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All the Rapture and Pain I Had Known in these Past Month Came Together Inside Me–I Never Promised My Soul to the Devil for this!
But no matter, only so many children can be made by one in a century. And new offspring will be weak. However, this is not necessarily a bad thing. The rule of the old covens had wisdom in it that strength should come with time. And then again, there is the old truth: you might make titans or imbeciles, no one knows why or how. Whatever will happen will happen, but choose your companions with care. Choose them because you like to look at them and you like the sound of their voices, and they have profound secrets in them that you wish to know. In other words, choose them because you love them. Otherwise you will not be able to bear their company. Make sure before you select a mate that they have some lifetime before you choose them. Never let loneliness drive you to fall in love with someone because their helplessness will be so completely your fault. Remember, beware of that power, and the power you have over those who are dying. Loneliness in us, and that sense of power can be a strong combination. What relation does this pattern of passivity/madness that we have seen in Treasure have to do with the violence in our society, which has become such a critical problem for contemporary men and women? #RandolphHarris 1 of 23
A friend of mine, not in analysis or psychotic in any way, tells us how it feels to be in a rage after a quarrel with his wife: How close this rage is to a temporary psychosis! As I walk down the street on a sidewalk that seems very far away, I cannot think; I am in a daze. However, it is foggy only externally—inside I am hyperalive, hyperaware of every thought and feeling, as though I am in an illuminated World, everything very real. The only trouble is that this inner illumination has practically no connection with the outside World. I feel slightly ashamed in relation to the outside World—ashamed and defenseless. If people made fun of me or suddenly demanded something important of me (say an accident occurred on the street). I would not be able to respond. Or if I did respond, I would have to get out of my “mad”; it would be broken through. The streets are foreign; they seem empty though people are walking on them just as always. I do not know the streets very well (though I have seen them thousands of times). I walk on as though I am drunk, picking up my feet and self-consciously putting down. I go into a restaurant, Wan Li at Renaissance Beijing Wangfujing Hotel, afraid the cashier girl will not recognize me—I am in a different skin—or she will think something is wrong. (She does recognize me and is friendly as always. #RandolphHarris 2 of 23
I go to the men’s room ; I read the graffiti over the urinal without any emotion. I am still afraid someone will require something of me, attack me, and I could not defend myself. I come back to my seat, staring out the window at the far end of the restaurant. I feel only a vague relation to the World. Food is brought me; I am not much interested in eating or taste; I go vaguely through the motions. I try to recall the details of our quarrel, without much success—two or three things stand out with great vividness; the rest is a jumble. I eat my favorite cuisine, a little chicken egg foo young, with rice and gravy, and a bit of my shrimp egg roll, as I sipped on a little jasmine tea. A waiter comes up, a middle-aged Chinese gentleman, and he says to me: “I can see you think too much,” he pointed to his forehead. “You got some problem?” I smiled and nodded. He went on: “These days everybody got some problem.” His words were strangely comforting. He went away, shaking his head. This was the first breakthrough of the outside World. It made me laugh to myself, and helped me much more than one would think. I could understand how, when this state is relatively permanent, people do themselves harm, step in front of a motor car for example. They do this mostly out of a lack of awareness of the real World about them. They do it also out of revenge. Or they get a gun and shoot somebody. #RandolphHarris 3 of 23
The experience of being caught up in such a rage is very close to the historical experience of being “mad.” What, for example, is the meaning of “mad” in such statements as the following made by a young African American man in Harlem: The White cops, they have a damn sadistic nature…We do not need them here in Harlem! They start more violence than any other people start…When we’re dancing on the street because we can’t go home, here comes one cop, he’ll want to chase everyone. And he gets mad. I mean he gets mad! He comes into the neighborhood aggravated and mad. In this statement, this African America man is saying that there is a relationship between the “mad” of the policeman and violence in Harlem. Does the policeman, by inciting a violent reaction, use his own rage as a stimulus to preserve what he feels is law and order? Is this one of the reasons a man would choose to become a police officer in the first place? Does he seize upon a culturally accepted psychosis and use it to ally himself with the status quo, thereby giving himself the right, in line of duty, to carry a club and gun with which to let out his own violence? #RandolphHarris 4 of 23
In the verbatim reports in Violent Men, by professor of criminology Hans Toch, we can consider these questions in greater detail. Dr. Toch believes, for example, that: The African American and the European American officers and suspects—their pride, their fear, their isolation, their need to prove themselves, above all their demand for respect—are strangely alike: victims both, prisoners of an escalating conflict they did make and cannot control. As shown by their own reports, the policemen feel they have to uphold “law and order,” and they identify this with their own individual self-esteem and masculinity. Time after time it is clear that the policeman is fighting an impotence-potency battle within himself that he expands and projects on the concept of “law and order.” Affronts to themselves the police interpret as affronts to the law of the land. They have to insist, then, that the suspects respect their authority and power. They feel their manhood or womanhood is being challenged and their reputation, on which their self-respect is based, is at stake. However, this is understandable when you look at the record number of police killings in Brazil’s state of Rio de Janerio. #RandolphHarris 5 of 23
In 2016, out of 46,000 officers, 147 of them were killed and numbers are expected to climb. Majority of the killings happen in the less affluent areas. These figures help to illustrate an institutional failure to protect police, and they highlight the systematic shortcomings in training and the use of lethal force, which has made Brazil’s police a major actor in violence that plagues that country. Some people say that the conflict starts with a culture of physical and psychological torture in Brazil’s military police training, which has also directly impacted the way in which these officers serve society and in turn are treated by society. Military police officers in Brazil are critical of their training regimen, in which physical, psychological, and disciplinary abuses are allegedly committed by their superiors and are thought to be commonplace. “Sometime, it was lunchtime and my superiors would shout at me that I was a monster, a parasite,” Ex-soldier Darlan Menezes Abrantes explains. “It was as if they were training a dog. A soldier is trained to only be afraid of his superiors. The training was just meant to mess with your feelings, so that you leave the barracks as a pit bull, wanting to bite someone.” #RandolphHarris 6 of 23
“How am I going to serve society being trained like that? It’s ridiculous,” Ex-soldier Darlan Menezes Abrantes adds. “Police have to learn quick thinking, the ability to make decisions. But right now they train police as they would a dog for a street fight. The officers can do anything and the soldiers just have to bow their heads. You are only trained to be afraid of the officers, that’s it. A soldier who sees an officer, even from far off, trembles with fear.” The school of hard knocks is the rule rather than the exception when training military police officers. Courses are concerned with imprinting the military culture on the future soldiers, with little theoretical teaching on topics such as criminal law or human rights. Over 21,000 public security personnel from various federal agencies were interviewed, over 50 percent of whom were military police. Of these officers, 83 percent said they received a full year of training before beginning work; 39 percent said they were victims of physical or psychological torture during training; 64 percent stated they had been humiliated or disrespected by their superiors. However, officers are prohibited from talking about negative experiences, and they have little opportunity to report violations. #RandolphHarris 7 of 23
The institutionalization of human rights violations within the military police during training has a direct impact on how police interact with the general population. A typical instance of an officer who, responds to a call of a family fight, sees a man sitting in a car who he thinks can tell him something about the altercation: The officer asks the man to step out of the car. The man response, “You can’t do this to me, I’m on private property.” He seemed obnoxious, the officer reported, his “attitude bothered me.” The man eventually got out of the car, but kept his hands in the pocket of his trench coat. This continued to bother the officer, who asked him to take his hands of out his pocket. Meeting with continued refusal, he called another policeman and they forced the hands out. The policeman sees this as an unforgivable defiance of his authority. He must assert police authority at all costs…(“I felt it was imperative that I take the man’s hands out of his pockets…He became abusive as we took hold of him…We arrested him and put him in the back seat of the patrol car, where he threatened to urinate on the seat, kicked and pounded on the glass.”) Police explain that they go out with batons in hand and wearing shorts and military police shirts, so that they can give the population a sense of security. #RandolphHarris 8 of 23
However, on the streets barbarism prevails: petty theft, harassment, weed-smoking, everything you can imagine. “When we got hold of the suspects, it was only beating, beating, beating, and pepper spray, a lot of pepper spray. That was the first time I came into contact with the torture techniques used by the military police,” says Rodrigo Nogueira Batista—a Navy graduate who is currently serving a 30-year prison sentence for several crimes, including attempted homicide—who had been chosen to participate in a summar operations, two months after joining the military police. The culture of violence is born through the dehumanization of the military police during training. The police are created in order to guarantee a hierarchy and discipline within the community and to create a certain image of the force. Some believe they were not made to protect neither the police nor the population. The man with his hands in his pockets we talked about earlier, saw the police as the arm of the government and the enemy of the people, and he was humiliated. And, indeed, he is right in the sense that the policeman must cow him to preserve his own authority. #RandolphHarris 9 of 23
Blue Power in this instance is the opposite side of the coin of Power to the people. Each is engaged in protecting one’s own self-image, one’s own sense of being a human being. However, the police man, by virtue of one’s identification with law enforcement and one’s gun and badge, has a special advantage. However, there is also a special morality that police officers must follow even in their private lives. An officer cannot do things that most humans do: drink alcohol, tell a lie, fall into debt. An officer can actually be punished for these things. This creates the image of a superhuman that does not exist. The police are also forbidden from speaking in a foreign language, except when it is required as a function of their roles as an officer. The human rights of police officers are frequently violated with these rules. Yet we want them to respect the rights of the citizens when they do not have their own rights respected. Police cannot publish things on social media about the internal workings of the organization without having to respond to them. Some are under investigation and responding to various inquires for having expressed themselves on social media. Sometimes they are sent to Internal Affairs because of a comment that someone made on a website and it can be boring and embarrassing. The military police cannot question a superior. #RandolphHarris 10 of 23
Because of the way the police are trained and the history of the country, suspects regularly feel that the cards are stacked against them, that no matter what they say they are going to jail, will be found guilty or killed. Their opponent in the dual are protected with a badge and gun, and often the suspect will challenge the officer to take off his or her badge and settle differences “man to man.” The placing on of hands, the physical contact, and the other aspect of touching are especially significant. The suspect has to protect the inviolability of their body. The police officer feels he or she has to assert their authority. And when it comes to asking for identification, it is a highly personal thing. Psychologically, demanding identification is like requiring a person to undress physically; it gives a person who has already been told he or she is inferior an added feeling of personal humiliation. To provokes the suspect’s sense of outrage, and the police officers finds that these situations can sometimes be pushed to the brink of a riot over a simple proof of identity. Noteworthy in these events is that often the mortal who ends up in jail was simply trying, through one’s act, to defend one’s self-image or one’s reputation or one’s rights. Both officer and suspect and almost everyone else is struggling to some for or other to build or protect one’s self-esteem, one’s sense of significance as a person. #RandolphHarris 11 of 23
Both police and suspects are fighting an impotence-potency battle within themselves. Each interprets this in one’s own, though diametrically opposite, way. True, this power battle can be blown up to paranoid proportions, the offense simply being imagined; or it can take the infantile form of bullying or some other deviation. However, in order to see the roots of violence we must go below these psychological dynamics and seek its source in the individual’s struggle to establish and protect one’s self-esteem. This, in essence, a beneficial need—it is potentially constructive. Prisons do not deter criminals. Prisons unman and dehumanize; violence rests on exploitation and exploitativeness, and prison is a power-centered jungle. There seems to be growing evidence that the police and guards on one side and the incarcerated mortals on the other are of the same personality type. Our research indicated that ranks of law enforcement contain their share of violent men and women. The personalities, outlooks and actions of these officers are similar to those of the other people in our lives. They reflect the same fears and insecurities, the same fragile, self-centered perspectives. They display the same bluster and bluff, panic and punitiveness, rancor and revenge, pride and shame as do others. And whereas much police violence springs out of adaptation to police work rather than out of the problems of infancy, the result, in practice, is almost the same. #RandolphHarris 12 of 23
The need for potency, which is another way of phrasing the struggle for self-esteem, is common to all of us. We see its beneficial form in the rebellion at the Attica, New York, prison, where the leader of the revolting inmates proclaimed: “We don’t want to be treated any longer as statistics, as numbers…We want to be treated as human beings, we will be treated as human beings.” Another inmate, older than the first, took a more realistic view: “If we cannot live as people, we will at least try to die as men.” History records that twenty-eight of them did die several days later when the troopers charged into the prison, shooting. However—such is the strange partnership between guards and prisoners, both being in prison and both being of the same personality types—history records that some prisoner died using their bodies to protect their prison guards from the shots. It seems necessary therefore to distinguish between alienating conditions on the one hand and estranged states on the other, although the distinction may be difficult, there being no question here of a simple stimulus-response situation. It also seems appropriate to limit the term alienation to mean an individual feeling or state of dissociation from self, from others, and from the World at large. Such states, although functions of the conditions that produce them, should not be confused with the conditions themselves. #RandolphHarris 13 of 23
Alienation refers to different kinds of dissociation, break or rupture between human beings and their objects, whether the later be other persons, or the natural World, or their own creations in art, science and society; and subjectively, the corresponding states of disequilibrium, disturbance, strangeness and anxiety. One of the concepts linked with alienation is the idea of anomie to describe the conditions of normlessness, the collapse of rules of conduct. The notion of anomie, like that of alienation itself, has been used to refer to a wide array of social and personal disorders. Anomie is a breakdown in the cultural structure, occurring particularly when there is an acute disjunction between the cultural norms and goals and the capacities of members of the group to act in accord with them. The breakdown of values causes people to respond to this conflict between ends and means in various deviant ways; and of those individual adaptations one in particular—retreat from the struggle to get ahead (as in the case of harlots of addicts)—is worth mentioning here. Anomie is a social condition rather than a psychological state, we can identify it as an important cause of alienation, particularly when the response takes the form of retreat; but we should not confuse it with alienation as a state of mind. #RandolphHarris 14 of 23
Similar considerations apply to other concepts which are often confused with alienation. For example, social isolation may lead to a state of estrangement, but not all isolates are alienated. Indeed, alienation may result from the social pressures of group, crowd or mass. By the same token alienation should not be confused with social disorganization, since, as we shall see, estrangement may also result in highly organized bureaucracies. Alienation is often associated with loneliness; but again, not all lonely people are estranged. Loneliness can be a creative part of human experience and another form of loneliness is self-rejection which is not really loneliness but anxiety; people who try to overcome or escape loneliness will end only by becoming self-alienated. What we have here are important conditions or correlates of alienation. Any one of these conditions may have different effects on men and women of varying personalities in different social situations, predisposing some more and others less to alienated states. Thus one mortal retreats from life, another rebels; and each of these in turn exhibits many different modes of behavior. Whatever the approach, central to the definition of alienation is that idea that mortals have lost their identity or selfhood. #RandolphHarris 15 of 23
We acquire a self or identity through interaction with others. However, if one acquires a self by communicating with others, especially through language, then anxiety about or loss of selfhood is a social as well as an individual problem. What this means is that the person who experiences self-alienation is not only cut off from the springs of one’s own creativity, but is thereby also cut off from groups of which one would otherwise be a part; and one who fails to achieve a meaningful relationship with others is deprived of some part of oneself. The self can only be preserved by identification with God, godless mortal’s essential bread at being dominated by an alien power which threatens our dissolution—by which the anxiety that loss of self can be produced is realized. Despair about loss of self is called a sickness unto death. The World dominated by a giant technological and bureaucratic apparatus of one’s own creation has caused much of this alienation. The price we pay for progress is anxiety, a dread of life perhaps unparalleled in its intensity and increasing to such a pitch that the sufferer may feel oneself to be nothing more than a lost point in empty space, inasmuch as all human relationships appear to have no more than a temporary validity. #RandolphHarris 16 of 23
Alienation is defined as loss of identity and is illustrated by men and women who trouble over the simple yet complex question, “Who am I?” In the Untied States of American today the literature of psychoanalysis is rich in its descriptions of such cases. Alienation is the remoteness of the neurotic from one’s own feelings, wishes, beliefs, and energies. It is the loss of the feeling of being an active, determining force in one’s own life. It is the loss of feeling oneself as an organic whole. Or, the alienated mortal is one who does not experience oneself as the center of one’s World, as the creator of one’s own acts—but one’s act and their consequences have become one’s masters, whom one obeys, or whom one may even worship. The alienated person is out of touch with oneself as one is out of touch with any other person. Implicit in most approaches to alienation is the ideal of an integrated mortal and of a cohesive society in which one will find meaning and satisfaction in one’s own productivity and in one’s relations with others. A person in solidarity society will no longer find the only aim of one’s conduct in oneself and, understanding that one is the instrument of a purpose greater than oneself, one will see that one is not without significance. We may well ask, was there ever such a society? Romantic notions about our own past or about primitive culture do not help us here. #RandolphHarris 17 of 23
I have an love of spiritual freedom and intellectual independence, and think it is important to keep away from all restrictive, limiting, and narrowing groups, organization, and institutions. I have seen so many lost to the cause of Truth by such constrictions of the mind and heart, so much of its good undone by this harm, that I shrink from the idea of becoming tagged as some one man’s disciple or as a member of some ashram, society, or church. If this man has found the Right, why not let one’s natural expression of it—whether in writing, art, or life—be enough? Why create a myth around one, to befog others and falsify the goal? Why not let well alone? Having no official connection with any group, sect, organization, or church leaves me free to help anyone, anywhere. A strongly individualistic temperament cannot be at ease in the collective membership of an organization where strict and rigid doctrines are set up like the Great Wall of China and where patriotism rejects salvation for those outside. Such a temperament needs the free air of unfettered thinking and uncircumscribed good will. It can sympathize intellectually with many different points of view without losing itself in any one of them, but it can do so only because it belongs to none. #RandolphHarris 18 of 23
The routine devotions of an institution do not appeal to this type of temperament—sensitive, moody, and independent as it is. The mortal who has seen the light and experienced its warmth will prefer one’s own way of living if it is the consequence of one’s awakening. One’s mind is bound by no religious doctrines, one’s conduct by no prohibitions or commandments. However, this does not mean one is free to do what one pleases. One mortal and one God are all the organizations needed. More is a superfluity. The seeker who cherishes one’s independent path and individual thought cannot comfortably fit into a group where all alike must be pressed into the same shape. It seems historically inevitable that every spiritual movement should sooner or later become organized and institutionalized. In that way it reflects the need and serves the tendency of average human nature. However, where a person is not average and refused to be taken up into it by that means, preferring to keep one’s independence and one’s allegiance, one is just as much entitled to do so. Those who feel tempted to do so, may study the public cults and listen to the public teachers but it would be imprudent to join any of the first or follow any of the second. It would be wiser to remain free and independent or they may be led astray from the philosophical path. #RandolphHarris 19 of 23
