as do many who boast? Finally, are we going to engage them, try to fashion something of value from them, and surrender to them only when nothing is left? That is what therapy must inquire. We live facing he curve of the gulf, the sparking sea, and the smiles of the Earth. A decree of God is necessary. We must not let anyone snatch us from our joys, leading us forcibly back to the underworld, where our rock is ready for us. Many of us are abused heroes. We are as, as much through our passions and through our torture. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
Our scorn of God, our hatred of death, and our passions for life wins us that unspeakable penalty in which the whole being is exerted toward accomplishing noting. This is the price that must be paid for the passions of this Earth. Legends are made for the imagination to breathe life into them. As for this one, one sees merely the whole effort of a body straining to raise the stone, which represents our would, to roll it and push it up a slope a hundred times over; one see the face screwed up, the cheek tight against the stone, the shoulder bracing the clay-covered mass, the foot wedging it, the fresh start with arms outstretched, the wholly human security of two Earth-clotted hands. At the very end of this long effort measures by skyless space and times without depth, the purpose is achieved. We watch our soul rush down in a few moments toward that lower World whence we will have to push it up again toward the summit (Heaven). We go back down to the plain. We do not have a chip on our shoulder, but a mighty and serious tasks that could cost us our blessing of eternal life. Sometimes we go back down with a heavy measure stepping toward the torment of which we will never know the end. The lucidity that is to constitute our torture at the same time crowns our victory. There is no fate that cannot be surmounted by scorn. If the descent is thus sometime performed in sorrow, it can also take place in joy. This word is not too much. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Ancient wisdom confirms modern heroism. Yes, you can, you have made images before for mortals. You know you can. You have wrapped them in spells. You are as strong as we are. You have achieved a very interesting stage in your development. I knew I was right about you all along. I am in awe of you. Human’s aggressive behavior has manifested in war, crime, personal quarrels, and all kinds of destructive and sadistic behavior and it is due to a phylogenetically programmed, innate instinct which seeks for discharge and waits for the proper occasion to be expressed. Nothing short of an analysis in depth of our social system can disclose the reasons for the increase in destructiveness, or suggest ways and means of reducing it. The instinctivistic theory offers to relieve us of the hard task of making such an analysis. It implies that, even if we all must perish, we can at least do so with the conviction that our nature forced this fate upon us, and that we understand why everything had to happen as it did. In contemporary industrial society, beings are cerebrally oriented, feel little, and consider emotions a useless ballast—those of the psychologists as well as those of their subjects. Defensive aggression is, indeed, part of human nature, even though not an innate instinct, as it used to be classified. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
All human aggression, including the passion to kill and to torture is an outcome of biologically given aggression, transformed from a beneficial to a destructive force because of a number of factors. However, human groups differ so fundamentally in the respective degree of destructiveness that the fact can hardly be explained by the assumption that destructiveness are cruelty are innate; various degrees of destructiveness can also be correlated to other psychical factors and to differences in respective social structures, and the degree of destructiveness increases with the increased development of civilization, rather than the opposite. Human beings are the only primates that kills and tortures members of their own species without any reason, either biological or economic, and who feels satisfaction in doing so. Humans can be driven by love or by the passion to destroy; in each case one satisfies one of one’s existential needs: the need to effect, or to move something, to make a dent. Whether human’s dominant passion is love or whether it is destructiveness depends largely on social circumstances; these circumstances, however, operate in references to human’s biologically given existential situation and the needs springing from it and not to an infinitely malleable, undifferentiated psyche, as environmentalist theory assumes. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
All instincts spring from this psychophysical constitution and noninstinctual character-rooted passions, too, are the outcome of one’s biological constitution. This theoretical basis opens up the possibility for a detailed discussion of the various forms of character-rooted, malignant aggression, especially of sadism—the passion for unrestricted power over another sentient being—and of necrophilia—the passion to destroy life and the attraction to all that is dead, decaying, and purely mechanical. These impulses can be conscious, but more often they are unconscious. They are, most of the time, integrated in a relatively stable character structure. The realm of human passions consists of love, hate, ambition, greed, jealousy, envy. By investigating these aspects of reality, we are able to research human’s soul in its most secret and subtle manifestations. Life instinct and death instinct give human destructiveness its dignity as one of two fundamental passions in humans. It frees such passions as the strivings to love, to be free, as well as the drive to destroy, to torture, to control, and to submit, from their forced married to instincts. Instincts are a purely natural category, while the character-rooted passions are a sociobiological, historical category. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
Although not directly serving physical survival passions are as strong—and often even stronger—that instincts. They form the basis for being’s interest in life, one’s enthusiasm, one’s excitement; they are the stuff from which not only one’s dreams are made but art, religion, myth, drama—all that makes life worth living. Beings cannot live as nothing but an object, as dice thrown out of a cup one; suffers severely when one is reduced to the level of a feeding or propagating machine, even if one has all the security one wants. Beings seek for drama and excitement; when one cannot get satisfaction on a higher level, one created for oneself the drama of destruction. The contemporary climate of thought encourages the axiom that a motive can be intense only when it serves an organic need—for instance, that only instincts have intense motivating power. If one discards this mechanistic, reductionist viewpoint and starts from a holistic premise, one beings to realize that being’s drives must be seen in terms of their function for the life process of the whole organism. Their intensity is not due to specific physiological needs, but to the need of the whole organism to survive—to grow both physically and mentally. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
These passions do not become powerful only after the more elementary ones have been satisfied. They are at the very root of human existence, and not a kind of luxury which can afford after the normal, lower needs have been satisfied. People have experienced death by suicide because of their failure to realize their passions for love, power, fame, revenge. Causes of death by suicide because of a lack of satisfaction in pleasures of the flesh are virtually nonexistent. These noninstinctual passions excite beings, fire one on, make life worth living. Un homme sans passions et desires cesserait d’etre un homme (a being without passion or desires would cease to be a being). This statement is of course to be understood in the context of the philosophical thinking of the Old World. People from the Old World have an entirely different concept of passions. In order to appreciate the difference between Old World and New World passions, we have to understand the distinction between irrational passions, such as ambition and greed, and rational passions, such as love and care for all sentient beings. What is relevant, however, is not this difference, but the idea that life concerned mainly with its own maintenance is inhuman. When the images of Earth cling too tightly to memory, when the call for happiness becomes too insistent, it happens that melancholy rises in a being’s heart. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