By rejecting the easy way of joining a particular sect, a labeled group, one rejects at the same time the withdrawal of sympathy or understanding from all other groups which usually or often accompanies the joining. If the universal character of truth requires one to keep one’s mind uncorralled, the personal need of strength confirms the requirement. What is it that is eternal: the primal phenomenon, present in the here and now, of what we call revelation? It is mortal’s emerging from the moment of the supreme encounter, being no longer the same as one was when entering into it. The moment of encounter is not a living experience that stirs in the receptive soul and blissfully rounds itself out: something happens to mortals. At times it is like feeling a breath and at times like a wresting match; no matter: something happens. The mortal who steps out of the essential act of pure relation has something More in one’s being, something new has grown there of which one did not know before and for whose origin one lacks any suitable words. Whereever the scientific World orientation in its legitimate desire for a causal chain without gaps may place the origin of what is new here: for us, being concerned with the actual, no subconscious and no other psychic apparatus will do. #RandolphHarris 20 of 23
Actually, we receive what we did not have before, in such a manner that we know: it has been given to us. In the language of the Bible: “Those who wait for God will receive strength in exchange.” Being faithful one accepts, one does not ask who gives. Mortals receives, and what one receives is not a content but a presence, a presence as strength. This presence and strength includes three elements that are not separate but may nevertheless be contemplated as three. First, the whole abundance of actual reciprocity, of being admitted, of being associated with one is altogether unable to indicate what that is like with which one is associated, nor does association make life any easier for us—it makes life heavier but heavy with meaning. And this is second: the inexpressible confirmation of meaning. It is guaranteed. Nothing, nothing can henceforth be meaningless. Questions about the meaning of life has vanished. However, if it were still there, it would not require an answer. You do not know how to point to or define the meaning, you lack any formula or image for it, and yet it is more certain for you than the sensations of your sense. What could it intend with us, what does it desire from us, being revealed and surreptitious? It does not wish to be interpreted by us—for that we lack the ability—only to be done by us. #RandolphHarris 21 of 23
It does not wish to be interpreted by us—for that we lack the ability—only to be done by us. This comes third: it is not the meaning of another life, but that of this our life, not that of a beyond but of this our World, and it wants to be demonstrated by us in this life and this World. The meaning can be received but not experienced; it cannot be experienced, but it can be done; and this is what it intends with us. The guarantee does not wish to remain shut up within me, it wants to be born into the World by me. However, even as the meaning itself cannot be transferred or expressed as a universally valid generally acceptable piece of knowledge, putting it to the proof in action cannot be handed on as a valid ought; it is not prescribed, not inscribed on a table that could be put up over everybody’s head. The meaning we receive can be put to the proof in action only by each person in the uniqueness of one’s being and in the uniqueness of one’s life. No prescription can lead us to the encounter, and none leads from it. Only the acceptance of the presence is required to come to it or, in a new sense, to go from it. As we have nothing but a You on our lips that we are released from it into the World. #RandolphHarris 22 of 23
That before which we live, that in which we live, that out of which an into which we life, the mystery—has remained what it was. It has become present for us, and through its presence it has made itself known to us as salvation; we have known it, but we have no knowledge of it that might diminish or extenuate its mysteriousness. We have come close to God, but no closer to an unriddling, unveiling of being. We have felt salvation but no solution. We cannot go to others with what we have received, saying: This is what needs to be known, this is what needs to be done. We can only go and put to the proof in action. And even this is not what we ought to do: rather we can—we cannot do otherwise. This is the eternal revelation which is present in the here and now. I neither know of nor believe in any revelation that is not the same in its primal phenomenon. I do not believe in God’s naming himself or in God’s defining himself before mortals. The word of revelation is: I am there as whoever I am there. That which reveals is that which reveals. That which has being is there, nothing more. The eternal source of strength flows, the eternal touch is waiting, the eternal voice sounds, nothing more. #RandolphHarris 23 of 23
If the Infinite Power is Everywhere Present, it Can Surely Make itself Known to its Ardent Seeker in Any Place
I was awakened from this irrelevant thought, this obviating thought, by the fact that he was now beside me. He was closing his arm round me, and pressing his forehead against my face. He gave that summons again, not the rich, thudding seduction of that moment in the Palais Royal, but the voice that had sung to me over the miles, and he told me there were things that two of us would know and understand as mortals never could. He told me that if I opened to him and gave him my strength and my secrets that he would give me his. He had been driven to try to destroy me, and he loved me all the more that he could not. That was a tantalizing thought. Yet I felt danger. The word that came unbidden to me was Beware. Still I wondered what could be the difference between joy and happiness? Happiness is a fulfillment of the past patterns, hopes, aims; but those are exactly what many people have to give us. Happiness is mediated, so far as we can tell, by the parasympathetic nervous system, which has to do with eating, contentment, resting, placidity. Joy is mediated by the opposing system, the sympathetic, which does not make one want to eat, but stimulates one for exploration. #RandolpHarris 1 of 16
If a mortal is to remain forever the mere appendage of another mortal, if one’s minds is to echo back only that another mortal’s idea, the question arises: When will one come to oneself? For this is not the final purpose of our life here? One who has reached this stage when one must cease being the shadow of others, will not fall into proud deceptive self-assertion if one humbly yields and follows the inner voice. Happiness relaxes one; joy challenges one with new levels of experience. Joy is a release, an opening up; it is what comes when one is able genuinely to let go. All efforts that take one outside of one’s self are only halting and temporary concessions to human weakness. The soul being inside of the person’s being, one must in the end turn within. Happiness is associated with contentment; joy with freedom and an abundance of human spirit. In joy that is derived from pleasures of the flesh, the thrill of the two persons moving together toward in a climax, is the goal. Welcome truth on whatever horizon it appears, look for it in all four directions, and do not leave any of them unvisited. In short, do not become narrow-minded or fanatical. Let one not be intimidated by history and believe that truth has appeared only in the past, or by geography and look for it only in an Eastern location. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
Joy is new possibilities; it points toward the future. Joy is living on the most advanced stage in the development of life; happiness promises satisfaction of one’s present state, a fulfillment of old longings. Joy is the three of new continents to explore; it is an unfolding of life. In whatever place you find truth, with whatever name it may be labelled, take it. Happiness is related to security, to being reassured, to doing things as one is used to and as our father did them. In one’s endeavours after a better life, one should welcome the help that could come to one from every right source. Joy is a revelation of what was unknown. One should always be receptive to ideas and practices which might enrich those one already knows. Happiness often ends up in a placidity on the edge of boredom. No single path will lead of itself to the full truth. Happiness is success. However, joy is stimulating, it is the discovery of new continents emerging within oneself. There is no one group which has captured the monopoly of truth, for its recognition is a universal experience. Let us refuse to listen to those who insists upon our travelling one way and one way alone. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
Truth is not confined to any sect but fragments of it may be found scattered here and there. Happiness is the absence of discord; joy is the welcoming of discord as the basis of higher happiness. We may learn from everything and everyone, from every event and happening something that is new or a confirmation of something that is old, something affirmative or something negative. Happiness is finding a system of rules which solve our problems; joy is taking the risk that is necessary break new frontiers. Tennyson portrays Ulysses from the point of view of joy; he sees the antiquated man scorning to rust unburnished, not to shine in use! When a teacher of a teaching, a book or mystical exercise is itself being used as the indirection expression of God’s own movements to shed grace, then it is sheer blindness to denounce it as useless. Why limit the help you are willing to receive to a single quarter? All mortals are your teachers. Truth, being infinite, has an infinite number of aspects. Each spiritual guide is inclined to emphasize some only and to neglect the others. The good life, obviously, includes both joy and happiness at different times. What I am emphasizing is the joy that follows rightly confronted despair. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
Inspiration has manifested itself in many lands and in different forms, through widely spaced centuries and various kinds of channels. Why limit culture to one contribution, one land, one form, one century, and one channel alone? This applies not only to intellectual and artistic culture, but also to its religious aspect. We may go even farther in this matter and apply the same idea to personal gurus. Must we always be moored to a single guru? Cannot we respect, appreciate, honor, venerate and receive light from other ones in addition? Joy is the experience of possibility, the consciousness of one’s freedom as one confronts one’s identity. In this sense despair, when it is directly faced, can lead to joy. During his Egyptian studies Pythagoras visited every mortal celebrated for wisdom, so eager was he to learn. He did not follow the Indian custom of sitting sown only at one man’s feet. We all stand on the edge of life, each moment comprising that edge. Before us is only possibility. This means the future is open—as open as it was for Adam and Eve. In the beginning of human consciousness and all of the joys that open to us. Some natural tear they dropped, but wiped them soon; the World was all before them, where to choose their place of rest, and Providence their guide. They, hand in hand, with wandering steps and slow, through Eden took their solitary way. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
Study everything but join nothing is the best counsel. But alas! naïve enthusiasts seldom heed it. One must make a stubborn reservation of one’s ground and run the flag of independence in the quest of truth, of nonattachment in the relationships with the teachers of truth. One will humbly and gladly accept whatsoever good one can find in their teachings, but one will not do so under a contact of pledged discipleship. In this matter one must be eclectic, taking the best from every available source and not shutting out any source that as something worthwhile to offer. It may not be the way for most people, for they cannot walk alone, but it is the only way for one. Self-guidance also leads to the goal. “When the Lord restored the fortunes of Zion, we were like those who dream. Then our mouth was filled with laughter, and our tongue with shouts of joy; then they said among the nations, ‘The Lord has done great things for them.’ The Lord had done great things for us; we are glad. Restore our Fortunes, O Lord, like the water courses in the Negeb! May those who sow in tears reap with shouts of joy! One that foes forth weeping, bearing the seed for sowing, shall come home with shouts of joy, bringing one’s sheaves with one,” reports Psalm 126. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
It is only through free, independent, truth-seeking research tat there is any hope of success in this Quest for ultimate truth. Naturally each vested interest tries to limit the search to its own fold for obvious reason, but one should refuse to limit one’s studies to any single school. If one keeps one’s intellectual liberty, one is less likely to fall into narrow sectarianism. Today, as in ancient Alexandria, one can study the World’s teachings, taking truth eclectically, but not making oneself a disciple. “Truly, truly, I say to you, you will weep and lament, but the World will rejoice; you will be sorrowful, but your sorrow will turn into joy. When a woman is in travail she has sorrow, because her hour has come; but when she is delivered of the child, she no longer remembers the anguish, for joy that a child is born into the World. So you have sorrow now, but I will see you again and your hearts will rejoice, and one will take your joy from you,” reports John 16.20-22. Learn some of the basic truths each system contains without identifying with the system itself. Keep the mind open and free to acquire worthwhile ideas and practices from other cultures and avoid the closed-in sectarian attitude. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
Such an isolated position, outside groups and without labels, offers this advantage, that one is able to take from all, to accept and reconcile fragments of widely different and apparently contradictory teachings. “These things I have spoken to you, that my joy may be in you, and that your joy may be full,” reports John 15.11. Take whatever is of value to you personally, in your present mental condition, from all these teachings and discard the rest. This is the eclectic way, and better than the commoner one of entering a single doctrinal cage and staying there. Hesitate well before committing yourself to join this or that organization. Remember that there are more aspects to truth than one, and it may well be worth keeping yourself free to learn something of these others. The Bible abounds in admonitions to rejoice. Paul’s word to the Philippians, “again I will say, Rejoice,” represents an ever-present element in Testaments the lack of joy is a consequence of mortal’s separation from God, and the presence of joy is a consequence of the reunion with God. Joy is demanded, and it can be given. It is not a ting one simply has. It is not easy to attain. It is and always was a rare and precious thing. And it has always been a difficult problem among Christians. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Christians are accused of destroying the joy of life, this natural endowment of every creature. The greatest of the modern foes of Christianity, Friedrich Nietzsche, himself the son of a Protestant minister, has expressed his judgment about Jesus in the words, “His disciples should look more redeemed.” We should subject ourselves to the piercing force of those words and should ask ourselves, “Is our lack of joy due to the fact that we are Christian?” Perhaps we can defend ourselves convincingly against the criticism that we are people who despise life, whose behavior is a permanent accusation of life. Perhaps we can show that this is a distortion of the truth. However, let us be honest. Is there not enough foundation for criticism? Are not many Christians—ministers, students of theology, evangelists, missionaries, Christian educators and social workers, pious laymen and laywomen, even the children of such parents—surrounded by an air of heaviness, of oppressive sternness, of lack of humor and irony about themselves? #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
We cannot deny this. Our Critics outside the Church are right. And we ourselves should be even more critical than they, but critical on a deeper level. I have always recommended to those who feel strong enough to be able to do so, to refrain from joining any organization, to keep their freedom, while at the same time studying the doctrines of whatever organization interests them, whatever religions engage some of their attention. This freedom enables them to look anywhere, to study everything, to question courageously, to keep breadth of view, depth of thought. Only such independence can reach out to the new without losing what is worthwhile in the old; all others are committed, fettered, captive. By remaining open to truths from different sources, and fitting them together like mosaics, we get eventually some sort of pattern. That rotation of the World’s axis which introduces the relational process has been succeeded almost immediately by the nest, which concludes it. Just now the It-World has surrounded the terrestrial being in me, then the You-World radiates from the ground for the length of one glance, and now its light has died back into the It-World. It is for the sake of language of this barely perceptible rising and setting of the spirit Sun that I relate this minute occurrence that happened to me more than once. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
No other event has made so deeply aware of the evanescent actuality in all relationships to other beings, the sublime melancholy in all relationships to other beings, the sublime melancholy of our lot, the fated lapse into It of every single You. For usually a day, albeit brief, separated from the morning and evening of the event; but here morning and evening merged cruelly, the bright You appeared and vanished: had the burden of the It-World really been taken from the terrestrial being and me for the length of one glance? At least I could still remember it, while the terrestrial being had sunk again from its stammering glance into speechless anxiety, almost devoid of memory. How powerful is he continuum of the It-World, and how tender the manifestation of the You! There is so much that can never break through the crust of thinghood! O fragment of mica, it was while contemplating you that I first understood that I is not something in me—yet I was associated wit you only in myself; it was only in me, not between you and me that it happened that time. However, when something does emerge from among things, something living, and become a being for me, and comes to me, near an eloquent, how unavoidably briefly it is for me nothing but You! #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
It is not the relationship that necessarily wanes, but the actuality of its directness. Love itself cannot abide in a direct relation; it endures, but in the alternation of actuality and latency. Every You in the World is compelled by its nature to become a thing for us or at least to enter again and again into thinghood. Think about the morning I walked on the road one dim morning, saw a piece of mica lying there, picked it up, and looked at it for a long time. The day was no longer dim: so much light was caught by the stone. And suddenly, as I looked away, I realized that while looking at it I had known nothing of the object and subject; as unity. I looked at it again, but unity did not return. Then something concentrated my strength, I entered into an association with my object, I raised the piece of mica into the realm of that which has being. And then, Lucas, only then did I feel: I; only then was I. He that had looked had not yet been I; only this, this being in association bore the name like a crown. Now I felt about this former unity as a marble image might feel about the block from which it has been carved: it was the undifferentiated, while I was the unification. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
As yet, I did not understand myself. True unity cannot be found, it can only be done. Can the low tide say I? Or the high tide? However, attribute a spirit to the sea and include in it the unity of low tide and high tide: that could say I. The piece of mica could not; the man looking at it could not; and the undifferentiated state of the initial look was mere material. However, once their tension had taken form, that which had become associated could. What we ordinarily call I is a point of departure and makeshift—a grammatical fact. However, the I of the tension is a work and actuality. Only in one relationship, the all-embracing one, is even latency actuality. Only one You never ceases, in accordance with its nature to be You for us. To be sure, whoever knows God also knows God’s remoteness and the agony of drought upon a frightened heart, but not the loss of presence. Only we are not always there. The love of the Vita Nuova is right in usually saying Ella and only occasionally Voi. The visionary of the Paradiso speaks inauthentically, from poetic constraint, wen he says Colui, and he knows it. Whether one speaks of God as He or It, this is never more than allegory. However, when we say You to him, the unbroken truth of the World has been made word by mortal sense. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
Every actual relationship in the World is exclusive; the other breaks into it to avenge its exclusion. Solely in the relation to God are unconditional exclusiveness and unconditional inclusiveness one in which the Universe is comprehended. Every actual relationship in the World rests upon individuation: that is its delight, for only thus is mutual recognition of those who are different granted—and that is its boundary, for thus is perfect recognition and being recognized denied. However, in the perfect relationship my You embraces myself without being it; my limited recognition is merged into a boundless being-recognized. Every actual relationship in the World alternates between actuality and latency; every individual You must disappear into the chrysalis of the It in order to grow wings again. In the pure relationship, however, latency is merely actuality drawing a deep breath during which the You remains present. The eternal You is You by its very nature; only our nature forces us to draw it into the It-World and It-speech. The It-World coheres in space and time. The You-World does not cohere in either. It coheres in the center in which the extended lines of relationships intersect: in the eternal You. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
In the great privilege of the pure relationship the privileges of the It-World are annulled. By virtue of it the You-World is continuous: the isolated moments of relationships join for a World life of association. By virtue of it the You-World has the power to give form: the spirit can permeate the It-World and change it. By virtue of it we are not abandoned to the alienation of the World and the deactualization of the I, nor are we overpowered by phantoms. Return signifies the re-cognition of center, turning back to it again. In this essential deed mortal’s buried power to relate is resurrected, the wave of all relational spheres surges up a living flood and renews our World. Perhaps not only ours. Dimly we apprehended this double movement—that turning away from the primal ground by virtue of which the Universe redeems itself in being—as the metacosmic primal form of duality that inheres in the World as a whole relation to that which is not World, and whose human form is the duality of attitudes, of basic words, and of the two aspects of the World. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
Both movements are unfolded fatefully in time and enclosed, as by grace, in the timeless creation that, incomprehensibly, is at once release and preservation, at once bound and liberation. Our knowledge of duality is reduced to silence by paradox of the primal mystery. No mortal comes to the knowledge of one’s divinity through a crowd of other mortals. No human entity can discover its own relation to God through any group method. The way to spiritual awareness is entirely individual, essentially lonely, inescapably within oneself. That is to say, it is mystical. Insofar as religion succeeds in showing the way, it ceases to be religion and becomes, or rather, consummates itself in, mysticism. Nothing is final and absolute. All is relative. Nobody need obey any mandate to bind oneself forever to any single group of ideas, need follow any sectarian flag. If one is to surrender one’s allegiance at all, it can only be reasonably done to the perfect synthesis of all that is needed for human living in all its departments. “And behold, it is wisdom in God that we should obtain these records, that we may preserve unto our children the language of our fathers,” reports I Nephi 3.19. If the mortal of letters is to hear and pronounce the word of truth, one must be independent of groups, organizations, parties, and institutions. One must be at liberty to play with many different points of view without committing oneself forever and finally to any of them. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
One Must Know What the Struggle Between Self and Soul Really Feels Like through One’s Own Experience!
We even went in search of haunted houses together—a newfound pastime that excited us both. Of course, most of the time we found nothing in the empty buildings where spirits were supposed to appear. And those wretched persons supposed to be supposed to by possessed by the devil were often no more than commonly insane. What, then, shall we do? The only answer is: Be compassionate. The universality of evil makes human compassion necessary. I often remark to the parents who are sad about the part they are played in the problems of their children. You and I—all of us who are human—are on the same yacht. Platitude through this is it often helps relieve them of the solitary, pariahlike quality that makes them feel they are alone in their mistakes and solitary in their evil. Mere rationalism can never solve the problem of life for the intellect no longer knows is from the ought, or known from the known—that is to say, ascents to Heaven; only the dead can be forgiven; but when I think of that my tongue’s a stone. However, there is an act of harmony between the two. I am content to follow to its source every event in action or in thought; measure the lot; forgive myself the lot! When such as I cast out remorse so great a sweetness flows into the heart, we must laugh and we must sing, we are blest by everything, everything we look upon is blest. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
This is an exquisite description of what happens in the deeper sense of forgiveness toward oneself. The forgiveness extends, in the case of parents and children, to the sons and daughters as well; for the regrets are often bound up with what seems to be their opposite, resentment on the part of the parents at the son or daughter for causing him or her such perplexity and sufferings. Thus forgiveness of oneself permits one to forgive others. Forgiveness, which is one phase of compassion, puts deeper meaning into our human comedies, and enables us to get insight from our tragedies so that they become bearable. Forgiveness means to overcome the resentment—to cast out remorse—which is the curse that accumulates in most human relationships. Forgiving ourselves as well as others may be the only way of transcending this resentment. The health-enhancing aspect of the forgiving of others is that it helps wipe away the resentment toward oneself at the same time. Compassion gives us fresh perspective on what it means to be human, and helps us judge less harshly ourselves as well as the persons who impinge upon us. Paradoxical as it sounds, this gives us a point outside our remorse from which we can do more to correct it. We stop, then, condemning ourselves for being human, and we can at the same time stop condemning others for the same condition. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
All my brilliantly colored birds given away, probably for sale in the bazaar. Gray African parrots that live to be as old men. Nicolas de Lenfent lived to be thirty. Two hundred years ago, the people of Paris would have got him. He would not have had to burn himself. Got me too maybe. But I doubt it. No, there never would have been any witches place for me. He lives on in my mind now. Pious mortal phrase. And what kind of life is that? I do not like living here myself! What does it mean to live on in the mind of another? Nothing, I think. You are not really there, are you? This means that everybody needs all the clarity they can muster regarding their ignorance and finiteness, and all the support they can obtain in order to face the upsetting implications of what their clarity reveals to them. A compassionate person is one who, by virtue of accepting this situation, can provide others as well as self with such support. As a mortal walks through life keeping a secret loyalty to one’s inner spiritual self, one is likely to make a few friends among those who are keen-sighted enough to perceive this loyalty, and a few enemies among others who misconstrue one’s actions and misunderstand one’s motives. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
And because one firmly believes in complete payment for all deeds by God sets over humankind, one will remain indifferent without resentment and without hatred to the latter, while silently returning a benign love to one’s friends. Freedom without compassion is demoniacal. Without compassion, freedom can be self-righteous, inhuman, self-centered, and cruel. The less affluent and the rich are both equally free to sleep under the bridges of Paris at night—this illustrates how freedom can turn into cruelty toward the less fortunate. Many of the crusades under the banner of freedom—and not merely the ones we read about in history books—have consisted of requiring the other person to accept one’s own concept of freedom. Thus, they have turned out to be tyrannical. This can be seen in some experiences of psychotherapy. The therapist may be convinced that one’s own form of freedom is the only thing that is good for the client, which then makes for coldness, rigidity, inhumanness in the therapist even though what one does may be technically correct. Mysticism is not concerned with those who depend on traditional forms of worship and current religious creeds for the satisfaction of all their inner needs. It is not for them and could do nothing for them. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
However, those to whom such dependence is mere incidental or mostly provisional may find further nutriment in mystical teachings and practices. Spiritual pride can take different forms. One of them is a studied intellectual independence, a refusal to be committed, the maintenance of a so-called open mind which never comes to a decision. Any good thing overdone becomes a bad thing and although independent judgment and thinking for oneself, if pushed to an extreme it merges into mere pride—egoistic pride. It is only as one gets released from all the self-pictured, self-made, much limited imaginations provided for one by less educated but well-meaning mortals that one can begin to let in the grace-bestowed new understanding of God. The person, young or mature, who has one’s mind set on higher things than pleasures of the moment and is willing to sacrifice a fragment of time, attention, and interest of such studies and such prayers, will find one’s refusal to conform to other people’s ways is repaid in inner growth on the quest. Attainment of sanctity may not be bought at the price of relinquishment of sanity. I once supervised a psychiatrist whose patient, a young woman of nineteen, was giving him a good deal of trouble. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
The patient was constantly being irritated, changing the subject, and in general angry and petulant. I remarked in the supervisory hour that the young woman might be trying to get some sign of affection from the therapist. The psychiatrist in the next session, when the young woman was playing out her petulant drama, interrupted her with “You know, I like you.” The patient stopped talking, paused a moment and then said, “I guess that is what it is all about.” When the therapist reported this to me, I asked, “Do you like her?” And he answered, “No, I really do not.” There flashed before my mind a glimpse of the whole treatment collapsing, for there is no doubt that patients in therapy can sense this presence of lack of compassion, despite all pretenses. Surely enough, she broke off the therapy after a couple of sessions. Compassion on the part of the therapist is the essence of any psychotherapy which deserves the name. When the level is basic as compassion, even if though they may not speak of it, patients will see through any pretense, since they are taught in our culture to pretend that they do not see such negative things. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
If people would learn to accept the authority of the Voice of Inspiration whenever and wherever it spoke to them, they would not need to cramp and confine themselves within the narrowing walls of any sect or section, any cult or organization. The Real Self dwells above time and space, matter and form, inviolable in its perfect liberty. If that be the goal of ideal state, one must sooner or later make a beginning to come into closer relations to it and to grow by the radiance of its light. Therefore one does no wrong in standing aloof from the confinements of discipleship to one particular mortal, and the restrictions of membership in one organized group. No longer is one willing to accede to the World’s demand for one’s loyalty, for one’s conformity, for one’s surrender. One is recovering one’s own individual identity and is determined to keep it. It is to God that one must give one’s ultimate allegiance. If one’s mind is filled with other people’s teachings, it may give no attention to God’s teachings, leading, and intuitions. There is a teaching principle in every mortal which can provide one with whatever spiritual knowledge one needs. However, one must first take suitable measures to evoke it. These include cleansing of body and mind, aspiration of feeling and thought, silencing of intellect and ego. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
As an expression of the divine life-power, one is unique. In the end, one will always have to take one’s guidance from within, that is to say, direct from that life-power which has made one what one is. The independent seeker, uncommitted to any cult, may be a sheep without a fold but one is not necessarily without a shepherd. The inner voice can guide and care for one no less than a mortal in the flesh. A therapist colleague of mine was seeing regularly a patient whose manner was generally bombastic and insolent. One day the therapist’s daughter had been seriously hurt. Nothing was said by the therapist in the session about the accident, but the patient that day, as we heard on the tape, was tender, kind, and completely without his usual bombast, as though he were aware of the therapist’s tragedy—which he could not have known. Does this presuppose some degree of mental telepathy in therapy or some capacity to pick up the tiny cues such as the sound of one’s voice? I believe both are probably true. Dr. Freud was right, in my judgment, in his mortal theory of telepathy, stating that he had learned not to lie in therapy because he hand often enough experienced the fact that the patient would see through the lie n matter how hard Dr. Freud tried to cover it up. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Some refuse to claim unity exists or does not exist. One who has passed though all the trials of immersion will persist in unity after death or one will not persist in it. This refusal, this noble silence, has been explained in two way. Theoretically: because perfection is said to elude the categories of thought and assertion. Practically: because the unveiling of such truths would not assist salvation. In truth both explanations belong together: whoever treats being as the object of an assertion, pulls it down into division, into the antitheses of the It-World—in which there is no salvation. When the view prevails that soul and body are identical, there is no salvation; when the view prevails that the soul is one and the body is another, then also there is no salvation. In the envisaged mystery, even as in lived actuality, neither this it is nor thus it is not prevails, neither being nor not being, but rather thus-and-otherwise, being and not-being, the indissoluble. To confront the undivided mystery undivided, that is the primal condition of salvation. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
We may follow the faithful to the truth of our encounter; going further would involve a betrayal of the actuality that we do not fetch from our own depths but that has been inspired in us and apportioned to us, we know: if this is merely one of the foals, then it cannot be ours; and if it is the goal, then it has been misnamed. And: if it is one of the goals, then the path may lead all the way to it; if it is the goal, then the path merely leads closer to it. Jesus says, “I came into this World, that those who do not see may see.” And the apostle says, “That which we have seen with out eyes, which we have looked upon—we proclaim to you.” Both speak not about the future, but about something they have seen and still see. And they certainly do not feel as do old and new theologians that there is a conflict between seeing and hearing, between seeing and believing. “That which we have seen and heard,” writes the apostle. “Everyone who see the Son and believes in him,” says Jesus. And most important and surprising: That which we have seen with our eyes according to our gospel is the Word, the eternal Word or Logos in whom God speaks, who can be seen through the words of creation and who is visible in the man Jesus. The Word can be seen, this is the highest unity of hearing and seeing, that is the truth which can bridge the Protestant and the Catholic half-truths. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
The technique of treatment must be in yourself for the best therapist is one who has problems one’s self, but is aware of them and is working on them. In psychotherapy one cannot have compassion for another if one never has experienced psychological problems of one’s own. Note that I do not ay the same psychological problems as the clients—that is not necessary. However, the therapist must know what the struggle between self and soul really feels like through one’s own experience. This is why, in interviewing and selecting candidates for two different psychoanalytic training institutes, I would never consider the candidate who was “well adjusted” and who had not endured the wresting with one’s own destiny. I assumed—and I believe rightly so—that such persons would not empathize with and feel compassion for the patient or client. The two greatest therapists I ever knew personally, Frieda Fromm-Reichmann and Harry Stack Sullivan, had, individually, almost every problem you can imagine, and both had fantastic insight into the problems of their patents and corresponding compassion. One of the obvious and central functions of the didactic therapy that the trainee is required to go through is to sensitize oneself to the problems within oneself in order to have compassion for the other persons one is to work with. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
The person who lack compassion does not grasp the whole circuit in one’s human relationships. When we speak of the importance of art, poetry, religion, and other right-brain functions, unassisted consciousness must always tend toward hate; not only because it is good common sense to exterminate the other fellow, but for the more profound reason that, seeing only arcs of circuits, the individual is continually surprised and necessarily angered when one’s hardheaded policies return to plague inventor. The inadequacy of a solely ration point of view, for reason is pliable to every sense, and in practice reason is often a matter of truth on this side of the Pyrenees, error on that. It is our destiny to live always in some form of community. Even the frontiersman who counted it a matter of pride that all of twenty miles separated one from one’s nearest neighbor was still bound to that neighbor by a language no matter how rarely one spoke it, by one’s memory, by every thought, ad infinitum. The wolf child is an anomaly and, indeed, is a proof of what I am saying in that one became human only when one exhibited a communal morality. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
The fact that we belong to a community as well as being individual persons requires that we acknowledge this destiny and relate to each other with compassion. Compassion limits our freedom, but it renders freedom human at the same time. As we have seen, the refusal to admit destiny is to cut ourselves off from other. And now we can see its cruelty. Surely it is relevant: If I do not take care of myself, who else will? However, if one takes care only of oneself, one’s freedom can become cruelty to others. Love, of which compassion is the first step, keeps freedom from becoming tyrannical. The universality of evil also makes necessary human mercy, the gentle virtue, as Shakespeare, in The Merchant of Venice, rightly insisted. Mercy not only drops like a soft Spring rain, but it is like forgiveness in that it blessed one who gives and one wo takes, Mercy is the attribute to awe and majesty, wherein doth sit the dread and fear of kings; but mercy is above this sceptered sway, it is enthroned in the hearts of kings, it is an attribute to God himself, and Earthly power doth then show likest God’s when mercy seasons justice. Evil will not disappear of shrink away during the night. We will never wake up in the morning to find that evil has vanished from the face of the Earth. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
The purpose of human life is not to avoid mistakes, nor to show an unblemished escutcheon, but to rise to meet the challenges as our destiny reveals itself and to search out in freedom the challenges we wish to engage in. As I read the human tragicomedy, we will go on struggling, avoiding complete nuclear catastrophe by the skin of our teeth, trying to become aware of the pitfalls in ourselves and our society, so that we can make constructive choices whenever possible. In this tragicomedy forgiveness and mercy will season justice and make life bearable with the presence of beauty, the emotion of love, and the occasional experience of joy. Seeing is the most astonishing of our natural powers. It receives the light, the first of all that is created, and as the light does it conquers darkness and chaos. It creates for us an ordered World, things distinguished from each other and from us. Seeing shows us their unique countenance and the larger whole to which they belong. Whenever we see, a piece of the original chaos is transformed into creation. We distinguish, we recognize, we give a name, we know. I have seen—that means in Greek I know. From seeing, all science starts, to seeing it must always return. We want to ask those who have seen with their eyes and we ourselves want to see with our eyes. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
Only the human eye is able to see in this way, to see a World in every small thing and to see a Universe of all things. Therefore the human eye is infinite in reach and irresistible in power. It is the correlate to the light of creation. However, seeing means more than the creation of a World. Where we see we unite with what we see. Seeing is a kind of union. As poetry has described it, we drink colors and forms, forces and expression. They become part of ourselves. They give abundance to the poverty of our loneliness. Even when we are unaware of them they stream into us; but sometimes we notice them and welcome them and desire more of them. Those bewildered by the doctrinal differences between the established or traditional creeds, theologies, liturgies, and customs, yet still seeking some mental satisfaction, finding similar differences between the religious heresies, the non-established or modern cults, have a way out of their problem. This is to apply themselves to direct personal practices which can give them their own experience, their own teaching, from within. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
These standard practices include self-purification and prayer. For this inner work they do not have to join any group or organization, do not have to search for, follow or cling to any guide. The God within them becomes, with faith, patience, persistence, and practice, the light on their path. If one finds the same tenet in ten different religious creeds or metaphysical codes one is glad to get their repeated confirmation. However, in the end one must get it for oneself from within one’s own self—God. It is the firmest base of life. Although it is quite true that each quester must travel the path for oneself, must move on one’s own two feet, this does not mean that one is travelling completely along, or on one’s own. If one has no personal guide to accompany one, God is still there, within one, pulling, drawing, leading, or pointing, if only one can learn how to recognize it. One wants to be faithful to the Glowing Light within, not subjected to or obstructed by an outside authoritarianism. If the Infinite Power is everywhere present, it can surely make itself known to is ardent seeker in any place, even though that place be bereft of masters. “It is by faith that miracles are wrought; and it is by faith that Angels appear and minister unto mortals; wherefore, if these things have ceased wo be unto the children of mortals, for it is because of unbelief, and all is vain,” reports Moroni 7.37. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Oh Brave New World that Has Such Robots in it?