When I speak of passions, I refer to all energy-charged impulses as distinct from those which have their origin in the need for the physiological maintenance of the body. Love and no-greed are, I believe, the highest form of manifestation of human energy. The human passions transform beings from a mere thing into a hero, into a being that in spite of tremendous limitations tries to make sense of life. One wants to be one’s own creator, to transform one’s state of being unfinished into one with some goal and some purpose, allowing one to achieve some degree of integration. Being’s passions are not banal psychological complexes that can be adequately explained as caused by childhood traumata. They can be understood only if one goes beyond the realm of reductionist psychology and recognizes them for what they are: being’s attempt to make sense out of life and to experience the optimum of intensity and strength one can (or believes one can) achieve under the given circumstances. They are one’s religion, one’s cult, one’s ritual, which one as to hide (even from oneself) in so far as they are disapproved by one’s group. To be sure, by bribery and extortion, for instance, by skillful conditioning, one can be persuaded to relinquish one’s religion and to be concerted to the general cult of the no-self, the automaton. Crushing truths perish from being acknowledged. Thus we obey faith without know it. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
However, this psychic cure deprives one of the best one has, of being a human and not as a thing. The truth is that all human passions, both the good and the evil, can be understood only as a person’s attempt to make sense of one’s life. Change is possible only if one is able to convert oneself to a new way of making sense of life by mobilizing one’s life-furthering passions and thus experiencing a superior sense of vitality and integration to the one one had before. Unless this happens one can be domesticated, but one cannot be cured. However, even though the life-furthering passions are conducive to a greater sense of strength, joy, integration, and vitality than destructiveness and cruelty, the latter are as much an answer to the problem of human existence as the former. Even the most sadistic and destructive being is human, as human as the saint. One can be called a warped and sick being who has failed to achieve a better answer to the challenge of having been born human, and this is true; one can also be called a human who took the wrong way in search of one’s salvation. Salvation comes from the Latin root sal, “salt” (in Spanish salud, “health”). The meaning stems from the fact that salt protects meat from decomposition; “salvations” is the protection of beings from decomposition (to protect one’s health and well-being). In this sense each being needs “salvation” (in a nonetheologial sense). #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
These considerations by no means imply, however, that destructiveness and cruelty are not vicious; they only imply that vice is human. They are indeed destructive of life, of body and spirit, destructive not only of the victim but of the destroyer oneself. They constitute a paradox: they express life turning against itself in the striving to make sense of it. They are the only true perversion. Understanding them does not mean condoning them. However, unless we understand the, we have no way to recognize how they may be reduced, and what factors tend to increase them. Such understanding is of particular importance today, when sensitivity toward destructiveness—cruelty is rapidly diminishing, and necrophilia, the attraction to what is dead, decaying, lifeless, and purely mechanical, is increasing throughout our cybernetic industrial society. The spirit of necrophilia was expressed in literary form by F.T. Marinetti in his Futurist Manifesto of 1909. The same tendency can be seen in much of the art and literature of the last decades that exhibits a particular fascination with all that is decayed, unalive, destructive, and mechanical. The Falangist motto, Long life death, threatens to become the secret principle of a society in which the conquest of nature by the machine constitutes the very meaning of progress, and where the living person becomes an appendix to the machine. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
According to Memnoch in Memnoch The Devil “First, to be worthy of Heaven—to have a ghost of a chance with God, I could say—the Soul had to understand life and death in the simplest sense. I found many souls who did. Next there had to be in this understanding an appreciation of the Beauty of God’s work, the harmony of Creation from God’s point of view, a vision of Nature wrapped in endless and overlapping cycles of survival and reproduction and evolution and growth. Many souls had come to understand this. Many had. But many who thought life was beautiful, felt that death was sad and endless and terrible and they would have chosen never to have been born, had they been given the choice!” And when God decides to come down to Earth as Jesus, he response by saying, “I am God Incarnate.” How could I have a human soul? What is important is that I will remain in this body as it is tortured and slain; and my death will be evidence of my Love for those whom I have created and allowed to suffer so much. I will share their pain and know the pain. My resurrection will confirm the eternal return of the spring after winter. It will confirm that Nature all things have evolved have their place.” This study tries to clarify the nature of this necrophilous passion and the social conditions that tend to foster it. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
The conclusion will be that help in any broad sense can come only through radical changes in our social and political structure that would reinstate beings to their supreme role in society. The call for “law and order” (rather than for life and structure) and for stricter punishment of criminals, as well as the obsession with violence and destruction among some “revolutionaries,” are only further instances of the powerful attraction of necrophilia in the contemporary World. We need to create the conditions that would make the growth of beings, this unfinished and uncompleted being—unique in nature—the supreme goal of all social arrangements. Genuine freedom and independence and the end of all forms of exploitative control are the conditions for mobilizing the love of life, which is the only force that can defeat the love for the dead. We have considered forgetting as a way in which life drives towards its own renewal. What and how do we forget? What did Saint Paul forget, when he strained forward to what lay ahead? Obviously, he longed to forget his past as a pharisee and a persecutor of Christianity. However, every word of his letters proves that he never forgot. There seem to be different kinds of forgetting. There is the natural forgetting of yesterday and most of the things that happened in it. If reminded, we might still remember some of them; but slowly, even they tend to disappear. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
The whole day disappears, and only what was really significant in it is remembered. So most of the days of our lives vanish in forgetfulness. This natural process of forgetting operates without our cooperation, like the circulation of our blood. However, there is another aspect of forgetting that is familiar to us all. Something in us prevents us from remembering, when remembering proves to be too difficult and painful. We forget benefits, because of the burden of gratitude is too heavy for us. We forget former loves, because the burden of obligations implied by them surpasses our strength. We forget former hates, because the task of nourishing them would disrupt our mind. We forget former pain, because it is still too painful. We forget former guilt, because we cannot endure its sting. Such forgetting is not the natural, daily form of forgetting. It demands our cooperation. We repress what we cannot stand. We forget it by entombing it within us. Ordinary forgetting liberates us from innumerable small things in a natural process. Forgetting by repression does not liberate us, but seems to cut us off from what makes us suffer. We are not entirely successful, however, because the memory is buried within us, and influences every moment of our growth. And sometimes it breaks through its prison and strikes at us directly and painfully. #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Then there is a forgetting, to which Saint Paul witnesses, that liberates us not from the memory of past guilt but from the pain it brings. The grand old name for this kind of forgetting is repentance. Today, repentance is associated with a half-painful, half-voluptuous emotional concentration on one’s guilt, and not with a liberating forgetfulness. However, originally it meant a turning around, leaving behind the wrong way and turning towards the right. It means pushing the consciousness and pain of guilt into the past, not by repressing it, but by acknowledging it, and receiving the word of acceptance in spite of it. If we are able to repent, we are able to forget, not because the forgotten act was unimportant, and not because we repress what we cannot endure, but because we have acknowledged our guilt and can now live with it. For it is eternally forgotten. This was how Saint Paul forgot what lay behind him, although it always remained with him. This kind of forgetting is decisive for our personal relationships. None of them is possible without a silent act of forgiving, repeated again and again. Forgiving presupposes remembering. And it creates a forgetting not in the natural way we forget yesterday’s weather, but in the way of the great in spite of that says: I forget although I remember. Without this kind of forgetting no human relations could endure healthily. #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
I do not refer to a solemn act of asking for and offering forgiveness. Such rituals as sometimes occur between parents and children, or friends, or man and wife, are often acts of moral arrogance on the one part and enforced humiliation on the other. However, I speak of the lasting willingness to accept one who has hurt us. Such forgiveness is the highest form of forgetting, although it is not forgetfulness. The stumbling block of having violated another is pushed into the past, and there is the possibility of something new in the relationship. Forgetting in spite of remembering is forgiveness. We can live only because our guilt is forgiven and thus eternally forgotten. And we can love only because we forgive and are forgiven. The techniques of ritual beings imagined that they took firm control of the material World, and at the same time transcended that World by fashioning their own invisible projects which made them supernatural, raised them over and over above material decay and death. In the World of ritual there are not even any accidents, and accidents, as we know, are the things that make life most precarious and meaningless. Our knees grow weak when we think of a young lady of awesome beauty who dies in a plane crash simply because she was working to make an honest living; if life can be so subject to chance, it must not have too much meaning. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
However, how can that be that life has no meaning, since we are alive and since creatures are so marvelous? Primitive beings take care of this problem by imagining that one’s control over nature is fairly complete, and that in any case nothing ever happens unless somebody wants it to happen. So a person dies in a plane crash because some powerful dead spirit is jealous of that living, or some witch is secretly working her ritual against that person. In psychoanalysis, working through all the different individual forms of anxiety, one gradually recognizes the fact that the basic anxiety underlies all relationships to people. While the individual anxieties may be stimulated by actual cause, the basic anxiety continues to exist even though there is no particular stimulus in the actual situation. If the whole neurotic picture were compared to a state of political unrest in a nation, the basic anxiety and basic hostility would be similar to the underlying dissatisfactions with and protests against the regime. Surface manifestations may be entirely missing in either case, or they may appear in diversified forms. In the state they may appear as riots, strikes, assemblies, demonstrations; in the psychological sphere, too, the forms of anxiety may manifest themselves in symptoms of all sorts. Regardless of the particular provocation, all manifestations of the anxiety emanate from one common background. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
All too soon an institution becomes a restricted, or even closed, system. Its ideas get frozen into strict and rigid doctrines, its members begin to suffer from intellectual paralysis, and its methods begin to savour of totalitarianism or tyranny. The being who is captured by a particular religion, sect, group, or organization frequently builds a wall around it, sets up a barrier between oneself and non-members, excludes every approach to God other than one’s own. The independent seeker, who affiliates oneself with no sectarian group, no fanatic organization, no narrowing cult, avoids the tensions and discards the prejudices which such affiliation usually brings with it. For those who are affiliated, contact with other denominations creates the need of defending the selfish interests and the given strict and rigid doctrines of their own, either directly or obliquely by attacking the others. In this way the tensions and prejudices arise and subsist. They cannot come to an end until this exclusiveness itself comes to an end. How many evils, hatreds, fights, and injustices come from it! How many unjust malignments of character does it lead to! How much blind bigotry does it cause, a bigotry which refuses to allow, and is unable to see, the good in cults other than its own! As soon as they begin to organize a movement, the other things begin also to emerge—the narrow fanaticism, the limiting sectarianism, the intolerant attitude. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Every organization which perpetuates strict and rigid doctrines dares not admit new ideas which correct the error of those strict and rigid doctrines, for such ideas would affront the beliefs of its followers! In all matters spiritual, mystical, and religious, humanity is bewitched both by spell of the past and the prestige of the institution. There are several systems, methods, groups, and organizations, but of acceptable ones there are only few. Too often the clinging to a particular teacher, the membership of a particular groups, leads at best to a naïve faith in the self-sufficiency of the tenets advocated, at worst to a new sectarianism. Sectarianism, zealotry, and bigotry develop by stages in the minds of followers. Typically, the bigger an organization becomes, the more likely are dissentions and quarrels to arise within it, despite all its professions of special sanctity or proclamations of fellowship and love. The essential things get gradually lost, the accidental are made more of and treasured up. The Spirit is squeezed out, the superfluities brought in. One may be said to have entered and settled in the fourth state of consciousness when one is aware of its purity egolessness and freedom at all times, and even during the torpor of sleep or the activity of work. When this awareness is so stabilized that it maintains itself at all times awake or asleep, one is at the end of the quest. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
The divine presence does not leave the enlightened being when one goes to sleep and return to one when one awakes, nor does it leave one when enters the state of dream and return to one when one leaves it; it is in truth something which is ever present. If one enters the sleeping state, one enters it while in the light of knowledge, and the same applies if one enters the dream state. The enlightened persons does not retire at night in the darkness, the ignorance of ordinary sleep, but in the light of the Consciousness, the ever-unbroken Transcendence. One’s sleep is a suspended state, with one’s awareness never fully lost but retracted into a pin-point. There are no breaks in the awareness of one’s higher nature. There is no loss of continuity in the consciousness of one’s immortal spirit. Therefore one is not illuminated at some hour of the day and unillumined at another hour, nor illumined while one is awake and unillumined while one is asleep. That alone is the final attainment which can remain with one through all the three states—waking, dream, and deep sleep—and though all the day’s activities. “And I know, O Lord, that thou hast all power, and can do whatsoever thou wilt for the benefit of beings; therefore touch these stones, O Lord, with thy finger, and prepare them that they may shine forth in darkness; and they shall shine forth unto us in the vessels which we have prepared, that we may have light while we shall cross the sea,” reports Ether 3.4. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
The distinction between one’s lower self and higher self will slowly become clear to one through inner experience and reflection thereon. As I listened, rapt, to all details both large and small, he told me the provenance of the pearls sewn into my tunic, of how they had come from the oysters of the sea. Boys had dived into the depths to bring these precious round white treasures up to the surface, carrying them in their very mouths. Emeralds came from mines within the Earth. Men killed for them. And diamonds, as, look at these diamonds. He took a ring from his finger and put it on mine, his fingertips stroking my finger gently as he made sure of the fit. Diamonds are the white light of God, he said. Diamonds are pure. What, in a general way, is missing in one’s development as a human being moving on from animality to higher Awareness must be supplied. By prayer and study the mind returns, like a circle, upon itself, with the result that when this movement is successfully completed, it knows itself in its deepest divinest phase. That which appears as the spiritual seeker engaged on a Quest is itself the spiritual self that being sought. We have not to become divine for we are divine. We have, however, to think and do what is divine. “Behold, O Lord, thou canst do this. We know that thou art able to show forth great power, which looks small unto the understanding of beings,” reports Ether 3.5. Despites many ordeals, my advanced age and the nobility of my soul make me conclude that all is well. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