Hell’s Bell ringing, my secret music. However, another sound was coming to me. I knew it as I went up the stairs. And I marveled at its power to reach me. It was like a song arching over an immense distance, low and sweet. Once years ago, I had heard a young farm boy singing as he walked along the high road out of Cresleigh Rocklin Trials to the north. He had not known anyone was listening. He had thought himself alone in the open country, and his voice had a private power and purity that gave it unearthly beauty. Never mind the words of his song. This was the voice that was calling to me now. The lone voice, rising over the miles that separated us to gather all sounds into itself. Hubris in psychology is the refusal to acknowledge destiny. Some believe that psychology has no limits at all. There are a number of people who are crying to be told that freedom is an illusion and they need worry about it no longer. Some capitalize with a vengeance on the widespread feelings of powerlessness and helplessness, which are the underlying anxiety of our time; and these individuals insure others that personal responsibility is demode and that they do not need to trouble their consciousness—if they have any left—about it. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Many in behavioral sciences believe that we must develop a technology of behavior, but that our belief in freedom and human dignity stands in the way. It is thought that this new technology will not solve our problems, however unit is replaces traditional prescientific views, and these are strongly entrenched. Freedom and dignity illustrate the difficulty. They are the possessions of the autonomous mortal of traditional theory, and they are essential to practices in which a person is held responsible for one’s conduct and given credit for one’s achievements. A scientific analysis shifts both the responsibility and the achievement to the environment. We would be the last to argue that the environment does not influence—to a considerable extent—the development of the person. Indeed, I would argue that the environment has an even more varied effect than most experts admit: anyone in psychoanalysis knows that the environment is important even on unconscious levels and in dreams. Any viewpoint that leaves out the environment—like the extreme forms of the human-potential movement, where it is argued that only the inner potentials are significant—is equally wrong. However, there are other points related to responsibility and freedom that concern us here. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
When people attack the traditional belief that a mortal can be held responsible for what one does, a scientific analysis shifts the credits as well as the blame to the environment. When we place all the blame for human behavior on the environment and try to design better environments as the only remedy to solve society’s problems, we forget that we also have methods to design better mortals. Now we would all agree that ideally all citizens should strive and it is their responsibility to correct the flaws in the environment, say, of school children, the less affluent, and those with special needs. Indeed, there are times we should proceed to the design of better environments by outright uniting and standing against the cruel and unfair laws in our society. However, what, pray tell, is the environment composed of except other human beings like you and me? And how can an environment be responsible? True, when a society is formed, there develops a group force which makes for conformism; to keep people in line is one of the functions of the group, as we have said. However, if we surrender our individual responsibility, what leverage, what power, do we have against the force of the group? #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Some people believe that the environment is some holy form made in Heaven and superimposed by some god or demigod upon us mortals. Completely absent is the wisdom that we have met the enemy and it is us. Autonomous mortals possess miraculous powers. A scientific analysis of behavior dispossesses autonomous mortals and turns the control one has been said to exert over to the environment. One is henceforth to be controlled by the World around one, and in large part by other mortals. However, we know that wise use of agency keeps our choices open and improves our ability to choose correctly. True freedom comes from choosing disobedience. While we are free to choose our course of action, we are not free to choose the consequences. Whether for good or bad, consequences follow as a natural result of the choices we make. “Verily I say, mortals should be anxiously engaged in a good cause, and do many things of their own free will, and bring to pass much righteousness,” reports Doctrine and Covenants 58.27. When we use the term moral agency, we are appropriately emphasizing the accountability that is an essential part of the divine gift of agency. We are moral beings and agents unto ourselves, freed to choose but also responsible for our choices. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Again, what kind of psychoengineering is this which turns the control over to the environment, holds that the World around us does the controlling, and this consist largely of other mortals? This seems to me to lack the logic that we have a right to expect of engineers of behavior. It sounds like the following lines from Goethe “For each, incompetent to rule one’s own internal self, is all too fain to sway one’s neighbor’s will, even as one’s haughty mind inclines.” When it comes to psychoengineering, there is a fundamental confusion of values in the system: toward whose values is the environment going to be changed? Who are the other people who will do the controlling? The problem is that either alternative—to blame the environment for everything or to locate everything within oneself as the human-potential movement used to do—is wrong. Both deny freedom. However, human beings have another possibility: they can choose when and whether they are to be acted upon or are to do the acting. When I fly in a plane, I let myself be acted upon. I nap a little; I look out the window and daydream. The pilot entirely controls the success or failure of my flight. When I get off the plane, however, to make a speech at a college or university, I choose the opposite alternative. I seek to persuade the audience; I want to get my viewpoint across. I am now assumedly the controller, I am on a deeper level of freedom—the freedom of being. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
One of the saddest things about psychology today is that so many of its better minds are forced to cope with the cant, error and falsehood generated by the discipline itself. The problem is that so many people are on the edge of panic these days and yearn for some rationalization for dumping their responsibility someplace outside themselves. Since it promises a way out and reinforces their desire to escape from a World that so baffles them, such a simplistic gospel of the environment being in control of human behavior greatly appeals to many. The gospel is especially seductive to those against sin: they oppose the things that ought to be opposed, such as aversive control and destructive punishment. Thus, people dump their environment the very responsibility that would be needed if they are effectively to influence their environment. What about the high-school student who finds looming up before one problems that one cannot possibly solve in the political and economic World, who is struggling with drugs and alcoholism and all the conflicts that occur in adolescence? Then one hears that one has no responsibility, that the environment will take over, that an impersonal science of engineering should take the blame and the credit. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
In a situation where someone is unaware of their personal responsibility not to sin and their free will, when they are mislead to believe that the environment is in control of their and they are not morally at fault for anything they do, how is one going to experience oneself and one’s life? One does not need to blame psychologist for the problems of juvenile delinquency like drugs, crimes, violence. No single mortal can be expected to answer for the exigencies of history, to state the obvious. However, if they are continually told that they are powerless and all in influence is exercised by the environment, young people are scarcely going to take responsibility for their actions or lives. It is surprising, then, that they resign from life, become the uncommitted, go to such films as A Clockwork Orange, mumbling the while a paraphrase from Shakespeare: Oh brave new World that has such robots in it? When people talk about cultural technology, they also talk about the greater happiness of humankind as the goal of one’s engineering. If one can turn stones into a delicious meal, humankind will run after thee like a flock, grateful and obedient, though forever trembling, lest thou withdraw thy hand and deny them the delicious cuisine, and they are left with nothing to consume. When there is no crime, there is no sin. Therefore when we shift environment to the environment, people do not need incarceration, but rather treatment, rehabilitation. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
If we recognize obedience as a cardinal virtue (prudence, the ability to discern the appropriate course of action to be taken in a given situation at the appropriate time), mortals seeks not so much of God as the miraculous, and comes forth with one’s triumvirate, miracle, mystery and authority. Psychology likewise presents that miracle and authority and the concepts of science, as they are believed to be rational and clear. However, in psychology, people seem to be unaware that scientific concepts are the most miraculous and mysterious of all concepts of our age. We cannot regard freedom as the central enemy, as that is an expression of fear of freedom, which will cause people to flee from freedom and to rationalize and justify that flight and turn control of their lives over to the government. Freedom is not an illusion. Much of our actions seem to be freely chosen and performed, but one could easily demonstrate that all our behavior is the result of previous conditioning. Some people believe that behaviorism already has control of 80 percent of all the Psychology Departments in the country and will soon have control of all of them. And many in psychology are taught to join with the ideas of behaviorist or they will be buried and forgotten. However, many people still believe that if we put our mind to it, there is nothing we cannot do. So this demonstrates the people still understand that they have free will. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
The people who argue freedom is an illusion usually have already given up their own freedom in their very strict and rigid doctrines, but may they are doing this to get people to surrender control of their lives to the government, which would make it easier to control the World. People become more helpless the more they doubt their own truth and get closer to the point of collapse. This is a flight from destiny and an escape from the dizziness of anxiety in freedom. Behaviorism tends to dominate when we are faced with vast social problems such as nuclear fission, concentration camps, the aftermath of World War and the agonizing endurance of a recession, when inflation and unemployment occur simultaneously, when there is an energy crisis, and so on endlessly. When society is facing a distraught age, behaviorism offers a simple gospel, promising escape from responsibility, from confusion, and especially from such difficult problems as freedom. Certainty is in the saddle, even though it is a false certainty. In such behaviorism there is no sense of the freedom of uncertainty. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
This alone can explain why there is such a great segment of our population who not only succumbs to behaviorist viewpoints, especially the democratic part because they rely on more government resources and advocate removing right as they do not want to be held responsible for their behavior by pushing for things like gun control, soda tax. I believe that this flight from destiny includes a frank refusal to let oneself see any of the aspects of life—such as responsibility, limits in science, and so on—that require us to understand our destiny. A vicious circle gets started in any strict and rigid doctrines. The person’s security is bolstered by the strict and rigid doctrines, and the strict and rigid doctrines are, in turn, reinforced by the security. True anxiety can be avoided by such strict and rigid doctrines, but there are clear penalties. The person reinforces the stockade around oneself and one’s ideas; one blocks out the anxiety by cutting off one’s possibility and one’s maneuverability. The anxiety is escaped, but the person is a prisoner in one’s own stockade. This, by definition, is the loss of freedom. And the constant expansion that characterizes freedom is blocked. If we were to peel off the defensive cover of the strict and rigid doctrines, we would almost always find a trembling person imprisoned with the walls one one’s self has created. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
Whether scientist or religious, the person who adheres to strict and rigid doctrines is one who fear secretly that one must crystallize one’s beliefs or they will evaporate. One is afraid that any pause would be thrown into panic. One fear that one’s truth will disappear unless one puts a firm stockage around it. Some truths we embody and do not know, which covers a great deal of experience, and it totally ignore by people who are not willing to expand their consciousness. One knows everything has, has an answer for everything; no question can make one ponder. Such persons are boring to others precisely because there is no freedom in what they are saying or standing for. In extreme forms and in clinical terms such a person becomes the compulsive-obsessional. All this has great bearing upon freedom. Freedom is the capacity to increase our theories, to look about ourselves to find more possibilities. Freedom means that we can see many different forms of truth, some from the West and others from the East, some from our technology and others from intuition. They very existence of theories and our dependence upon them are on the side of freedom. Then we achieve the mark of the mature intelligence, and we can hold in the mind two opposing thoughts without undermining either one of them. So the inescapable uncertainty of human life is accepted as our destiny from which we do not flee. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
The shadows cast upon the wall in Plato’s legend of the cave are one degree removed from reality. However, if we know they are shadows, we are saved from the shackles of strict and rigid doctrines. And knowing we live in a cave can also turn our imaginations loose in new freedom. This confrontation with destiny releases us to experience a sea change in the realm of possibility. We can find new forms, new ways of relating to each other, new styles of life. The soul senses of the mortal who is in one’s relationship to society experiences the disappointment of the change into freedom, and aspires beyond conditions and barriers to reach the eternal soul. When we seek something in truth, there is God-seeking because we go where we can find him. However, even if we gain all the wisdom of solitude and the power of concentration, if we leave our life’s way, we will miss God. It is rather as if a mortal went out of one’s way and merely wised that it might be the way; one’s aspiration find expression in the strength of one’s wish. Every encounter is a way station that grants one a view of fulfillment; in each one thus fails to share, and yet also does share, in the one because one is ready. Ready, not seeking, one goes one’s way; this gives one the serenity toward all things and the touch that helps them. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
However, once one has found, one’s heart does not turn away from them although one now encounters everything in the one. One blesses all the cells that have sheltered one as well as all those where he will still put up. For this finding is not an end of the way but only its eternal center. It is a finding without seeking; a discovery of what is most original and the origin. The soul sense that cannot be satiated until in finds the infinite soul sensed its presence from the beginning; this presence merely had to become wholly actual for it out of the actuality of the consecrated life of the World. It is not as if God could be inferred from anything—say, from nature as its cause, or from history as its helmsman, or perhaps from the subject as the self that thinks itself through it. It is not as if something else were given and this were then deduced from it. This is what confronts us immediately and first and always, and legitimately it can only be addressed, not asserted. The essential element in our relation to God has been sought in a feeling that has been called a feeling of dependence or, more recently, in attempt to be more precise, creature-feeling. While the insistence on this element and its definition are right, the one-sided emphasis on this fact lead to a misunderstanding of the character of the perfect relationship. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
My God—What Have We Done?
Torches blazed ahead, and over a chorus of mourful wails, there came other cries, distant but filled with pain. Yet something beyond these puzzling cries had caught my attention. Amid all the foulness, I sensed a mortal was near. It was Nicolas and he was alive and I could hear him, the warm, vulnerable current of his thoughts mingled with his scent. And something was terribly wrong with his thoughts. They were chaos. Also, when I exercised my freedom and vice versa the anxiety engulfed me like a tidal wave. The anxiety came in the person of this figure whom I identified as my enemy-friend, a kind of figurative devil. It is the anxiety that comes, in varying intensity, whenever one leaps into the field of new possibilities, whenever one moves into the area of new idea or new compositions in music or a new style in art. It comes after such subconscious thoughts as “Ah, there is a new vision—nobody ever painted a scene like this before.” Then there comes the feeling “Do I want to venture out so far?” And I remind myself of all the dangers in venturing into that no man’s land. In such situations the person finds oneself adjuring oneself to calm down, not to get too excited, when getting excited in the sense of becoming inspired is exactly what, on the deepest level, one wants. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
Freedom and anxiety are two sides of the coin—there is never one without the other. The anxiety is part and parcel of the vision or an idea that, in the particular form it comes to us, no one has ever thought of before. This anxiety—or dread, if we wish to translate angst that way—is a function of the freedom of imagination we must exercise in order to get any idea of significance. The dread comes with the new possibility and the risk that this leap requires. We might, like the scientists who split the atom, break through into a new land, where the usual mooring places by which we have oriented ourselves no longer even exist. Hence, the sense of alienation and bewilderment—and even the experience of intense human aloneness—that such a breakthrough brings in its train. I am told that when the scientists stood behind their glass barrier near Los Alamos and saw the first atomic explosion, the faces of a number of them turned white. One cried aloud, “My God, what have we done?” There is a rational explanation for this anxiety. We must keep in mind that the anxiety comes not from the possibility that the new idea or discovery might be wrong and useless (then it can simply be discarded), but from the possibility that it might be true, as it was, for example, with atomic fission or with Armin van Buuren’s new idea about musical harmonies. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Then one’s colleagues, the professors at one’s university, will be jolted, will be required to change their lecture notes because the possibility that there are new truths has been proven to be correct. This causes upset, which was very great indeed with the splitting of the atom. Or if one is a Nicolas Copernicus with new theory that the Earth moves around the Sun, or a Karl Marx with a radically new approach to the economic life of humankind, the uproar that accompanies the shaking of the foundations will be that much more catastrophic. Although the examples above are of great mortals, we are illustrating something that we all experience, though to a lesser degree. When he or she exercises the freedom to move out into the real World of possibility, every human being experiences this anxiety. Only by not venturing—that is, by surrendering our freedom, we can escape the anxiety. I am convinced that many people never become aware of their most creative ideas since their inspirations are blocked off by this anxiety before the ideas even reach the level of consciousness. A pressure toward conformism infuses every society. One function of any group or social system is to preserve homeostasis, to keep people in their usual positions. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
The danger of freedom to the group is possessed exactly at that point: that the nonconformist will upset the homeostasis, will use one’s freedom to destroy the tired and true ways. Sokratis was condemned to drink hemlock because, so the good citizens of Athens believed, he taught false daimones (moral philosophy that defines right action as that which lead to the well-being of the individual, thus holding good behavior as an essential value) to the youth of Athens. Jesus was crucified because he upset the accepted religion of his day. Joan of Arc heard voices and was burned at the stake. Aaliyah choose the material and images she liked best and perished in a mysterious plane crash. These extreme examples are of person whose idea later become the cornerstones of our civilization. However, the fact only confirms my point. The persons whose insights are too disturbing, who bring too much of the anxiety that accompanies freedom, are put to death by their own generation, which suffers the threat caused by the Earthquake of the news ideas. However, when their ideas are crystallized into the strict and rigid doctrines of the new age and there is no chance of the dead figures rising from their silent graves to disturb the peace a new, they are worshipped by subsequent generations. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
The prototype of the person who produces something new is found in Prometheus, who created fire—or, as the myth presents it, stole it from the gods—and gave it to humankind as the beginning of human civilization. No one envies his punishment in being chained to a mountainside, where an eagle would eat away at his liver all day. At night, the liver would grow back, and the same grisly process would begin all over again the next day. This accompanies his great act of defiance, which was one aspect of Prometheus’ personal freedom. The denying of the dizziness of freedom is shown in the phrase pure spontaneity. For no one can seek that without succumbing to the dreadful implications of freedom. Even John Lilly, in his experiencing pure spontaneity in one’s stimulus-free tank, describes the great dangers therein, and one’s own great anxiety in one’s experience hovering on the edge of nonbeing, death. One may envy one’s colleagues who claim to exist in pure spontaneity and who seem to be on a perpetual high. Yes, we may envy them, but we do not love them for that. We love them for their vulnerability—which means their accepting and owning the dizziness of their freedom, their destiny which always stalks their freedom. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The legend of Icarus presents a picture of a young man refusing to accept the dizziness, or the anxiety, of freedom. Icarus that day must have felt a sense of great adventure—to be the first person who could sail high and taste the ecstasy, the sheer freedom from the bonds of the Earth, with no limits at all. For this one afternoon he was completely subject, not limited even by the distant reaches of the sky. One could order one’s Universe as one wished, could live out one’s whim and desire born in one’s own imagination. Here, indeed, was pure spontaneity. No longer part of the World, no longer subject to the laws of Earth or its destiny or the requirements of community. What exhilaration there must have been in the young man’s heart! A great dream comes true, an experience of complete freedom, pure spontaneity at last. One needs only the self-preoccupation, the refusal to consider compromise. He is like humanists of previous decades who insisted that there was no evil they need bother to consider. Human kind had done such great things in the past; why could we not overcome any and all difficulties in the future? Icarus remained as spontaneous as a child and burst into the sea to drown not as a young man, but as a child. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
When they hear these truths concerning the inward life and Universal laws, how sad, how foolish that so many people turn their heads away in indifference, in apathy, and in inertia! They believe that, even if there were any truth in them, these ideas are only for a handful of dreamers, for an esoteric cult with nothing better to do with its times and thought than to entertain them. There does not seem to be any point of contact between these ideas and their own lives, no applicability to their personal selves, and hence, no importance in them at all. How gross this error, how great this blindness! The mystic’s knowledge is full of significance for every other mortal. The mystic’s discoveries are full of value for one. Mortal’s hope for a happier existence and need of faith in Universal meaning has led one to try so many wrong turnings which brought one only father from them, that it is understandable why cynicism or indifferentism should claim so many votaries. However, this is not yet the end result. The few who today have found both hope and need adequately satisfied are presages of what must happen to the others. Even those mortals who do not believe in God are unknowingly seeking to find him or waiting for him. Every mortal has within one this divine possibility. However, if one refuses to believe it, or puts one’s faith in a hard materialism, or fails to seek for it, it will remain only latent. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
It is the thought of attaining happiness in some way which induces mortals to commit most crimes, just as it is the thought of attaining truth which induces them to hold the most materialistic beliefs. Although they see both happiness and truth from a wrong angle and so are given this deceptive result, still the essential motivation of their lives is the same as that of the questers. The segregation in thought of a spiritual elite as being the only seekers is valid only for a practical view, not for an ultimate one. Like people who are visually impaired, they seek the unseen. Like mystics they want the unknow centre of their being, but the conscious mind does not yet share in this desire. Everything else they try must in the end fail them, since life itself fails them at death. Those who do not choose to tread the path of mysticism need not therefore tread the path of mysticism need not therefore tread the path of misunderstanding it. This wisdom is latent in the bad as well as the good mortal. Any moral condition will suffice as a starting point. Jesus spoke to sinners as freely as to those of better character. One’s words were not wasted as the sequence showed. Even to those who had committed great crimes, as they as they repent and understand what repentance entails, Jesus promised salvation. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
Was it for the sake of a small withdrawn spiritual elite that Jesus walked in Galilees, that Buddha wandered afoot across India, that Sokratis frequented the Agora in Athens? There is hope for all, benediction for the poor and the rich, the good and the bad, for every mortal may come into this great light. However—some mortals may come more easily, more quickly, while others may drag their way. “If anyone among you thinks that one is wise in this age, let one become a fool that one may become wise. For the wisdom of this World is folly with God,” reports 1 Corinthians 3.18-19. When a speaker in a morning chapel service used this as his text, I got a written question in class: “What do you think about this morning’s sermon?” And this was the implication: How can philosophy stand in view of Paul’s deprecating words? I want to answer by trying to interpret what I believe Paul means, not only in the passage above but in the whole context. At the end of his discussion he gives the key by saying: Let no one boast of mortals. For all things are yours, whether Paul or Apollos or Cephas or the World or life or death or the present of the future, all are yours; and you are Christ’s and Christ is God’s. (I Corinthians 3.21-23.) #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Paul has asked, “Has not God made foolish the wisdom of the World?” And now he exclaims, “World and life and Apollos are yours.” This means that the wisdom of the World is ours also. How could it be otherwise? We could not even read Paul’s words without the wisdom of the World which enables us to understand ancient texts, which gives us the technical tool to spread the Christian message all over the Earth, which produces and sustains the political and educational and artistic institutions which serve and protect the Church. All this is ours. And even the different theologies are ours: the more dialectical one of Paul, the more ritualistic one of Peter, the more apologetic one of Apollos. There is only one type of theology which Paul dislikes—that which wants to monopolize the Christ and call itself the party of Christ. For each of these theologies wisdom of the World is needed; scribes are needed, debaters are needed, philosophers are needed, a language is needed to which everybody contributes. It is impossible to deny all this. However, it is possible to discredit through loose talk what one cannot avoid using at the same time. There is a deep dishonesty in the accusation against the use of historical research and philosophical thought in theology. In daily life one calls somebody dishonest who bring defamation upon those whom one uses. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
We should not commit this dishonesty in our theological work. And we cannot escape using the wisdom of this World. If we say “let us use a little of it, but not much in order to escape the dangers implied in it, this is no escape. This is certainly not what Paul means. The whole World is yours, he says, the whole life, present and future, not parts of it. These important words speak of scientific knowledge and its passion, artistic beauty and its excitement, politics and their use of power, eating and drinking and their joy, pleasures of the flesh and its ecstasy, family life and its warmth and friendship with its intimacy, justice with its charity, nature with its might and restfulness, the mortal-made World above nature, the technical World and its fascination, philosophy with its humility—daring only to call itself love of wisdom—and its profundity—daring to ask ultimate questions. In all of these things is wisdom of this World and power of this World and all these things are ours. They belong to us and we belong to them; we create them and they fulfill us. However, and this “but” of Paul’s is not one of those prepositions in which everything is taken back that was given before. The great preposition to the World which is ours gives both the foundation and the limit of the World that is ours: “And you are Christ’s,” namely, that Christ whose Cross is foolishness and weakness to the wisdom of the World. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
The wisdom of this World in all its forms cannot know God, and the power of this World with all its means cannot reach God. If they try it, they produce idolatry and are revealed in their foolishness which is the foolishness of idolatry. No finite being can attain the infinite without being broken as one who represented the World, and its wisdom and its power, was on the Cross. This is the foolishness and the weakness of the Cross which is ultimate wisdom and which is the reason that Christ is not another bearer of wisdom and power of this World but that he is God’s. The Cross makes him God’s. And out of this foolishness we win the wisdom to use what is our, the wisdom of the World, even philosophy. If it be unbroken, it controls us. If it be broken, it is ours. “Broken” does not mean reduced or emaciated or controlled, but it means undercut in its idolatic claim. Paul’s courage in affirming everything given, one’s openness towards the World, his sovereignty towards life should put to shame each of us as well as all our Churches. We are afraid to accept what is given to us: we are compulsive self-seclusion towards our World, we try to escape life instead of controlling it. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
We do not behave as if everything were ours. And the Churches do so even less. The reason for this is that we and out Churches do not know as Paul did what it means to be Christ’s and because of beings Christ’s, to be God’s. Those who feel no call to develop themselves spiritually, no obligation to follow the quest, are nevertheless unwittingly doing both. Only, they are doing so at so sow and imperceptible a pace that they do not recognize the activity and the moment. All the experience of life are in the end intended to induce us to seek wholeheartedly for God. That is, to lead us to the very portal of the Quest. The vision of the tree of life shows us how the effects of casualness can lead us away from the covenant path. Consider that the rod of iron and the strait and narrow path, or the covenant path, led directly to the tree of lie, where all the blessings provided by our Savior and his Atonement are available to the faithful. If we are not careful in living our covenants with exactness, our casual efforts may eventually lead us into forbidden paths or to join with those who have already entered the great and spacious building. If not careful, we may even drown in the depths of a filthy river. “The Spirit of Christ is given to every mortal, that one may know good from evil and is sent forth by the power and gift of Christ; wherefore ye may know with a perfect know it is of God,” reports Moroni 7.16. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
The Universe Contemplates Us—In the End it Sinks Back into Mystery!