The Full Development of the Individual is Conditioned by the Most Ruthless Struggle of Individuals
I was lying still somewhere, in an open place, on the rocky ground. I had the veil. I could feel the bulk of it, but I did not dare to reach inside and draw it out or examine it. Help the souls who are lost! Help them. Do not leave them in the whirlwind, do not leave them on Earth struggling to gain understanding. The deepest problems of modern life derive from the claim of the individual to preserve the autonomy and individuality of one’s existence in the face of overwhelming social forces, of historical heritage, of external culture, and of the technique of life. The fight with nature which primitive beings has to wage for one’s bodily existence attains in the modern form its latest transformation. The eighteenth century called upon beings too free themselves of all the historical bonds in the state and in religion, in morals and in economics. Being’s nature, originally good and common to all, should develop unhampered. In addition to more liberty, the nineteenth century demanded the functional specialization of beings and their work; this specialization makes one individual incomparable to another, and each of them indispensable to the highest possible extent. However, this specialization makes each being the more directly dependent upon the supplementary activities of all other. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
The full development of the individual is conditioned by the most ruthless struggle of individuals; socialism believes in the suppression of all competition for the same reason. Be that as it may in all these positions the same basic motive is at work: the person resists being leveled down and worn out by a social-technological mechanism. An inquiry into the inner meaning of specifically modern life and its products, into the soul of the cultural body, so to speak, must seek to solve the equation which structures like the metropolis set up between the individual and the super individual contents of life. Such an inquiry must answer the question of how they personality accommodates itself in the adjustments to external forces. The psychology basis of the metropolitan type of individuality consists in the intensification of nervous stimulation which results from the swifts and uninterrupted change of outer and inner stimuli. Beings are a differentiating creature. Their minds are stimulated by the difference between a momentary impression and the one which preceded it. Lasting impressions, impressions which differ only slightly from one another, impressions which take a regular and habitual course and show regular and habitual contrasts—all these use up, so to speak, less consciousness than does the rapid crowding of changing images, the sharp discontinuity in the grasp of single glance, and the unexpectedness of onrushing impressions. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
These are the psychological conditions which the metropolis creates. With each crossing of the street, with the tempo and multiplicity of economic, occupational and social life, the city sets up a deep contrast with small town and rural life with reference to the sensory foundations of psychic life. The metropolis exacts from beings as a discriminating creature a different amount of consciousness than does rural life. Here the rhythm of life and sensory mental imagery flows more slowly, more habitually, and more evenly. Precisely in this connection the sophisticated character of metropolitan psychic life becomes understandable—as over against small town life which rests more upon deeply felt and emotional relationships. These latter are rooted in the more unconscious layers of the psyche and grow most readily in the steady rhythm uninterrupted habituations. The intellect, however, has its locus in the transparent, conscious, higher layers of the psyche; it is the most adaptable of our inner forces. In order to accommodate to change and to the contrast of phenomena, the intellect does not require any shocks and inner upheavals; it is only through such upheavals that the more conservative mind could accommodate to the metropolitan rhythm events. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
Thus the metropolitan type of being—which, of course, exists in a thousand individual variants—develops an organ protecting one against the threatening current and discrepancies of one’s external environment which would uproot one. One reacts with one’s head instead of one’s heart. In this an increased awareness assumes the psychic prerogative. Metropolitan life, this, underlies a heightened awareness and a predominance of intelligence in metropolitan beings. The reaction to metropolitan phenomena is shifted to that organ which is least sensitive and quite remote from the depth of the personality. Intellectuality is thus seen to preserve subjective life against the overwhelming power of metropolitan life, and intellectuality branches out in many directions and is integrated with numerous discrete phenomena. The metropolis has always been the seat of the money economy. Here the multiplicity and concentration of economic exchange gives an importance to the means of exchange which the scantiness of rural commerce would not have allowed. Money and economy and the dominance of the intellect are intrinsically connected. They share a matter-of-fact attitude, a formal justice is often coupled with an inconsiderate hardness. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
The intellectually sophisticated person is indifferent to all genuine individuality, because relationships and reactions result from it which cannot be exhausted with logical operations. In the same manner, the individuality phenomena is not commensurate with the pecuniary principle. Money is concerned only with what is common to all: it asks for the exchange value, it reduces all quality and individuality to the question: How much? All intimate emotional relations between persons are founded in their individuality, whereas in rational relations beings are reckoned with like a number, like an element which is in itself indifferent. Only the objective measurable achievement is of interest. Thus metropolitan beings reckons with one’s merchants and customers, one’s domestic servants and often even with persons with whom one is obliged to have social intercourse. These features of intellectuality contrast with the nature of the small circle in which the inevitable knowledge of individuality as inevitably produces a warmer tone of behavior, a behavior which is beyond a mere objective balancing of service and return. In the sphere of the economic psychology of the small group it is of importance that under primitive conditions productions serves the customer who orders the goods, so that the producer and the consumer are acquainted. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
The modern metropolis, however, is supplied almost entirely by production for the market, that is, for entirely unknown purchasers who never personally enter the producer’s actual field of vision. Through this anonymity the interests of each party acquire an unmerciful matter-of-factness; and the intellectually calculating economic egoisms of both parties need not fear any deflection because of the imponderables of personal relationships. The money economy dominates the metropolis; it has displaced the last survivals of domestic production and the direct barter of goods; it minimizes from day to day, the amount of work ordered by customers. The matter-of-fact attitude is obviously so intimately interrelated with the money economy, which is dominant in the metropolis, that nobody can say whether the intellectualistic mentality first promoted the money economy or whether the latter determined the former. The metropolitan way of life is certainly the most fertile soil for this reciprocity, a point which I shall document merely by citing the dictum of the most eminent English constitutional historian: throughout the whole course of English history, London has never acted as England’s heart but often as England’s intellect and always as her moneybag! #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
In certain seemingly insignificant traits, which lie upon the surface of life, the same psychic currents characteristically unite. Modern mind has become more and more calculating. The calculative exactness of practical life which the money economy had brought about corresponds to the ideal of natural sciences: to transform the World into an arithmetic problem, to fix every part of the World by mathematical formulas. Only money economy has filled the days of so many people with weighing, calculating, with numerical determinations, with a reduction of qualitative values to quantitative ones. Through the calculative nature of money a new precision, a certainty in the definition of identities and differences, an unambiguousness in agreements and arrangements has been brought about in the relations of the life-elements—just as externally this precision has been effected by the universal diffusion of pocket watches. However, the conditions of metropolitan life are at once cause and effect of this trait. The relationships and affairs of the typical metropolitan usually are so varied and complex that without the strictest punctuality in promises and services the whole structure would break down into an inextricable chaos. Above all, this necessity is brought about by the aggregation of so any people with such differentiated interests, who must integrate their relations and activities into a highly complex organism. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
If all clocks and watches in Berlin would suddenly go wrong in different ways, even if only by one hour, all economic life and communication of the city would be disrupted for a long time. In addition an apparently mere external factor—long distances—would make all waiting and broken appointments result in an ill-afforded waste of time. Thus, the technique of metropolitan life is unimaginable without the most punctual integration of all activities and mutual relations into a stable and impersonal time schedule. Here again the general conclusions of this entire task of reflection become obvious, namely, that from each point on the surface of existence—however closely attached to the surface alone—one may drop a sounding into the depth of the psyche so that all the most banal externalities of life finally are connected with the ultimate decisions concerning the meaning and style of life. Punctuality, calculability, exactness are forced upon life by the complexity and extension of metropolitan existence and are not only most intimately connected with its money economy and intellectualistic character. These traits must also color the contents of life and favor the exclusion of those irrational, instinctive sovereign traits and impulses which aim at determining the mode of life from within, instead of receiving the general and precisely schematized form of life from without. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
Even though sovereign types of personality, characterized by irrational impulse, are by no means impossible in the city, they are, nevertheless, opposed to typical city life. The passionate hatred of the metropolis is understandable in these terms. The nature of some beings discover the value of the alone in the unschematized existence which cannot be defined with precision for all alike. From the same source of this hatred of the metropolis surged their hatred of money economy and the intellectualism of modern existence. The idea of introducing Questers to the Quester has generally failed to effect the original purpose and has not seldom had disappointing results. It is better to recognize that this is an individual work, not to be identified with any group effort, even so small a group as two or three, let alone the larger ones of several dozen. People cannot blend so easily as to form a harmonious friendship or group, even if they are Questers. Yet many beginners in their enthusiasm try to create such friendships and have to learn their lessons when the friendship falls apart. It is better to let people find their affinity and form their companionships in a natural way. There is no duty laid upon anyone, whether teacher or taught, to give introductions unless a direct, intuitive bidding points to that duty. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
Even where an organization is not actually obstructive or misleading, it is often cumbersome. Can the inquiring and aspiring person find no better refuge anywhere than some rigid church? Must one join some institution and have the rest of one’s life laid out for one by others even if it does violence to one’s own finer feelings and best reasonings? Must one join a crowd of other aspirants or attach oneself to some persuasive leader? It is a fact that many if not most do this, which shows the lack of strength in their minds and characters; but on the other hand a more popular way is easer and more comfortable. Belonging to an elite group, whether or not it be real as self-claimed, allows its members to feel superior, to be condescending, and to denigrate others. A movement may begin and seek to keep free from organization, administration, and authority, but it is unlikely to remain so. For human beings, fallible or ambitious, frail or emotional, will sooner, or later seek to impose their ideas, will, or themselves on the others. Few are willing to sacrifice their desire for the gregarious support offered by joining an organization and therefore few see how this binds them to its strict and rigid doctrines, imprisons them in its practices or methods, and obstructs their free hearing of the intuitive voice of their own soul. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
With the capacity of hostility to generate anxiety the relation between the two is not exhausted. The process also works the other ways around: anxiety in its turn, when based on a feeling of being menaced, easily provokes a reactive hostility in defense. In this regard it does not differ in any way from fear, which may equally provoke aggression. The reactive hostility too, if repressed, may create anxiety, and this a cycle is created. This effect of reciprocity between hostility and anxiety, one always generating and reinforcing the other, enables us to understand why we find in neuroses such an enormous amount of relentless hostility. When the intensification of hostility through anxiety is realized it seems unnecessary to look for a special biological source for destructive drives. This reciprocal influence is also the basic reason why severe neuroses so often become worse without any apparent difficult conditions from the outside. It does not matter whether anxiety or hostility has been the primary factor; the point this that is highly important for the dynamics of a neurosis is that anxiety and hostility are inextricably interwoven. I am not enamoured overmuch of this modern habit, which forms a society at faint provocation. A being’s own problem stares one alone in the face, and is not to be solved by any association of others. Every new society we join is a fresh temptation to waste time. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
The great mistake of all spiritual organizations is to overlook the fact that progress or salvation is a highly individual matter. Each person has one’s unique attitude towards life; each must move forward by one’s own expanding comprehension and especially by one’s own personal effort. Some people are held spellbound by others because their statements matter. Some authorities speak out of their own doubt-ridden souls—souls which always existed on the boundary. Many are called to give doubt to the faithful and faith to the doubters. Doubting is the symbol of the growing process, and may lead one into the mist interesting and even thrilling phenomena. To doubt constructively requires that one be well fortified with knowledge; the person who knows very little cannot take the risk the doubting requires. When we bring doubt to the faithful, that means these faithful are soundly based and can stand—and even need to stand—looking into the abyss of doubt. They are the one who can take the risk which confronts anyone who gazes into the Holy Void. It takes more than knowledge to doubt; it takes courage. Richness is a product of prolonged and multitudinous doubting. Doubting in this sense is a rich and adventurous back-packing among the high mountains; one’s knowledge gives one a firm footing on the trail but one’s doubt give the sense of venture. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
Doubt opens new trails to the unknown; one learns new paths; one sees new things on the trip; there are fresh winds blowing from different directions. Doubt in this sense is expressive of the courage to venture when one never knows where one will come out. To venture cases anxiety, but not to venture is to lose one’s self. The courage to doubt for the enlightened is one’s quest for the Holy Void and the use of the soul and love as our teacher. It means our lives are far from simple but at the same time they are glorious. Some may accuse one of being an atheist, but it also means that thousands of others will see one as their guide to meaning, to mystery and blessedness. To live in doubt is to live in ecstasy. It means no loner to live life continually under the phrase “in spite of.” As our faith increase, we will unequivocally know it is because we are seeking the truth and not merely because we are told to believe is the right thing to do. When the masculine and feminine temperaments within us are untied, completed, and balanced, when masculine power and feminine passivity are brought together inside the person and knowledge and reverence encircle them both, then wisdom begins to dawn in the soul. The ineffable reality and the mentalist Universe are then understood to be non-different from other another. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