I blinked my eyes. I felt weary suddenly; it was almost a feeling of despair. And I thought confusedly, This is ridiculous, I never despair! Others do that, not me. I go on fighting no matter what happens. Always. Sometimes we find the specter of anxiety forcing its way into the picture time and time again. When a person is most vulnerable to anxiety, that is the moment of pause. It is the tremulous moment when we balance possible decisions, when we look forward with wonder and awe or with dread or fear of failure. The pause is the moment when we open ourselves, and the opening is our vulnerability to anxiety. When we spoke about listening to the silence, we noted that many people flee from silence because of the anxiety of the anxiety the silence brings. They perpetually seek the company of some noise or the television or radio even to the extent of carrying blaring portable sets with them on the streets or in the erstwhile peace of the parks. John Lilly found in his experiments in which people floated in his stimulus-free tank that silence, with its complete freedom, brings to many people more anxiety than they can bear. Who knows what devil may emerge out of the complete silence? Where are our familiar boundaries? #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
The members of John Cage’s audience at his famous concert of silence were required to absorb their own anxiety. There was no music to do it for them. People shrink from the quiet desperation that confronts them in periods of complete silence, fearing they will lose all ways of orienting themselves. In our technological society, we are moving toward periods of greater and greater leisure—in earlier retirement, for example—and superficially we welcome this prospective leisure. However, we find within ourselves a curious gnawing fear of something missing. What will we do with all this unfilled free time, this unplanned, unscheduled empty space? Does it not hang before us—O paradox of paradoxes! –like a great threat, the threat of emptiness, rather than the great boon we were seeking? Will our capacities, lying fallow, evaporate? Will we lose our abilities? Will we be blotted out in sleep for over a century like Lestat de Lioncourt? If there is nobody knowing at the door, will we lose our consciousness? Secretly, man of us interpret freedom as becoming nothing. And will we, in our now unhampered possibility, become simply no thing? This is a real and immediate source of anxiety, covered up and unadmitted though it generally is. Formless freedom, unstructured freedom without the limits of destiny, leaves human beings inert. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
At such times the pause takes over People do not know what to do, and they cry out for someone or something to organize them. Hence, organized play and planned leisure—which are really contradictions in terms. Thrown on their own resources, people may find themselves bankrupt since they have long gotten into the habit of ignoring their pauses. Let us consider again the illustration of a speaker receiving promptings and directions from the audience. Suppose, in one’s millisecond pauses, no such prompting comes. In anxiety over this possibility, some speakers choose to write out their lectures word for word, and then they can fall back on the printed page regardless of the promptings or lack thereof from the audience. However, in reading one’s speech the speaker has surrendered one’s opportunity for freedom, for the discovery of new ideas, for the adventure of exploring new frontiers, for the heady thrill of uncertainty. Thus, one chooses security over freedom, as the Grand Inquisitor so passionately adjured. However, such a choice exacts a serious price in self-consciousness, tension, and the loss of freedom. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Sometimes the anxiety that accompanies freedom is intermixed and confused with excitement. Once, while waiting (which is a form of pausing) at an airport for a person whom I knew only slightly and who was going to be my guest at my country farm for three days, I felt the excitement that always comes wit the anticipation of meeting a new person. However, this excitement merged back and forth into the anxiety that came as I asked myself in fantasy: What will two people do cooped up in an twelve room farm house for long? Will the intimacy become boring or scary? So I jotted down the following notes: When does excitement—for example, the constructive side of anxiety, which keeps life from being boring, keeps us spontaneous, stimulated, and alive—lead into destructive anxiety, which shuts out spontaneity, paralyzes, and blocks our freedom? Excitement, the risking of which is pleasurable, gives us the spirit of the chase, keeps us growing. This has a clear survival value. It remains excitement so long as I feel I can cope; I can retain a sense of some autonomy. When I cannot do this, it becomes destructive. Thus as long as we can experience “I can” and “I will,” we remain open, we experience our freedom, we preserve the power to experience new possibilities. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
Does this anxiety always occur in the exercise of freedom? The answer to that depends on how one views life. If we follow Martin Heidegger and Paul Tillich, who conceive of life as a continuous dialectical tension between being and nonbeing, each of us engaged in every breath in preserving our own being against the threat of nonbeing, then we must answer “Yes.” In any case I prefer to keep the question on the level of consciousness. This would mean starting that while there is always some accompaniment of dizziness with freedom, we, as human beings, may not be aware of it since we have different points where we block it off, where we repress the dizziness temporarily or deny it altogether. All people are trying to find God, to feel his love and sense his peace. Those who are in flight from Worldly things do s consciously; those who are in pursuit of them do so unconsciously. Life compels no one to enter upon this conscious Quest, although it is leading everyone upon the conscious Quest. Even among the students of this teaching, not all are following the Quest, many are merely seeking for an intellectual understanding; their interest has been attracted and their curiosity aroused, but they have not felt called upon to go any farther. This may be due to inner weakness or to outer difficulties or both. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
Such men and women do not have to pledge themselves to any moral tasks or mystical experiences. Nevertheless, their studies and reflections upon the teaching will not be without a certain value and will place them on an altogether different level from the unawakended herd which is bereft of such an interest. However, I a mortal’s mission requires one to know only one’s association with one’s cause and no real relation to any soul, no present encounter with God, so that everything around one becomes It and subservient to one’s cause? What about the saying of Napoleon, “I was never truly my own master but was always ruled by circumstances.” Was not that legitimate? Is this phenomenon of experiencing and using no person? Indeed, this master of the age evidently did not now the dimension of the soul. The matter has been put well: all being was for him valore. Gently, he compared the followers who denied one after his fall with Peter; but there was nobody whom one could have denied, for there was nobody whom he could have denied, for there was nobody whom he recognized as a being. He was the demonic spirit for the millions and did not respond; to the soul he responded be calling it an It, he responded fictitiously on the personal level—responding only in his own sphere, that of one’s cause, and only with his deeds. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
This is the elementary historical barrier at which the basic word of association loses its reality, the character of reciprocity: the demonic spirit for whom nobody can become true soul. In addition to the person and the ego, to the free and the arbitrary mortal—not between them—occurs in fateful eminence in fateful times: ardently, everything flames toward one while one oneself stands in a cold fire; a thousand relations reach out toward one but none issues from one. One participates in no actuality, but others participate immeasurably in one as in an actuality. To be sure, one views the beings around one as so many machines capable of different achievements that have to be calculated and used for the cause. However, that is also how one views oneself (only one can never cease experimenting to determine one’s own capacities, and yet never experiences their limits). One treats oneself, too, as an It. This the individual is saying one is not vitally empathic, not full. Much less does it feign these qualities (like the they are the foundation of the I of the modern ego). One does not even speak of oneself, one merely speaks on one’s own behalf. The I spoken and written by one is the required subject of the sentences that convey one’s statements and orders—no more and no less. It lacks subjectivity; neither does it have a self-consciousness that is preoccupied with being-that-way; and least of all does it have any delusions about its own appearance. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
I am the clock that exists and does not know itself: thus one oneself formulated one’s fatefulness, the actuality of this phenomenon and the inactuality of the soul, after one had been separated from one’s cause; for it was only then that one could, and had to, think and speak of oneself and recollect one’s soul which appeared only then. What appears is not mere subject; neither does it reach subjectivity: the magic spell broken, but unredeemed, it finds expression in the terrible word, as legitimate as it is illegitimate: The Universe contemplates Us! The end it sinks back into mystery. Who after such a step and such a fall, would dare to claim that this mortal understood one’s tremendous, monstrous mission—or that one misunderstood it? What is certain that the age for which the demonic mortal who lives without a present has become master and model will misunderstand one. It fails to see that what holds sway here is destiny and accomplishment, not the lust for and delight in power. It goes into ecstasies over the commanding brow and has no inkling of the signs inscribed upon this forehead like digits upon the face of a clock. One tries studiously to imitate the way one looked at others, without any understanding of one’s need and necessitation, and one mistakes the objectivity severity of this I for fermenting self-awareness. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
The word “I” remains the shibboleth of humanity. Napoleon spoke it without the power to relate, but he did speak it as the I of an accomplishment. Those who exert themselves to copy this, merely betray the hopelessness of their own self-contradiction. What is that: self-contradiction? When mortals do not test a priori of relation in the World, working out and actualizing the innate soul in what one encounters, it turns inside. Then it unfolds through the unnatural, impossible object, the I—which is to say that it unfolds where there is no room for it to unfold. Thus the confrontation within the self comes int being and this cannot be relation, presence, the current of reciprocity, but only self-contradiction. Some mortals may try to interpret this as a relation, perhaps one that is religious, in order to extricate themselves from the horror of their Doppelganger: they are bound to keep rediscovering the deception of any such interpretation. Here is the edge of life. What is unfulfilled as here escaped into the mad delusion of some fulfillment; now it gropes around in the labyrinth and get lost ever more profoundly. When mortals are overcome by the horror of the alienation between I and World, at times, it occurs to one that something might be done. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
Imagine that at some dreadful midnight you lie there, tormented by a waking dream: the bulwarks have crumbled and the abysses scream, and you realize in the midst of this agony that life is still there and I must merely get through it—but how? How? Thus feels mortals in the hours when one collects oneself: overcome by horror, pondering, without direction. And yet one may know the right direction, deep down in the unloved knowledge of the depths—the direction of return that leads through sacrifice. However, he rejects this knowledge; what is mystical cannot endure the artificial midnight Sun. One summons thought in which one places, quite rightly, much confidence: thought is supposed to fix everything. After all, it is the lofty art of thought that it can paint a reliable and practically credible picture of the World. Thus mortals say to one’s thought: “Look at the dreadful shape that lies over there with those cruel eyes—is she not the one which with whom I played long ago? Do you remember how she used to laugh at me with these eyes and how good they were then? And now look at my wretched soul—I will admit it to you: it is empty, and whatever I put into myself, experience as well as use, does not penetrate to this cavern. Will not you fix things between her and me so that she relents and I get well again?” #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
And thought, ever obliging and skillful, paints with its accustomed speed a series—nay, two series of pictures on the right and the left wall. Here is (or rather: happens, for the World pictures of thought are reliable motion pictures) the Universe. From the whirl of the stars emerges the small Earth, from the teeming on Earth emerges small mortals, and now history carries one forth through the ages, to preserve in rebuilding the anthills of the cultures that crumble under its steps. Beneath this series of pictures is written: “One and all.” On the other wall happens the soul. A female figure spins the orbits of all stars and the life of all creatures and the whole of World history; all is spun with a single thread and is no longer called stars and the life of all creatures and the whole of World history; all is spun with a single thread and is no longer called stars and creatures and World but feeling and representations or even living experiences and states of the soul. And beneath this series of pictures is written: “One and all.” Henceforth, when mortals are for once overcome by the horror of alienation and the World fills one with anxiety, one looks up (right or left, as the case may be) and see a picture. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
Then one sees that the soul is contained in the World, and that there is really no I, and this the World cannot harm the I, and one calms down; or one sees that the World is contained in the I, and that there really is no World, and thus the World cannot harm the I, and one calms down. And when mortals are overcome again by the horror of alienation and the I fills one with anxiety, one looks up and sees a picture; and whichever one sees, it does not matter, either the empty I is stuffed full of World or it is submerged in the flood of the World, and one calms down. However, the moment will come, and it is near, when mortals overcome by horror, looks up and in a flash sees both pictures at once. And one is seized by a deeper horror. Shall we say that all humans are traveling on this quest of God but most humans do so unconsciously and unwillingly? For then the person technically called a quester simply differs from other persons by one’s awareness of the journey, the demands in makes upon one, and one’s willingness to co-operate in satisfying demands. Mortals unconsciously seeks one’s freedom and enlightenment, as one consciously seeks one’s welfare and happiness. However, there is a faceless sinister, sarcastic, evil presence that one can sense sometimes. It plants thoughts and puts on demonic plays to cause worry and fear. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
As the influences of the World increasingly embrace the evil, we must strive with all diligence to stay firmly on the path that leads us safely to our Saviour. Cries and howls continue. A new anthem of curses upon those who break the sacred laws, blasphemed, provoke the wrath of God and Stand. They are pulling on the gates and lower windows. They are doing stupid things like throwing rocks at the wall. It I because God is hidden in all creatures that all creatures are searching all the time for God. This remains just as true even though in their ignorance they usually mistake the object of their search and believe that it is something else. Only on the quest does this search attain self-consciousness. The uninformed mortal is blind to the work of spiritual evolution which goes on within one and consequently thwarts and obstructs it unwittingly. The informed mortal sees the work and co-operates with it consciously. The blessing of feasting upon the words of Christ are powerful and life changing. The words of Christ will profoundly touch hearts and open the eyes of those who do not see him. “Ye must press forward with a steadfastness in Christ, having a perfect brightness of hope, and a love of God and of all mortals, animals and other living and non-living beings. Wherefore, if ye shall press forward, feasting up the word of Christ, and endure to the end, behold, thus saith the Father: Ye shall have eternal life,” reports 2 Nephi 31.20. In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Human Beings are Given More than One Chance to Redeem themselves for Such is the Mercy of the Higher Power!