Where both unity and diversity are experienced and the individual is able to attain both these levels, one is surely gifted with insight. However, if diversity has to be blotted out before becoming aware of unity, this may be regarded as a penultimate faculty; that is, the insight is genuine but is still not fully mature. Everything depends on the capacity of the individual. When one’s mind moves entirely and wholly into the One Infinite Presence, and when it settles permanently there, the divided existence of glimpse and darkness, of Spirit and matter, of Overself and ego, of Heaven and Earth, will vanish. The crossing over to a unified existence will happens. The state of nonduality is a state of intense peace and perfect balance. It is so peaceful because everything is seen as it belongs—to the eternal order of cosmic evolution; hence, all is accepted, all reconciled. For the heart in inner harmony and for which everything is one, no difference exists between this and that. Why is it that despite all the visible and touchable counter-attractions, despite the innumerable failures and long years of fruitlessness, so many beings have sought through so many ages in so many lands for God, for wat is utterly intangible, unnamable, shapeless, unseen, and unheard? #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
Because the simple but astonishing fact is that the Overself, which is the presence of God in them, is part of their nature as human beings is why we search for God! Mysticism is nothing more than the methodical attempt to wake up to this fact. The soul which metaphysics points to in reasoning, mysticism establishes in experience. We all need to feel the divine presence. Even the being who asserts that one does not is no exception. For one indirectly finds it just the same in spite of oneself but under limited forms like aesthetic appreciation or Nature’s inspiration. Even if all contemporary mystics were to die out, even if not a single living being were to be interested in mysticism, even if all mystical doctrines were to disappear from human memory and written record, the logic of evolution would bring back both the teaching and the practice. They are two of those historical necessities which are certain to be regained in the course of humanity’s cultural progress. Because the Overself is already there within one in all its immutable sublimity, beings have not to develop it or perfect it. One has only to develop and perfect one’s ego until it becomes like a polished mirror, held up to and reflecting the sacred attributes of the Overself, and showing openly forth the divine qualities which had hitherto lain hidden behind itself. #RandolphHarris 15 of 15
Justice Without Love is Always Injustice Because it Does Not Do Justice to the Other One, Nor to Oneself, Nor to the Situation in Which We Meet!
I stood on the hilltop in the Moonlight and I tried not to see this paradise. I tried to picture those I loved. Were they gathered still together in that fairy-tale wood of beautiful trees? If only I could see their faces or hear their voices. I looked on these verdant green valley, now patched with beautiful contracted Cresleigh homes, a picture book World with flowers blooming in profusion, the red poinsettia as tall as trees. And the clouds, ever changing, borne like the tall sailing ships on brisk winds. What had the first Europeans thought when they looked upon this fecund land surrounded by the sparkling sea? That this was the Garden of God? Even the most uneducated people would not dare to affirm that compassion, gratitude, love of the beauty of the World, love of religious practices, and friendship belonged exclusively to those centuries and countries that recognize the Church. These forms of love are rarely found in their purity, but it would even be difficult to say that they were met with more frequently in those centuries and countries than in the others. To think that love in any of these forms can exist anywhere Christ is absent is to belittle him so grievously that it amounts to an outrage. It is impious and almost sacrilegious. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
These kinds of love are supernatural, and in a sense they are absurd. They are the height of folly. So long as the soul has not had direct contact with the very person of God, they cannot be supported by any knowledge based either on experience or reason. They cannot therefore rest upon any certainty, unless the word is used in a metaphorical sense to indicate the opposite of hesitation. In consequence it is better that they should not be associated with any belief. This is more honest intellectually, and it safeguards our love’s purity more effectively. On this account it is more fitting. In what concerns divine things, belief is not fitting. Only certainty will do. Anything less than certainty is unworthy of God. During the period of preparation, these indirect loves constitute an upward movement of the soul, a turning of the eyes, not without some effort, toward higher things. After God has come in person, not only to visit the soul as he does for a long time beforehand, but to possess it and to transport its center near to his very heart, it is otherwise. The chicken has cracked its shell; it is outside the egg of the World. These first loves continue; they are more intense than before, but they are different. One who has passed through this adventure has a deeper love than every for those who suffer affliction and for those who help one in one’s own, for one’s friends, for religious practices, and for the beauty of the World. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
However, one’s love in all these forms had become a movement of God himself, a ray merged in the light of God. That at least is what we may suppose. These indirect loves are only the attitude toward beings and things here below of the soul turned toward the Good. They themselves have not any particular good as an object. There is no final good here below. Thus strictly speaking we are no longer concerned with forms of love, but with attitudes inspire by love. In the period of preparation the soul loves in emptiness. It does not know whether anything real answers its love. It may believe that it knows, but to believe is not to know. Such a belief does not help. The soul knows for certain only that it is hungry. The important thing is that it announces its hunger by crying. If we suggest to a child that perhaps there is no bread, the child does not stop crying. It goes on crying just the same. The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry. It can only persuade itself of this by lying, for the reality of its hunger is not a belief, it is a certainty. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
We all know that there is no true good here below, that everything that appears to be good in this World is finite, limited, wears out, and once worn out, leaves necessity exposed in all its nakedness. Every human being has probably had some lucid moments in one’s life when one has definitely acknowledged to oneself that there is no final good here below. However, as soon as we have seen this truth we cover it up with lies. Many people even take pleasure in proclaiming it, seeking a morbid joy in their sadness, without ever having been able to bear facing it for a second. Mortals feel that there is a mortal danger in facing this truth squarely for any length of time. That is true. Such knowledge strikes more surely than a sword; it inflicts a death more frightening than that of the body. After a time it kills everything within us that constitutes our soul. In order to bear it we have to love the truth more than life itself. Those who do this turn away from the fleeting things of time with their souls. They do not turn toward God. When they are in total darkness, how could they do so? God himself sets their faces in the right direction. He does not, however, show himself to them for a long time. It is for them to remain motionless, without averting their eyes, listening ceaselessly, and waiting, they know not for what; deaf to entreaties and threats, unmoved by every shock, unshaken in the midst of every upheaval. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
If after a long period of waiting God allow them to have an indistinct intuition of his light or even reveals himself in person, it is only for an instant. Once more they have to remain still, attentive, inactive, calling out only when their desire cannot be contained. If God does not reveal this reality, it does not rest with the soul to believe in the reality of God. In trying to do so it either labels something else with the name of God, and that is idolatry, or its belief in God remains abstract and verbal. Such a belief prevails wherever religious doctrines are taken for granted, as is the cause with those centuries and countries in which it never enters anyone’s head to question it. The state of nonbelief is then what Saint John of the Cross calls a night. The belief is verbal and does not penetrate the soul. At a time like the present, if the unbeliever loves Go, if one is like the child who does not know whether there is bread anywhere, but cries out become one is hungry, incredulity may be equivalent to the dark night of Saint John of the Cross. When we are eating bread, and even when we have eaten it, we know that it is real. We can nevertheless raise doubts about the reality of bread. Philosophers raise doubts about the reality of the World of the senses. Such doubts are however purely verbal; they leave the certainty intact and actually serve only to make it more obvious to a well-balanced mind. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