If you follow your conscience, you do what you want. However, it was simpler than that. I wanted you to have the wealth I gave you. I wanted you…to be happy. I lighted the torch on the wall, and went out for a moment to breathe the fresh air. Then leaving gates and doors unlocked behind me, and went up stairs to watch the twilight melt from the sky. An hour must have passed. The azure light faded, the stars rose. A friend responded to my question as to how he was with these words: “I have got a cold, I did not sleep much last night, everything is going wrong.” My friend went on: “The people who argue that the psyche and the ego are identical are wrong. My ego is in bad shape; my psyche is fine.” All through history human beings have wrestled with the fact that each of us experiences two aspects of selfhood which are never fully separated from each other. One of these aspects is the ego-self. This has the functions Dr. Freud rightly assigned to it: beleaguered monarch thought it is, it keeps, as best it can, some harmony in the different sections of its kingdom. It judges the demands of reality, balances preconscious ideas, and sifts out unacceptable unconscious impulses so that the person can live with some unity. The ego-self is related to the instincts and bodily well-being. A number (though not all) of the concerns about wounded prestige, suffering slights, I would assign to this ego-self. The ego-self’s question is some form of “Do I get what I want?” Hence, its associated with the term egocentricity. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
The other aspect is the psyche-self, which seeks to see life steadily and its it whole. The psyche-self is concerned with the context of freedom. The heightened consciousness of which we speak from time to time is a function of the psyche-self. It is the aspect that scans the various possibilities of the self; it is the locus of what we call essential freedom. When Christopher Burney, during the five years in solitary confinement in Germany in World War II, set himself to review everything he had been taught in school in order to keep from going psychotic, he was using not the ego-self, but the source of purpose that transcends the ego, which is the psyche-self. The ego-self is correlated with freedom of doing, the psyche-self with freedom of being. When it is pointed out again and again that freedom depends on how the self relates itself to itself at every moment, one is speaking of the psyche-self in relation to the ego. The self relating to itself was the aspect of selfhood that Dr. Freud never understood. About his therapeutic practice we find Dr. Freud writing, “analysis does not set out to make pathological reactions impossible but to give the patient’s ego freedom to choose one way or the other.” This refers to freedom, but it omits the function most concerned with this freedom—namely, the self relating to itself. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
There is a curious phenomenon in human selfhood that I have noticed in my clients and in myself that I call the automatic pilot. The automatic pilot is the device on passenger planes to which the pilot can shift the directing of the plane when, on a long flight, he or she needs to rest. A client, for example, will be intensely anxious about a confrontation one must have with some other person or about a difficult phone call one mast make. Finally, one gets one’s courage up and goes ahead to do these anxiety-laden acts. One is surprised to discover that they turn out much better than one anticipated. There seems to be some unexpected assistance, some power that one did not know one possessed. From a Freudian point of view, it would be asserted that the help of which one was not aware comes from the client’s preconscious; and in Jungianism, it would probably be interpreted as a voice from the unconscious. I call such assistance a function of the psyche-self. The implication is that we, whether we are patients in therapy or not, can rightfully trust ourselves on those deeper dimensions which I have called the psyche-self. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
In the welter of self-distrust in which we generally find ourselves these days (covered up as it is by neonarcisscism, techniques of assertiveness, and advice to stand up for yourself), we can bank on more power, more capacity than mist of us give ourselves credit for. This upsurging of strength and energy which we did not know we has is an example of the working of destiny through the psyche-self. However, it is required at the same time that we confront our despair and our anxiety rather than suppressing them; otherwise the despair and anxiety will take over in the moment when we need their opposites. The automatic pilot is partially an influence from Eastern mysticism, particularly Zen Buddhism and its offshorts. It is the phenomena of letting go and letting be. The awareness of the duality of selfhood enables us to correct a radical misunderstanding of Zen Buddhism and other Eastern psychoreligions with regard to transcending the self. There is a passion among some groups in America to lose oneself, to escape from oneself, to get free of oneself. It is significant that this passion came along with, or followed closely, the age of narcissism and the preoccupation with self-sentiments. The “me” decade followed hard upon the Zen decade. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
These two phases, me decade and Zen decade, sound contradictory—and they are on paper. However, their proximity shows that they had in common the same longing to escape from oneself. People in search of a drug would ask a friend, “Do you have any uppers?” or if the answer was no, “Do you have any downers?” It did not matter whether the result one got was elation or depression. At least one got free of oneself. The rushing after Zen and the narcissism was thus often to be found in the same person. There was no distinction between the constructive self-concern of a person and the self-concern of one who leaps after one gimmick one weekend and after another gimmick the next weekend. This leaping often leads not only to temporary elation, but to eventual confusion and despair. The loss of the self, I believe is a misnomer. The misunderstanding of the Zen Buddhist goal of freedom from the self actually leads to a more subtle kind of narcissism. One’s own pushiness, one’s demands, one’s egocentricity may still be present; only the person now rationalizes them in terms of nonselfullness. We cannot help noting the exemplars of Zen Buddhism and Transcendental Meditation and other forms of psychoreligion are not without any self; the idea is abused. They are relieved of one phase of the self—namely, what I have called the ego-self. However, they seek to discover in the psyche-self a new clarity, a freshness, a sense of immediacy and of eternity. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
The self we transcend in Zen Buddhism and meditation is the ego-self. The ecstasy we experience is the freedom from the concerns of the ego-self, a process of dumping rubbish of the self, followed by the pre-eminent presence, however temporary, of the psyche-self. One gains power over an incubus by addressing it by its real name. Similarly, the It-World that but now seemed to dwarf mortal’s small strength with its uncanny power has to yield to anyone who recognizes its true nature: the particularization and alienation of that out of whose abundance, welling up close by, every Earthly You emerges to confront us—that which appeared to us at times as great and terrible as the mother goodness, but nevertheless always motherly. However, how can we muster the strength to address the incubus by one’s right name as long as a ghost lurks inside us—that I that has been robbed of its actuality? How can the buried power to relate be resurrected in a being in which a vigorous ghost appears hourly to stamp down the debris under which this power lies? How is a being to collect itself as long as the mania of one’s detached I-hood chases it ceaselessly around an empty circle? If caprice is one’s dwelling place, how is anyone to behold one’s freedom? #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Even as freedom and fate belong together, caprice belongs with doom. However, freedom and fate are promised to each other and embrace each other to constitute meaning; caprice and doom, the spook of the soul and the nightmare of the World, get along with each other, living next door and avoiding each other, without connection and friction, at home in meaninglessness—until in one instant eye meets eye, madly, and the confession erupts from both that they are unredeemed. How much intellectual eloquence and artistry is used today to prevent or at least conceal this occurrence! Free is the mortal that wills without caprice. One believes in the actual, which is to say: one believes in the real association of the real duality, I and You. One believes in destiny and also that is needs one. It does not lead one, it waits for one. One must proceed toward it without knowing where it waits for one. One must go forth with one’s whole being: that one knows. It will not turn out the way one’s resolve intended it; but what wants to come will come only if one resolves to do that which one can will. One must sacrifice one’s little will, which is unfree and ruled by things and drives, to one’s great will that moves away from being determined to find destiny. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
Now one no longer interferes, nor does one merely allow things to happen. One listens to that which grows, to the way of Being in the World, not in order to be carried along by it but rather in order to actualize it in the manner in which it, needing one, wants to actualize it in the manner in which it, needing one, wants to be actualized by one—with human spirit and human deed, with human life and human death. One believes, I said; but this implies: he encounters. The capricious mortal does not believe and encounter. One does not know association; one only knows the feverish World out there and one’s feverish desire to use it. We only have to give use an ancient, classical name, and it walks among the gods. When you say You, he means: You, my ability to use! And what one calls one’s destiny is merely an embellishment of and a sanction for one’s ability to use. In truth one has no destiny but is merely determined by things and drives, feels autocratic, and is capricious. One has no great will and tires to pass off caprice in its place. For sacrifice one lacks all capacity, however much one may talk of it, and you may recognize it by noting that one never becomes concrete. One constantly interferes, in order “to let it happen.” How, one says to you, could one fail to assist destiny? How could one not employ all feasible means required for such an end? That is how one see those who are free; one cannot seem them differently. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
However, the free mortal does not have an end here and then fetch the means from there; one has only one thing: always only one’s resolve to proceed toward one’s destiny. Having made this resolve, one will renew it at every fork in the road; and one would sooner believe that one was not really alive than one would believe that the resolve of the great will was insufficient and required the support of means. One believes; one encounters. However, the unbelieving marrow of the capricious mortal cannot perceive anything but unbelief and caprice, positing ends and devising means. One’s World is devoid of sacrifice and grace, encounter and present, but shot through with ends and means: it could not be different and its name is doom. For all one’s autocratic bearing, one is inextricably entangled in unreality; and one becomes aware of this whenever one recollects one’s own condition. Therefore one takes pains to use the best parts of one’s mind to prevent or at least obscure such recollection of one’s falling off, of the deactualized and the actual I, were permitted to reach down to the roots that mortals calls despair and from which self-destruction and rebirth grow, this would be the beginning of the return. “Jesus Christ was not Yes and No; but in him it is always Yes. For all the promises of God find their Yes in him,” reports II Corinthians 1.19,20. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
A change in his traveling plans and the angry reaction of the Corinthian Christians to this change is used by Paul for profound and far-reaching assertions about Jesus “the Christ”: “In hi it is always Yes, he is not Yes and No.” This reminds us by contrast of the words of a great Protestant mystic who has said that in Yes and No all things consist, and of philosophers and theologians who are convinced that truth can only be expressed through No and Yes, and above all of Paul’s own central doctrines that God justifies the sinner, that he says “yes” to one whom he says a radical ‘”no” at the same time. And does not Paul in this second letter to Corinthians formulate the Yes and No in a most paradoxical way: “Unknown and yet well known, dying and behold we live, having nothing yet possessing every.” This certainly is Yes and No. However, in the Christ, he says, there is not Yes and No. Really not? Do we not come from Good Friday to Easter, which point to the deepest No and the highest Yes—that of the death and life of Christ? Yes and No: This certainly is the law of all life, but not Yes alone and not No alone. Yes alone is the advice of a self-deceiving confidence which soon will be shaken by the No of the three gray figures: emptiness, guilt, death. No alone is the advice of a self-deceiving despair whose hidden Yes to itself is manifest in its self-seclusion and its resistance against the Yes of love and communion. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
And further, Yes and No is the law of truth. Not Yes alone and not No alone! Yes alone is the arrogance which claims that its limited truth is the ultimate truth, but which reveals by its fanatical self-affirmation how many hidden No’s are present in its ground. No alone is the resignation which denies any ultimate truth but which shows by its self-complacent irony against the biting power of every word of truth how strong the Yes to itself is that underlies its ever-repeated No. Truth as well as life unite Yes and No, and only the courage which accepts the infinite tension between Yes and No can have abundant life and ultimate truth. How is such a courage possible? It is possible because there is a Yes above the Yes and No of life and of truth. However, it is a Yes which is not ours. If it were ours, even our greatest, our most universal and most courageous Yes, it would be contrasted by another No. This is the reason why no theology and no philosophy, not even a theology or philosophy of “Yes and No” is ultimate truth. In the moment in which it is expressed, it is contradicted by another philosophy and another theology. Not even the message of Yes and No, be it said by Kierkegaard or by Luther or by Paul, can escape its No. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
There is only one reality where there is not Yes and No but only Yes: Jesus as the Christ. First he also stands under the No, as completely as a being can stand; this is the meaning of the Cross. Everything of Christ which is only the expression of a finite life or a finite truth stands with all life and all truth under the No. Therefore, we are not asked to accept Christ as the unquestionable teacher or as the always fitting example, but we are told that in Christ all promises of God have become real, and that in Christ a life and truth which is beyond Yes and No has become manifest. This is the meaning of Resurrection. The No of death is conquered and the Yes of life is transcended by that which has appeared in Christ. A life which is not balanced by death, a truth which is not balanced by error is visible in Christ’s being. Christ shows the final Yes without another No. This is the Easter message; this is the Christian message altogether. And this is the ground of a courage which can stand the infinite tension between Yes and No in everything finite, even in everything religious and in everything Christian. Paul points to the fact that Christian say Amen through Christ. One cannot say Amen to anything expect the reality which is the Christ. Amen is the formula of confirmation, the expression of ultimate certitude. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
There is no ultimate certitude expect the life which has conquered its death and the truth which as conquered its death and the truth which has conquered its error, the Yes which is beyond Yes and No. Paul points to that which gives us such a certainty: It is not an historical report, but it is the participation in Christ, in whom we are established, as he says who has given us the guarantee of his Spirit in our hearts. We can stand the Yes and No of life and truth because we participate in the Yes beyond Yes and No, because we are in it, as it is in us. We are participants of Christ’s resurrection; therefore, we can say the ultimate Yes, the Amen beyond our Yes and our No. How many people thing and say that when their material fortunes improve, or their family problems are solved, or their living place is changed they will be able to give time and effort to the spiritual quest, but until then they must wait! However, in actual fact this seldom happens. For when the improvement, solution, or change does take place, new matters call for their attention or new attachments are formed for the ego, and so the spiritual effort gets postponed again. Those who believe that it is better to wait for more propitious circumstances before they begin the Quest, deceive themselves into an unavailing and lugubrious pessimism. Neither tomorrow nor the next year will be any better. Procrastination my be perilous. Later may be too late. Beware of being drawn into that vast cemetery wherein mortals bury their half-born aspiration and paralysed hopes. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
Justice Without Love is Always Injustice Because it Does Not Do Justice to the Other One, Nor to Oneself, Nor to the Situation in Which We Meet!
I stood on the hilltop in the Moonlight and I tried not to see this paradise. I tried to picture those I loved. Were they gathered still together in that fairy-tale wood of beautiful trees? If only I could see their faces or hear their voices. I looked on these verdant green valley, now patched with beautiful contracted Cresleigh homes, a picture book World with flowers blooming in profusion, the red poinsettia as tall as trees. And the clouds, ever changing, borne like the tall sailing ships on brisk winds. What had the first Europeans thought when they looked upon this fecund land surrounded by the sparkling sea? That this was the Garden of God? Even the most uneducated people would not dare to affirm that compassion, gratitude, love of the beauty of the World, love of religious practices, and friendship belonged exclusively to those centuries and countries that recognize the Church. These forms of love are rarely found in their purity, but it would even be difficult to say that they were met with more frequently in those centuries and countries than in the others. To think that love in any of these forms can exist anywhere Christ is absent is to belittle him so grievously that it amounts to an outrage. It is impious and almost sacrilegious. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17
These kinds of love are supernatural, and in a sense they are absurd. They are the height of folly. So long as the soul has not had direct contact with the very person of God, they cannot be supported by any knowledge based either on experience or reason. They cannot therefore rest upon any certainty, unless the word is used in a metaphorical sense to indicate the opposite of hesitation. In consequence it is better that they should not be associated with any belief. This is more honest intellectually, and it safeguards our love’s purity more effectively. On this account it is more fitting. In what concerns divine things, belief is not fitting. Only certainty will do. Anything less than certainty is unworthy of God. During the period of preparation, these indirect loves constitute an upward movement of the soul, a turning of the eyes, not without some effort, toward higher things. After God has come in person, not only to visit the soul as he does for a long time beforehand, but to possess it and to transport its center near to his very heart, it is otherwise. The chicken has cracked its shell; it is outside the egg of the World. These first loves continue; they are more intense than before, but they are different. One who has passed through this adventure has a deeper love than every for those who suffer affliction and for those who help one in one’s own, for one’s friends, for religious practices, and for the beauty of the World. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17
However, one’s love in all these forms had become a movement of God himself, a ray merged in the light of God. That at least is what we may suppose. These indirect loves are only the attitude toward beings and things here below of the soul turned toward the Good. They themselves have not any particular good as an object. There is no final good here below. Thus strictly speaking we are no longer concerned with forms of love, but with attitudes inspire by love. In the period of preparation the soul loves in emptiness. It does not know whether anything real answers its love. It may believe that it knows, but to believe is not to know. Such a belief does not help. The soul knows for certain only that it is hungry. The important thing is that it announces its hunger by crying. If we suggest to a child that perhaps there is no bread, the child does not stop crying. It goes on crying just the same. The danger is not lest the soul should doubt whether there is any bread, but lest, by a lie, it should persuade itself that it is not hungry. It can only persuade itself of this by lying, for the reality of its hunger is not a belief, it is a certainty. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17
We all know that there is no true good here below, that everything that appears to be good in this World is finite, limited, wears out, and once worn out, leaves necessity exposed in all its nakedness. Every human being has probably had some lucid moments in one’s life when one has definitely acknowledged to oneself that there is no final good here below. However, as soon as we have seen this truth we cover it up with lies. Many people even take pleasure in proclaiming it, seeking a morbid joy in their sadness, without ever having been able to bear facing it for a second. Mortals feel that there is a mortal danger in facing this truth squarely for any length of time. That is true. Such knowledge strikes more surely than a sword; it inflicts a death more frightening than that of the body. After a time it kills everything within us that constitutes our soul. In order to bear it we have to love the truth more than life itself. Those who do this turn away from the fleeting things of time with their souls. They do not turn toward God. When they are in total darkness, how could they do so? God himself sets their faces in the right direction. He does not, however, show himself to them for a long time. It is for them to remain motionless, without averting their eyes, listening ceaselessly, and waiting, they know not for what; deaf to entreaties and threats, unmoved by every shock, unshaken in the midst of every upheaval. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17
If after a long period of waiting God allow them to have an indistinct intuition of his light or even reveals himself in person, it is only for an instant. Once more they have to remain still, attentive, inactive, calling out only when their desire cannot be contained. If God does not reveal this reality, it does not rest with the soul to believe in the reality of God. In trying to do so it either labels something else with the name of God, and that is idolatry, or its belief in God remains abstract and verbal. Such a belief prevails wherever religious doctrines are taken for granted, as is the cause with those centuries and countries in which it never enters anyone’s head to question it. The state of nonbelief is then what Saint John of the Cross calls a night. The belief is verbal and does not penetrate the soul. At a time like the present, if the unbeliever loves Go, if one is like the child who does not know whether there is bread anywhere, but cries out become one is hungry, incredulity may be equivalent to the dark night of Saint John of the Cross. When we are eating bread, and even when we have eaten it, we know that it is real. We can nevertheless raise doubts about the reality of bread. Philosophers raise doubts about the reality of the World of the senses. Such doubts are however purely verbal; they leave the certainty intact and actually serve only to make it more obvious to a well-balanced mind. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17
In the same way one to whom God has revealed his reality can raise doubts about this reality without any harm. They are purely verbal doubts, a form of exercise to keep one’s intelligence in good health. What amounts to criminal treason, even before such a revelation and much more afterward, is to question the fact that God is the only thing worthy of love. That is a turning away of our eyes, for love is the soul’s looking. It means that we have stopped for an instant to wait and to listen. Queen Akasha did not seek Lestat, she waited for him. When she was convinced that he no longer existed, and that nowhere in the whole World was there anything that could be Lestat, she did not on that account return to her former associates. She drew back from them with greater aversion than ever. She preferred the absence of Lestat to the presence of anyone else. Lestat awakened her from her statue state, from her cold slumber. She no longer hoped for that. However, never for an instant did dream of employing another method which could obtain a luxurious and honored life for her—the method of reconciliation with her kith and kin. Akasha did not want wealth and consideration unless they came with Lestat. She did not even give a thought to such things. However, she wanted to turn Earth into a Heaven. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17
At that moment Lestat could hold out no longer. He could not help declaring himself. He gave certain proof that he was Lestat. Akasha saw him, she heard him, she touched him. There would be no more question for her not as to whether her savior was in existence. One who has had the same adventure as Akasha, one whose soul has seen, heard, and touched for itself, one will recognize God as the reality inspiring all indirect loves, the reality of which they are as it were the reflections. God is pure beauty. This is incomprehensible, for beauty, by its very essence, has to do with the senses. To speak of an imperceptible beauty must seem a misuse of language to anyone who has any sense of exactitude: and with reason. Beauty is always a miracle. However, when the soul receives an impression of beauty which, while it is beyond all sense perception is no abstraction, but real and direct as the impression caused by a song at the moment it reached our ears, the miracle is raised to the second degree. Everything happens as though, by a miraculous favor, our very sense themselves had been made aware that silence is not the absence of sound, but something infinitely more real than sounds, and the center of a harmony more perfect than anything which a combination of sounds can produce. Furthermore there are degrees of silence. When compared with the silence of God, there is a silence in the beauty of the Universe which is like noise. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17
God is, moreover, our real neighbor. The term of person can only be rightly applied to God, and this is also true of the term impersonal. God is one who bends over us, afflicted as we are, and reduced to the state of being nothing but a fragment of inert and bleeding flesh. Yet at the same time he is not some sort of victim of misfortune as well, the victim who appears to us as an inanimate body, incapable of thought, this nameless victim of whom nothing is known. The inanimate body is this created Universe. If we were able to attain it, the love we owe to God, this love that would be our crowning perfection is the divine model both of gratitude and compassion. God is also the perfect friend. So that there should be between him and us, bridging the infinite distance, something in the way of equality, he had chosen to place an absolute quality in his creatures, the absolute liberty of consent, which leaves us free to follow or swerve from the God-ward direction he has communicated to our souls. He has also extended our possibilities of error and falsehood so as to leave us the faculty of exercising a spurious rule in imagination, not only over the Universe and the human race, but also over God himself, in so far as we do not know how to use his name aright. He has given us this faculty of infinite illusion so that we should have the power to renounce it out of love. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17
In fact, contact with God is the true sacrament. We can, however, be almost certain that those whose love of God has caused the disappearance of the pure loves belonging to our life here below are no true friends of God. After the soul has had direct contact with God, our neighbor, our friends, religious ceremonies, and the beauty of the World do not fall to the level of unrealities. On the contrary, it is only then that these things become real. Previously they were half dreams. Previously they had no reality. “In my vision at night I looked, and there before me was one like a son of man, coming with the clouds of Heaven. He approached the Ancient of Days and was led into his presence. He was given authority, glory and sovereign power; all peoples, nations, and mortals of every language worshipped him. His dominion is an everlasting dominion that will not pass away, and his kingdom is one that will never be destroyed,” reports Daniel 7.11. Could God possibly forgive people without at least demanding their conversation and some ritual observances? People, at any time, can return and be accepted by God. God can at any time forgive those who repent. Many people say we live in a sick society—and the quality of life might be changed radically by the development of a new sense of community. If every person returns from one’s evil way and from the violence on one’s hands, who knows, God may return. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17
Modern mortals are voracious readers who have never learned to read well. Part of the trouble is that one is taught to read drivel that is hardly worth reading well. (There was a time when children learned to read by reading the Bible.) One ends up by reading mainly newspapers and magazines—ephemeral, anonymous trash that one scans on its way to the garbage can. One has no wish to remember it for any length of time; it is written as if to make sure that one will not; and one reads it in a manner that makes doubly sure. There is no person behind what one reads; not even a committee. Somebody wrote it in the first place—if one can call that writing—and then various other people took turns changing it. For the final result no one is responsible; and it rarely merits a serious response. It cries out to be forgotten soon, like the books on which one is learned to read, in school. They were usually anonymous, too; or they should have been. In adolescence students are suddenly turned loose on books worth reading, but generally do not know how to read them. And if, untaught, some instinct prompts them to read well, chances are that they are asked completely tone-deaf questions as soon as they have finished their assignment—either making them feel that they read badly after all or spoiling something worthwhile for the rest of their lives. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17
We must learn to feel addressed by a book, by the human being behind it, as if a person spoke directly to us. A good book or essay or poem is not primarily an object to be put to use, or an object of experience: it is the voice of You speaking to me, requiring a response. “So whatever you wish that mortals would do to you, do so to them; for this is the law and the prophets,” reports Matthew 7.12. Recently I have had to think about the relation of love to justice. And it occurred to me that among the words of Jesus there is a statement of what is called the “Golden Rule.” The Golden Rule was well known to Christians and Greeks, although mostly in a negative form: What you do not want that mortal should do to you, do not so to them. Certainly, the absolute for is richer in meaning and nearer to love, but it is not love. It is calculating justice. How, then, is it related to love? How does it fit the message of the kingdom of God and the justice of the kingdom as expressed in the Sermon on the Mount where the Golden Rule appears? Let us think of an ordinary day in our life and of occasions for the application of the Golden Rule. We meet each other in the morning, we expect a friendly face or word and we are ready to give it although our minds are full of anxious anticipation of the burdens. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17
Somebody wants a part of our limited time, we give it, having asked somebody else to give us a part of one’s time. We need help and we give it if we are asked, although it includes sacrifice. We are frank with others, expecting that they will be frank with us even if it hurts. We are fair to those who fight against us expecting fairness from them. We participate in the sorrows of our neighbors, certain that they will participate in ours. All this can happen in one day. All this is Golden Rule. And if somebody has violated this rule, consciously or unconsciously, we are willing to forgive as we hope to be forgiven. It is not astonishing that for many people the Golden Rule is considered as the real content of Christianity. It is not surprising that in the name of the Golden Rule criticism is suppressed, independent action discouraged, serious problems avoided. It is even understandable that statesmen ask other nations to behave toward their own nations according to the Golden Rule. And does not Jesus himself say that the Golden Rule is the law and the prophets? However, we know that this is not the answer of the New Testament. The great commandment as Jesus repeats it and the descriptions of love in Paul and John’s tremendous assertion that God is love, infinitely transcend the Golden Rule. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17
The Golden Rule must be transcended, for it does not tell us what we should wish that mortal would do to us. We wish to have freedom from heavy duties. We are ready to give the same freedom to others. However, someone who loves us refuses to give it to us, and one oneself refuses to ask us for it. And if one did, we should refuse to give it to one because it would reduce our growth and violate the law of love. We wish to receive a fortune which makes us secure and independent. We would be ready to give a fortune to a friend who asks us for it, if we had it. However, in both cases love would be violated. For the gift would ruin us and the other individual. We want to be forgiven and we are ready to do the same. However, perhaps it is in both cases an escape from the seriousness of a personal problem, and therefore against love. The measure of what we shall do to mortals cannot be our wishes about what they shall do to us. For our wishes express not only our right but also our wrong and our foolishness more than our wisdom. This is the limit of the Golden Rule. This is the limit of calculating justice. Only for one who knows what one should wish and who actually wishes it, is the Golden Rule ultimately valid. Only love can transform calculating justice into creative justice. Love makes justice just. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17
Justice without love is always injustice because it does not do justice to the other one, nor to the oneself, nor to the situation in which we meet. For the other one and I and we together in this moment in this place are unique, unrepeatable occasion, calling for a unique unrepeatable act of uniting love. If this call is not heard by listening love, it is not obeyed by the creative genius of love, injustice is done. And this is true even of oneself. One who loves listens to the call of one’s own innermost center and obeys this call and does justice to one’s own being. For love does not remove, it establishes justice. It does not add something to what justice does but it shows justice what to do. It makes the Golden Rule possible. For we do not speak for a love which swallows justice. This would result in chaos and extinction. However, we speak for a love in which justice is the form and structure of love. We speak for a love which respects the claim of the other one to be acknowledged as what one is, and the claim of ourselves to be acknowledged as what we are, above all as persons. Only distorted love, which is a cover for hostility or self-disgust, denies that which united love. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17
Love makes justice just. The divine love is justifying love accepting and fulfilling one who, according to calculating justice, must be rejected. This justification of one who is unjust is the fulfillment of God’s creative justice, and of God’s reuniting love. Knowing that the ultimate meaning of freedom will elude us, let us still endeavor to define the term as best we can. The first definition is on the psychological level, the domain of everyday actions: Freedom is the capacity to pause in the face of stimuli from many directions at once and, in this pause, to throw one’s weight toward this response rather than that one. This is the freedom we experience in a store when we pause over the purchase of a necktie or a shirt. We summon up in our imaginations the image of how we will look in this or that tie, what so-and-so will say about it, or how the color will fit such and such a suit. And then we buy the tie or we move on to something else. This is freedom of doing, or existential freedom. This freedom is shown most interestingly in the supermarket, when we push our carts through the aisles between the tumultuous variety of packages and cans of food on the shelves, each one silently shouting through its bright-colored label “Buy me!” We see the shoppers with expressions of hesitancy, vacuity, wonder, pausing for some inspiration as to which of all these foods will be good for dinner tonight. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17
The shopper seems hypnotized, charmed, preoccupied. Like patients on a ward in a mental hospital, they do not see me as I walk directly across their line of vision. The expressions of wonder and hesitancy are a readiness, an invitation, an openness to some stimulus on the shelves to persuade them to throw the balance this way of that in making their choice. This first freedom is experienced by each of us hundreds of times every day. It is decked up in respectable terms like decision/choice when we discuss freedom in psychology classes—if we ever discuss freedom in psychology classes at all. The most profound illustration of this kind of freedom is our ability to ask questions. Take, for example, my asking a question after listening to a lecture. The very fact that the question comes up in my mind at all implied that there is more than one answer. Otherwise there would be no point in asking the question in the first place. This is freedom; it implies that there is some possibility, some freedom of selection in what I ask. The speaker then pauses for a few seconds after I have asked it, turning over in his or her mind the possible answers. We sense that there is, in asking and answering questions, a good deal more going on, and it is of a richer nature, than the mere responding to various stimuli and selecting a response. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17
Each person who lights this candle within one’s own mind will soon begin to attract other mortals like moths to a flame burning by a fire—not all mortal nor many mortals but only those who are groping for a way out of their darkness. Can a scrupulously impartial search through World-thought and experience lead to discovery of truth? “Wilt thou be made whole?” asked Jesus. Questioning implies some value judgment, some investment of the person’s life, some invitation to share, to make contact, some challenge to consider a new idea. Regrettably, in recent decades our very idea of freedom has been diminished and grown shallow in comparisons with previous ages; it has been relegated almost exclusively to freedom from outside pressure, to freedom from state coercion—to freedom understood on the juridical level, and no higher. Only when this search for a higher life has becomes an absolute necessity to a mortal, has one found even the first qualification needed for the Quest. “And the Lord God doth work by means to bring about his great and eternal purposes; and by very small means the Lord doth confound the wise and bringeth about the salvation of many souls,” reports Alma 37.7. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17
It is a Rare Gift to Meet a Human Being in Whom Love—and this Means God—is so Overwhelmingly Manifest!
All right. I allowed myself to be taken along. White marble tile, carved gold fixtures; and ancient Roman splendor. Time is important because, although we are eternal beings, we are not going to be able to enjoy the pleasures of being in the flesh and on this Earth forever, and you may miss it, even when you go to Heaven. Nevertheless, we know and believe the love God has for us. “God is love, and one who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in one,” reports 1 John 4.16. “A new commandment I give to you, that you love one another; even as I have loved you, that you also love one another. By this, if you have love for one another, all mortals will know that you are my disciples,” reports John 13.34-35. After two thousand years are we still able to realize what it means to say, “God is Love”? The writer of the First Epistle of John certainly knew what he wrote, for he drew the consequences: “One who abides in love abides in God, and God abides in one.” God’s abiding in us, making us his dwelling place, is the same thing as our having love as the sphere of our habitation. God and love are not two realities; they are one. God’s Being is the being of love and God’s infinite power of Being is the infinite power of love. Therefore, one who professes devotion to God may abide in God if one abides in love, or one may not abide in God if one does not abide in love. And one who does not speak of God may abide in him if one is abiding in love. #RandolphHarris 1 of 18
And since the manifestation of God as love is his manifestation in Jesus Christ, Jesus can say that many of those who do not know him, belong to him, and that many of those who confess their allegiance to him do not belong to him. The criterion, the only ultimate criterion, is love. For God is love, and the divine love is triumphantly manifest in Christ the Crucified. Let me tell you the story of a woman who passed away a few years ago and whose life was spent abiding in live, although she rarely, if ever, used the name of God, and though she would have been surprised had someone told her that she belonged to him who judges all mortals, because he is love and love is the only criterion of his judgment. Her name was Elsa Brandstrom, the daughter of a former Swedish ambassador to Russia. However, her name in the mouths and hearts of hundreds of thousands of prisoners of war during the First World War was the Angel of Siberia. She was an irrefutable, living witness to the truth that love is the ultimate power of Being, even in a century which belongs to the darkest, most destructive and cruel of all centuries since the dawn of humankind. At the beginning of the First World War, when Elsa Brandstorm was twenty-four years of age, she looked out the window of the Swedish Embassy in what was then Saint Petersburg and saw the Germany prisoners of war being driven through the streets on their way to Siberia. #RandolphHarris 2 of 18
From that moment on, after what she had seen, Elsa could no longer endure the splendor of the diplomatic life of which, up to then, she had been a beautiful and vigorous center. She became a nurse and began visiting the prison camps. There she saw unspeakable horrors and she, a girl of twenty-four, began, almost alone, the fight of love against cruelty, and she prevailed. She had to fight against the resistance and suspicion of the authorities and she prevailed. She had to fight against the brutality and lawlessness of the prison guards and she triumphed. She had to fight against cold, hunger, dirt and illness, against the conditions of an undeveloped country and a destructive war, and she prevailed. Love gave her wisdom with innocence, and daring with foresight. And whenever she appeared despair was conquered and sorrow healed. Elsa visited the hungry and gave them food. She saw the thirsty and have them to drink. She welcomed the unknown, clothed the people in their birthday suits and strengthened the sick. Elsa herself fell ill and was imprisoned, but God was abiding in her. The irresistible power of love was with her. #RandolphHarris 3 of 18
And she never ceased to be driven by this power. After the war Elsa initiated a great work for the orphans of Germany and Russian prisoners of war. The sight of her among these children whose sole ever-shinning Sun she was, must have been a decisive religious impression for many people. With the coming of the Nazis, she and her husband were forced to leave Germany and come to this country. Here she became the helper of innumerable European refugees, and for ten years I was able personally to observe the creative genius of her love. We never had a theological conversation. It was unnecessary. Elsa made God transparent in every moment. For God, who is love, was abiding in her and she in the Lord. She aroused the love of millions towards herself and towards that for which she was transparent—the God who is love. On her deathbed Else received a delegate from the king and people of Sweden, representing innumerable people all over European, assuring her that she would never be forgotten by those whom she had given back the meaning of their lives. It is a rare gift to meet a human being in whom love—and this means God—is so overwhelmingly manifest. It undercuts theological arrogance as well as pious isolation. It is more than justice and it is greater than faith and hope. It is the presence of God himself. For God is love. And in every moment of genuine love we are dwelling in God and God in us. #RandolphHarris 4 of 18
Attitude is an important part of the foundation upon which we build a productive life. In appraising our present attitude, we might consider what is necessary. There are many degrees of necessity. Everything is necessary in some degree if its loss really causes a decrease of vital energy. (This word is here used in the strict and precise sense that it might have if the study of vital phenomena were as far advanced as that of falling bodies.) When the degree of necessity is extreme, deprivation leads to death. This is the case when all the vital energy of one being is bound up with another by some attachment. In the lesser degrees, deprivation leads to a more or less considerable lessening of energy. Thus a total deprivation of food causes death, whereas a partial deprivation only diminishes the life force. Nevertheless, if a person is not to be weakened, the necessary quantity of food is considered to be that required. The most frequent cause of necessity in the bonds of affection is a combination of sympathy and habit. As in the case of avarice or drunkenness, that which was at first a search for some desired good is transformed into a need by the mere passage of time. The difference from avarice, drunkenness, and all the vices, however, is that in the bonds of affection the two motives—search for a desired good, and need—can very easily coexist. They can also be separated. #RandolphHarris 5 of 18
When the attachment of one being to another is made up of need and nothing else it is a fearful thing. Few things in this World can reach such a degree of ugliness and horror. Whenever a human being seeks what is good and only find necessity, there is always something horrible. The stories that tell of a beloved being who suddenly appears with a death’s head best symbolize this. The human soul possesses a whole arsenal of lies with which to put up a defense against this ugliness and, in imagination, to manufacture sham advantages where there is only necessity. It is for this very reason that ugliness is an evil, because it conduces to lying. Speaking quite generally, we might say that there is affliction whenever necessity, under no matter what form, is imposed so harshly that the hardness exceeds the capacity for lying of the person who receives the impact. That is why the purest souls are the most exposed to affliction. For one who is capable of preventing the automatic reaction of defense, which tends to increase the soul’s capacity for lying, affliction is not an evil, although it is always a wounding and in a sense a degradation. When a human being is attached to another by a bond of affection which contains any degree of necessity, it is impossible that one should wish autonomy to be preserved in one’s self and the other. It is impossible by the miraculous of nature. It is, however, made possible by the miraculous intervention of the supernatural. This miracle is friendship. #RandolphHarris 6 of 18
Friendship is an equality made of harmony. There is harmony because there is a supernatural union between two opposites, that is to say, necessity and liberty, the two opposites God combined when he created the World and men. There is equality because each wishes to preserve the faculty of free consent both in oneself and in the other. When anyone wishes to put oneself under a human being or consents to be subordinated to one, there is no trace of friendship. The Queen of the Damn’s Maharet is not the friend of Queen Akasha. There is no friendship where there is inequality. A certain reciprocity is essential in friendship. If all good will is entirely lacking on one of the two sides, the other should suppress one’s own affection, out of respect for the free consent which one should not desire to force. If on one of the two sides there is not any respect for the autonomy of the other, this other must cut the bond uniting them out of respect for oneself. In the same way, one who consents to be enslaved cannot gain friendship. However, the necessity contained in the bond of affection can exist on one side only, and in this case there is only friendship on one side, if we keep to the strict and exact meaning of the word. If only for a moment, a friendship is tarnished as soon as necessity triumphs, over the desire to preserve the faculty of free consent on both sides. #RandolphHarris 7 of 18
In all human things, necessity is the principle of impurity. If even a trace of the wish to please or the contrary desire to dominate is found in it, all friendship is impure. In a perfect friendship these two desires are completely absent. The two friends have fully consented to be two and not one, they respect the distance which the fact of being two distinct creatures places between them. Mortals have the right to desire direct union with God alone. Friendship is a miracle by which person consent to view from a certain distance, and without coming any nearer, the very being who is necessary to one as food. It requires the strength of the soul that Eve did not have; and yet she had no need of the fruit. If she had been hungry at the moment when she looked at the fruit, and if in spite of that she had remained looking at it indefinitely without taking one step toward it, she would have performed a miracle analogous to that of perfect friendship. Through this supernatural miracle of respect for human autonomy, friendship is very like the pure forms of compassion and gratitude called forth by affliction. In both cases the contraries which are the terms of the harmony are necessity and liberty, or in other words subordination and equality. These two pairs of opposites are equivalent. From the fact that the desire to please and the desire to command are not found in pure friendship, it has it in, at the same time as affection, something not unlike a complete indifference. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