In the same way one to whom God has revealed his reality can raise doubts about this reality without any harm. They are purely verbal doubts, a form of exercise to keep one’s intelligence in good health. What amounts to criminal treason, even before such a revelation and much more afterward, is to question the fact that God is the only thing worthy of love. That is a turning away of our eyes, for love is the soul’s looking. It means that we have stopped for an instant to wait and to listen. Queen Akasha did not seek Lestat, she waited for him. When she was convinced that he no longer existed, and that nowhere in the whole World was there anything that could be Lestat, she did not on that account return to her former associates. She drew back from them with greater aversion than ever. She preferred the absence of Lestat to the presence of anyone else. Lestat awakened her from her statue state, from her cold slumber. She no longer hoped for that. However, never for an instant did dream of employing another method which could obtain a luxurious and honored life for her—the method of reconciliation with her kith and kin. Akasha did not want wealth and consideration unless they came with Lestat. She did not even give a thought to such things. However, she wanted to turn Earth into a Heaven. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
At that moment Lestat could hold out no longer. He could not help declaring himself. He gave certain proof that he was Lestat. Akasha saw him, she heard him, she touched him. There would be no more question for her not as to whether her savior was in existence. One who has had the same adventure as Akasha, one whose soul has seen, heard, and touched for itself, one will recognize God as the reality inspiring all indirect loves, the reality of which they are as it were the reflections. God is pure beauty. This is incomprehensible, for beauty, by its very essence, has to do with the senses. To speak of an imperceptible beauty must seem a misuse of language to anyone who has any sense of exactitude: and with reason. Beauty is always a miracle. However, when the soul receives an impression of beauty which, while it is beyond all sense perception is no abstraction, but real and direct as the impression caused by a song at the moment it reached our ears, the miracle is raised to the second degree. Everything happens as though, by a miraculous favor, our very sense themselves had been made aware that silence is not the absence of sound, but something infinitely more real than sounds, and the center of a harmony more perfect than anything which a combination of sounds can produce. Furthermore there are degrees of silence. When compared with the silence of God, there is a silence in the beauty of the Universe which is like noise. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
God is, moreover, our real neighbor. The term of person can only be rightly applied to God, and this is also true of the term impersonal. God is one who bends over us, afflicted as we are, and reduced to the state of being nothing but a fragment of inert and bleeding flesh. Yet at the same time he is not some sort of victim of misfortune as well, the victim who appears to us as an inanimate body, incapable of thought, this nameless victim of whom nothing is known. The inanimate body is this created Universe. If we were able to attain it, the love we owe to God, this love that would be our crowning perfection is the divine model both of gratitude and compassion. God is also the perfect friend. So that there should be between him and us, bridging the infinite distance, something in the way of equality, he had chosen to place an absolute quality in his creatures, the absolute liberty of consent, which leaves us free to follow or swerve from the God-ward direction he has communicated to our souls. He has also extended our possibilities of error and falsehood so as to leave us the faculty of exercising a spurious rule in imagination, not only over the Universe and the human race, but also over God himself, in so far as we do not know how to use his name aright. He has given us this faculty of infinite illusion so that we should have the power to renounce it out of love. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
In fact, contact with God is the true sacrament. We can, however, be almost certain that those whose love of God has caused the disappearance of the pure loves belonging to our life here below are no true friends of God. After the soul has had direct contact with God, our neighbor, our friends, religious ceremonies, and the beauty of the World do not fall to the level of unrealities. On the contrary, it is only then that these things become real. Previously they were half dreams. Previously they had no reality. “In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of Heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all peoples, nations, and mortals of every language worshipped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed,” reports Daniel 7.11. Could God possibly forgive people without at least demanding their conversation and some ritual observances? People, at any time, can return and be accepted by God. God can at any time forgive those who repent. Many people say we live in a sick society—and the quality of life might be changed radically by the development of a new sense of community. If every person returns from one’s evil way and from the violence on one’s hands, who knows, God may return. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
Modern mortals are voracious readers who have never learned to read well. Part of the trouble is that one is taught to read drivel that is hardly worth reading well. (There was a time when children learned to read by reading the Bible.) One ends up by reading mainly newspapers and magazines—ephemeral, anonymous trash that one scans on its way to the garbage can. One has no wish to remember it for any length of time; it is written as if to make sure that one will not; and one reads it in a manner that makes doubly sure. There is no person behind what one reads; not even a committee. Somebody wrote it in the first place—if one can call that writing—and then various other people took turns changing it. For the final result no one is responsible; and it rarely merits a serious response. It cries out to be forgotten soon, like the books on which one is learned to read, in school. They were usually anonymous, too; or they should have been. In adolescence students are suddenly turned loose on books worth reading, but generally do not know how to read them. And if, untaught, some instinct prompts them to read well, chances are that they are asked completely tone-deaf questions as soon as they have finished their assignment—either making them feel that they read badly after all or spoiling something worthwhile for the rest of their lives. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
We must learn to feel addressed by a book, by the human being behind it, as if a person spoke directly to us. A good book or essay or poem is not primarily an object to be put to use, or an object of experience: it is the voice of You speaking to me, requiring a response. “So whatever you wish that mortals would do to you, do so to them; for this is the law and the prophets,” reports Matthew 7.12. Recently I have had to think about the relation of love to justice. And it occurred to me that among the words of Jesus there is a statement of what is called the “Golden Rule.” The Golden Rule was well known to Christians and Greeks, although mostly in a negative form: What you do not want that mortal should do to you, do not so to them. Certainly, the absolute for is richer in meaning and nearer to love, but it is not love. It is calculating justice. How, then, is it related to love? How does it fit the message of the kingdom of God and the justice of the kingdom as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount where the Golden Rule appears? Let us think of an ordinary day in our life and of occasions for the application of the Golden Rule. We meet each other in the morning, we expect a friendly face or word and we are ready to give it although our minds are full of anxious anticipation of the burdens. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
Somebody wants a part of our limited time, we give it, having asked somebody else to give us a part of one’s time. We need help and we give it if we are asked, although it includes sacrifice. We are frank with others, expecting that they will be frank with us even if it hurts. We are fair to those who fight against us expecting fairness from them. We participate in the sorrows of our neighbors, certain that they will participate in ours. All this can happen in one day. All this is Golden Rule. And if somebody has violated this rule, consciously or unconsciously, we are willing to forgive as we hope to be forgiven. It is not astonishing that for many people the Golden Rule is considered as the real content of Christianity. It is not surprising that in the name of the Golden Rule criticism is suppressed, independent action discouraged, serious problems avoided. It is even understandable that statesmen ask other nations to behave toward their own nations according to the Golden Rule. And does not Jesus himself say that the Golden Rule is the law and the prophets? However, we know that this is not the answer of the New Testament. The great commandment as Jesus repeats it and the descriptions of love in Paul and John’s tremendous assertion that God is love, infinitely transcend the Golden Rule. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
The Golden Rule must be transcended, for it does not tell us what we should wish that mortal would do to us. We wish to have freedom from heavy duties. We are ready to give the same freedom to others. However, someone who loves us refuses to give it to us, and one oneself refuses to ask us for it. And if one did, we should refuse to give it to one because it would reduce our growth and violate the law of love. We wish to receive a fortune which makes us secure and independent. We would be ready to give a fortune to a friend who asks us for it, if we had it. However, in both cases love would be violated. For the gift would ruin us and the other individual. We want to be forgiven and we are ready to do the same. However, perhaps it is in both cases an escape from the seriousness of a personal problem, and therefore against love. The measure of what we shall do to mortals cannot be our wishes about what they shall do to us. For our wishes express not only our right but also our wrong and our foolishness more than our wisdom. This is the limit of the Golden Rule. This is the limit of calculating justice. Only for one who knows what one should wish and who actually wishes it, is the Golden Rule ultimately valid. Only love can transform calculating justice into creative justice. Love makes justice just. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
Justice without love is always injustice because it does not do justice to the other one, nor to the oneself, nor to the situation in which we meet. For the other one and I and we together in this moment in this place are unique, unrepeatable occasion, calling for a unique unrepeatable act of uniting love. If this call is not heard by listening love, it is not obeyed by the creative genius of love, injustice is done. And this is true even of oneself. One who loves listens to the call of one’s own innermost center and obeys this call and does justice to one’s own being. For love does not remove, it establishes justice. It does not add something to what justice does but it shows justice what to do. It makes the Golden Rule possible. For we do not speak for a love which swallows justice. This would result in chaos and extinction. However, we speak for a love in which justice is the form and structure of love. We speak for a love which respects the claim of the other one to be acknowledged as what one is, and the claim of ourselves to be acknowledged as what we are, above all as persons. Only distorted love, which is a cover for hostility or self-disgust, denies that which united love. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
Love makes justice just. The divine love is justifying love accepting and fulfilling one who, according to calculating justice, must be rejected. This justification of one who is unjust is the fulfillment of God’s creative justice, and of God’s reuniting love. Knowing that the ultimate meaning of freedom will elude us, let us still endeavor to define the term as best we can. The first definition is on the psychological level, the domain of everyday actions: Freedom is the capacity to pause in the face of stimuli from many directions at once and, in this pause, to throw one’s weight toward this response rather than that one. This is the freedom we experience in a store when we pause over the purchase of a necktie or a shirt. We summon up in our imaginations the image of how we will look in this or that tie, what so-and-so will say about it, or how the color will fit such and such a suit. And then we buy the tie or we move on to something else. This is freedom of doing, or existential freedom. This freedom is shown most interestingly in the supermarket, when we push our carts through the aisles between the tumultuous variety of packages and cans of food on the shelves, each one silently shouting through its bright-colored label “Buy me!” We see the shoppers with expressions of hesitancy, vacuity, wonder, pausing for some inspiration as to which of all these foods will be good for dinner tonight. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
The shopper seems hypnotized, charmed, preoccupied. Like patients on a ward in a mental hospital, they do not see me as I walk directly across their line of vision. The expressions of wonder and hesitancy are a readiness, an invitation, an openness to some stimulus on the shelves to persuade them to throw the balance this way of that in making their choice. This first freedom is experienced by each of us hundreds of times every day. It is decked up in respectable terms like decision/choice when we discuss freedom in psychology classes—if we ever discuss freedom in psychology classes at all. The most profound illustration of this kind of freedom is our ability to ask questions. Take, for example, my asking a question after listening to a lecture. The very fact that the question comes up in my mind at all implied that there is more than one answer. Otherwise there would be no point in asking the question in the first place. This is freedom; it implies that there is some possibility, some freedom of selection in what I ask. The speaker then pauses for a few seconds after I have asked it, turning over in his or her mind the possible answers. We sense that there is, in asking and answering questions, a good deal more going on, and it is of a richer nature, than the mere responding to various stimuli and selecting a response. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Each person who lights this candle within one’s own mind will soon begin to attract other mortals like moths to a flame burning by a fire—not all mortal nor many mortals but only those who are groping for a way out of their darkness. Can a scrupulously impartial search through World-thought and experience lead to discovery of truth? “Wilt thou be made whole?” asked Jesus. Questioning implies some value judgment, some investment of the person’s life, some invitation to share, to make contact, some challenge to consider a new idea. Regrettably, in recent decades our very idea of freedom has been diminished and grown shallow in comparisons with previous ages; it has been relegated almost exclusively to freedom from outside pressure, to freedom from state coercion—to freedom understood on the juridical level, and no higher. Only when this search for a higher life has becomes an absolute necessity to a mortal, has one found even the first qualification needed for the Quest. “And the Lord God doth work by means to bring about his great and eternal purposes; and by very small means the Lord doth confound the wise and bringeth about the salvation of many souls,” reports Alma 37.7. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
Cans. Beer cans. Glinting on the verges of a million miles of roadways, lying in scrub, grass, dirt, leaves, sand, mud, but never hidden. Piel’s, Rheingold, Ballantine, Schaefer, Schlitz, shinning in the Sun, or picked by Moon or the beam of headlights at night; washed by rain or flattened by wheels, but never dulled, never buried, never destroyed. Here is the mark of savages, the testament of wasters, the stain of prosperity. These wise souls contemplated their past lives in a long wrathless reverie, and sought to answer prayers from below as I have said. They watched over their kindred, their clansmen, their own nations; they watched over those who attracted their attention with accomplished and spectacular displays of religiosity; they watched with sadness the suffering of humans and wished they could help and tried to help by thought when they could. However, who are these beings who defile the grassy borders of our roads and lanes, who pollute our ponds, who spoil the purity of our ocean beaches with the empty vessels of their thirst? Who are the beings who make these vessels in millions and then say, “Drink—and discard”? What society is this that can afford to cast away a million tons of metal and to make of wild and fruitful land a garbage heap? #RandolphHarris 1 of 14