Although friendship is a bond between two people it is in a sense impersonal. It leaves impartiality intact. It in no way prevents us from imitating the perfection of our Father in Heaven who freely distributes Sunlight and rain in every place. On the contrary, friendship and this distribution are the mutual conditions one of the other, in most cases at any rate. For, as practically every human being is joined to others by bounds of affection that have in them some degree of necessity, one cannot go toward perfection except by transforming this affection into friendship. Friendship has something universal about it. It consists of loving a human being as we should like to be able to love each soul in particular of all those who go to make up the human race. As a geometrician looks at a particular figure in order to deduce the universal properties of the triangle, so one who knows how to love directs upon a particular human being a universal love. The consent to preserve an autonomy within ourselves and in others is essentially of a universal order. As soon as we wish for this autonomy to be respected in more than just one single being we desire it for everyone, for we cease to arrange the order of the World in a circle whose center is here below. We transport the center of the circle beyond the Heavens. #RandolphHarris 9 of 18
If the two beings who love each other, through an unlawful use of affection, think they form only one, friendship does not have this power. However, then there is not friendship in the true sense of the word. That is what might be called an adulterous union, even though it comes about between husband and wife. There is not friendship where distance is not kept and respected. The simple fact of having pleasure in thinking in the same way as the beloved being, or in any case the fact of desiring such an agreement of opinion, attacks the purity of the friendship at the same time as its intellectual integrity. It is very frequent. However, at the same time pure friendship is rare. When the bonds of affection and necessity between human beings are not supernaturally transformed into friendship, not only is the affection of an impure and low order, but it is also combined with hatred and repulsion. That is shown very well in The Queen of the Damned and in Romeo Must Die. The mechanism is the same in affections other than carnal love. It is easy to understand this. We hate what we are dependent upon. We become disgusted with what depends on us. Sometimes affection does not only become mixed with hatred and revulsion; it is entirely changed into it. The transformation may sometimes even be almost immediate, so that hardly any affection has had time to show; this is the case when necessity is laid bare almost at once. #RandolphHarris 10 of 18
When the necessity which brings people together has nothing to do with the emotions, when it is simply due to circumstances, hostility often makes it appearance from the start. When Christ said to his disciples: “Love one another,” it was not attachment he was laying down as their rule. As it was a fact that there were bounds between them due to the thoughts, the life, and the habits they shared, he commanded them to transform these bonds into friendship, so that they should not be allowed to turn into impure attachment or hatred. Since, shortly before his passing into Heaven, Christ gave this as a new commandment to be added to the two great commandments of the love of our neighbor and the love of God, we can think that pure friendship, like the love of our neighbor, has in it something of a sacrament. Christ perhaps wished to suggest this with reference to Christian friendship when he said: “Where there are two or three gathered together in my name there am I in the midst of them.” Pure friendship is an image of the original and perfect friendship that belongs to the Trinity and is the very essence of God. It is impossible for two human beings to be one while scrupulously respecting the distance that separates them, unless God is present in each of them. The point at which parallels meet is infinity. #RandolphHarris 11 of 18
The Greeks were an eminently visual people. They gloried in the visual arts; Homer’s epics abound in visual details; and they created tragedy and comedy, adding new dimensions to visual art. The Hebrews were not so visual and actually entertained a prohibition against the visual arts. Neither did they have tragedies or comedies. The one book of the Bible that has sometimes been called a tragedy, Job, was clearly not intended for, and actually precluded, any visual representation. The Greeks wanted God to be a friend, they visualized their gods and represented them in marble and in beautiful vase paintings. They also brought them on the stage. The Hebrews did not visualize their God and expressly forbade attempts to make of him an object—a visual object, a concrete object, any object. Their God was not to be seen. He was to be heard and listened to. He was not an It but an I—or a You. Christianity was born of the denial that God could not possibly be seen. Not all who considered Jesus a great teacher became Christians. Christians were those for whom he was the Lord. Christians were those who believed that God could become visible, an object of sight and experience, of knowledge and belief. Of course, Christianity did not deny its roots in Judaism. Jesus as the Son of God who had ascended to the Heavens to dwell there with God, as God, did not simply become another Heracles, the son of Zeus who had ascended to the Heavens to dwell there with the gods, as a god. #RandolphHarris 12 of 18
Jesus did not simply become another of the legion of Greek gods and demigods and sons of Zeus. He had preached and was to be heard and listened to. His moral teachings were recorded lovingly for the instruction of the faithful. However, were they really to be listened to? Or did they, too, become objects—of admiration and perhaps discussion? Was the individual to feel addressed by them, commanded by them—was he able to relate his life to them? The new dispensation was hardly that. The New Testament keeps saying, nowhere more emphatically than in the Gospel according to John, that those who only live by Jesus’s moral teaching shall not enter the kingdom of Heaven; only those can be saved who are baptized, who believe, and who take the sacraments—eating, as that Gospel puts it, “of this bread.” Of course, Christian belief is not totally unlike Jewish belief. It is not devoid of trust and confidence, and in Paul’s and Luther’s experience of faith these Jewish elements were especially prominent. Rarely have they been wholly lacking in Christianity. Still, this Jewish faith was never considered sufficient to some. Christian faith was always centered in articles of faith that had to be believed by those who wanted to be saved. When the Reformation did away with visual images, it was only to insist more firmly on the purity of doctrines that must be believed. #RandolphHarris 13 of 18
However, may love the beautiful stained-glass windows, which communicate stores to those who are visual learners. And for Luther the bread and wine were no mere symbols of Christ’s flesh and blood—otherwise he might have made common cause with Ulrich Zwingli and presented the splintering of Protestantism—but the flesh and blood itself: God as an object. People sometimes wonder, is there some particular purpose in my birth here? Is it all ere coincidence? Must we doubt, deny, even reject God? These are some of the questions a thoughtful mortal might ask. If one is to moan over the length of the road opening out before one, one should also jubilate over the fact that one has begun to travel it. How few care to take this step! If some are immediately and irrevocably captured by the teachings, others are only gradually and cautiously convinced. Those who feel an emptiness in their hearts despite Worldly attainment and possession may be unconsciously yearning for God. So many of us place so much value in possessions, yet we overlook the startling fact that we have not begun to possess ourselves! What mortal can call one’s essential self? Can we build a bridge between this sorrowful Earthly life and the peaceful eternal life? Are the two forever sundered? Every seer, sage, and saint answers the first question affirmatively and the second negatively. #RandolphHarris 14 of 18
The echoes of our spiritual being some to us all the time. They come in thoughts and things, in music and pictures, in emotions and words. If only we would take up the search for their source and trace them to it, we would recognize in the end the Reality, Beauty, Truth, and Goodness behind all the familiar manifestations. Those who can no longer confine their thinking within the conventional boundaries of common experience may cross over into religion’s reverent faith, into Christianity’s deep-felt intuition, or into philosophy’s final certitude. Whoever perceives the inferiority of one’s environment to what it could be, as well as the imperfections of one’s nature in the light of its undeveloped possibilities, and who sets out to improve the one and amend the other, has taken a first step to the quest. It is better to come late to the higher life with its nobler values and uplifting practices, than not at all. It is still better to come to it when one is comparatively young and foundations are being laid. They will be fortunate indeed if their spiritual longings are satisfied without the passage of many years and the travail of much exploration. They will be fortunate indeed if pitying friends do not repeatedly tell them with each change and each disappointed pulling-up of tents that they are pursing a mirage. #RandolphHarris 15 of 18
Those who have found their way to this Path leave forever behind them their aimless wanderings of the past. One fateful day, one will ruefully realize that one is octopus-held by external activities. Then will one take up the knife of a keen relentless determination and cut the imprisoning tentacles once and for all. I have no need to see and to test in order to be set free. I am free even in the confusion of servitude. I enjoy the freedom of the future, generations in advance. And when I die, I shall die a free man, for I have fought for freedom my whole life long. Mortals are free, in so far as one has the power of contradicting oneself and one’s essential nature. Mortals are free even from one’s freedom; that is, one can surrender one’s humanity. Freedom, by its very nature, is elusive. The word is difficult to define because of its quicksilver quality: freedom is always moving. You can state what it is not or what you desire to get free from—which is why the phrase freedom from should never be disparaged. However, it is difficult to designate what freedom is. Thus we always hear of the struggle for, the fight for freedom. Yet, when someone tells us “how I found freedom,” we have a feeling that something is being faked. The greatest virtue is not to be free, but to struggle ceaselessly for freedom. #RandolphHarris 16 of 18
Freedom is like a flock of white butterflies bestirred in front of you as you walk through the woods: rising in cluster they flit off in an infinite number of directions. Once you become self-konsciously sure of your freedom, you have lost it. Hence we find ourselves almost always describing what freedom is not rather than what it is: “I am free tomorrow” means I do not have to work; “I have a free period” means I do not have any class then. Freedom is frequently and persistently conceived of as a negative quality. Freedom is very much like health or virtue or innocence. After we have lost it, we feel it mist intensely. The dictionary does nothing to relieve our frustration. In the eighteen different meanings in Webster’s, fourteen of them are negative, such as “not held in slavery” or “not subject to external authority.” Of the reaming four, one is “liberty”—which deals with political freedom—and the others are simply tautological, such as “spontaneous, voluntary, independent.” Freedom is continually creating itself. Freedom is expansiveness. Freedom has an infinite quality. The guiding laws of life are not easy to find. The sacred wisdom of God is also the secret wisdom. The seeker quests until one’s thoughts rests. #RandolphHarris 17 of 18
The quest will continue to attract its votaries so long as the Real continues to exist and mortals continue to remain unaware of it. This ever-new set of possibilities is part of the reason psychology has by and large evaded the subject, for freedom cannot be pinned down as psychologists are wont to do. In psychotherapy the closest we can get to discerning freedom in action is when a person experiences “I can” or “I will.” When a client in therapy says either of these, I always make sure he or she knows that I have heard him or her; for “can” and “will” are statements of personal freedom, even if only in fantasy. These verbs point to some event in the future, either immediate or long-term. They also imply that the person who uses them sense some power, some possibility, and is aware of ability to use this power. The mystery of the soul is as formidable and as baffling as any. Yet it is also a fascinating one. If few people have penetrated it today, may tried to do so in the past. Only when they are brought by the discipline of experience to a sense of responsibility, are they likely to seek this knowledge. This does not mean that a spiritual outlook requires an unquestioning acceptance of what mortals have made of themselves and the World. We approach God deep in our hearts. We feel the divine presence in that profound unearthly stillness where neither the sounds of emotional clamour nor those of intellectual grinding can enter. #RandolphHarris 18 of 18
The Way of Life Would be to Love Guardedly and Almost Secretly but the Soul is Perfectly Knowable and Experienceable
It was a more lavish place even than the great hall of the palace; it was stuffed to overflowing with fine things, with a couch made of carved leopards, and a bed hung with sheer silk; and with polished mirrors of seemingly magical perfection. The concept of destiny makes the experience of anger necessary. The kind of person who never gets angry is, we may be sure, the person who also never encounters destiny. When one encounters destiny, one finds anger automatically rising in one, but as strength. Passivity will not do. This emotion is not necessarily negative. Encountering one’s destiny requires strength, the encounter takes the form of embracing, accepting, or attacking. Experiencing the emotional state of anger and conceiving of destiny means that you are free from regarding yourself as too precious; you are able to throw yourself into the game, whatever it may be, without worrying about picayune details. Enkil, a man in his middle twenties, sought the help of a psychotherapist because he was having difficulty in his marriage. One week, after he had had several sessions with the therapist, sudden and dramatic changes occurred in his relationship with his wife, Akasha. Both of them began to talk to each other about events and feelings that they had never discussed before. In some ways it was an agonizing week for them. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
Anger that had been pent up for months, and even years, poured forth. In the course of their self-disclosures each of them revealed that they had had dates with another since their marriage. More expressions of anger and hurt burst forth, reaching an intensity they had never experiences before. However, when the anger and hurt had been expressed other feelings began to manifest themselves. They became aware that they felt closer and more attracted to each other than they ever had before. As they moved toward each other, they felt more care and warmth. Gaining awareness of our fear of love is often a difficult task, for we tend to disguise it from ourselves and others by employing many defenses against intimacy. Some people have a reservoir of hostility built up over the years that has something to do with their behavior, and the functions that it appears to serve in relation to their spouse and other people one cares for is one of keeping it virtually impossible to experience intimacy. There are many similar defenses against intimacy. We may keep people at a distance by seeming indifferent to them, by being rigid or legalistic, or by playing the role of martyr. As long as we are successful at employing these ways of keeping others away, it is hard for us to become aware of our fear of love, for we make the possibility of intimacy so remote that there is a little danger of our experiencing it. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
With the lion so successfully caged, we do not become aware of our fear of it. If we can begin to see what we are doing and begin to give up some of our defenses, then we will be more likely to experience our fear of love directly. Once this occurs, we are in a much better position to do something about it. If we cannot only be aware of our fear of love, but also accept it both in ourselves and in others, it will also be helpful. Here, as elsewhere, caring for ourselves seems to be the starting point for personality growth. If we can experience and accept our fear of love, we will have less need of indirect ways of expressing it, which are almost invariably harmful to relationships. When we experience more intimacy than our fears will permit, instead of finding some pretext for withdrawing, we can admit our fear to ourselves and often to the other person as well. This direct way of responding to our fear will be far less destructive to the relationships. A natural ebb and flow of the experience and expression of love will then be possible, as we experience such intimacy as we are ready for and then withdraw for a time as our fear asserts itself too strongly. As we see this pattern clearly, we will be far more able to take in stride apparent setbacks in our association with others. #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
When we can recognize that when someone we love acts destructively or hurtfully towards us it is almost certainly an indication that one, too, is afraid rather than that one does not care for us, and it makes a big difference to recognize this. If we did not have this insight, we may be just as hurt or express as much anger. The chances of resolving the situation are much better, however, because we ourselves will not be likely to react as though we have been completely rejected and unloved. This is when we often pick one of Mrs. Winchester’s favorite flowers, a daisy, and pluck the petals off as we play that “he or she loves me, he or she loves me not” game in which we tally up what we consider to be indications of how the other person involved feels based on what answer comes up when we get to the last petal. Then no matter the outcomes, we say to ourselves, “There must something the matter with me or my love would not treat me this way.” This game may give up hope, but it might just be pointless, for the problem is usually not possessed in the absence of caring but rather in the fear of love, which leads the person to act as though one does not care. Of course, recognizing the existence of the fear of love does not always lead to a resolution of interpersonal difficulties. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
Anger for some people is a path to freedom. The times when some people become angry are times when one gains valuable insight, which are then expressed constructively—for example, the time when Akasha told Enkil about her plans to marry Lestat and move across the World, which he had called “the craziest plan I ever heard.” Experiences like Enkil’s is analogous to a ship putting out to sea. It is cast loose from the dock, and, sailing in the open wind, it then gets its power from cooperation with wind and sea and stars, as we get our power by living in cooperation with destiny. Our freedom, like the ship’s, thus comes from engaging destiny, knowing that the elements are there all the time and that they have to be encountered or embraced. Constructive anger is one way of encountering destiny. However, often sailors find that they have to fight the elements, as in the case of a storm at sea. We find our freedom at the juncture of forces we cannot control but can only encounter—which often, like the ship fight the storm, takes all the strength we have. Now it is not only sailing with, it is sailing against the sea and the storm winds. The constructive anger we have been speaking about is one way of using our power to choose our way of encountering destiny. The possible responses to destiny range from cooperation with at one end of the spectrum to fighting against the other. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
Our anger empowers us in the struggle against destiny. As Beethoven cried, “I will seize fate by the throat!” And out of that came the Fifth Symphony. Of course, recognizing the existence of the fear of love does not always lead to a resolution of interpersonal difficulties. A woman, for example, might see that her husband belittles her constantly as a means of avoiding intimacy and as a way of coping with his own self-hate. Yet if she saw no crack in the wall of this defense, she might ultimately come to the conclusion that it would be self-destructive for her to continue the marriage. And a child might still have to be taken from a cruel father even though it might be recognized that his brutality is rooted in a terrible fear of love. If we can discover that the potential hurt of not experiencing and expressing love ultimately far outweighs the risk that accompany intimacy, this might also be a helpful revelation. When we dare to love, we can never eliminate the possibility that we will be hurt. The emotional involvement of caring always includes vulnerability; in fact, if we allow ourselves to love someone, we can be certain that we will sometimes be hurt. Someone we love will pass on to Heaven; someone we love maybe injured; someone we love may suffer from an infirmary; someone we love will be so frightened and mistrustful of our caring that they will react in ways that are hurtful or even destructive to us. #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
If we chose to love, these are painful experiences, and we cannot avoid them. It is quite customary to relegate us, the votaries Christianity, to the asylum of eccentricity, crankiness, gullibility, fraud, and even lunacy. In some individual cases our critics are perfectly justified in doing so. When the Christian losses one’s direct path, one easily deviates into these aberrations. However, to make a wholesale condemnation of all Christianity because of the rotten condition of a part of it is unfair and itself an unbalanced procedure. Wherever and whenever it can, science puts all matters to the test. Christianity welcomes this part of the scientific attitude. It has nothing to fear from such a practical examination. However, there is a drawback here. No scientist can test it in a laboratory. One must test it in one’s own person and over a long period. Owning to the widespread lack of education of the subject, there are some people who are disturbed by various fears of prayer. Prayer has been given by God to mortals for their spiritual profits, not for their spiritual destruction. Hatred and jealousy of the flesh, which is in so many evil spirits, is due to that fact that we have both body and soul, which should not exist on this Earth. There are times when there had been mountains and oceans and forests and no living things such as us. That is why evil believes that to have a spirit within a mortal body is a curse. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
God likes the music and rhythm of the language—the shape of words, so to speak. Yes, there are bad spirits who like to hurt people, and why not? And there are good spirits who love them, too. This is why the Bible stresses righteousness. God requires us to have faith in our soul and requires us to search for it patiently, untiringly, and unremittingly. Because this is a strong Christian experience, one’s who preserve in their search may hold the hope that one day they may find it. Mortals will rush agitatedly hither and thither in quest of a single possession, but hardly one can be induced to go in quest of one’s own soul. Strange as it may seem to our kith and kin who has immersed themselves heavily in the body’s senses, hard to believe as it may be to those who have lost themselves deeply in the World’s business, there is nevertheless a way up to the soul’s divinity. That the divine power is active here, in London or Oakland, and now, in the twenty first century, may startle those who look for in only in Biblical times and in the Holy Land. However, human perceptions in their present stage cannot bring this subtler self within their range without a special training. Its activity eludes the brain. What are the alternatives to a life in which love experienced and expressed? Does such a life hold out the hope of any less hurt? Only two other alternatives appear to be available. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
One of the alternatives, if it possible, would be to cut oneself off completely from the experience of love. Such a person would say in effect to themselves, “I will not allow anyone to mean anything to me. I may have business relationships of one kind or another, but no one will be important to me beyond the immediate dealings in which we find each other useful, and no one will learn anything of personal nature about how I feel or who I really am. I will never allow myself to experience the desire or need for love.” Perhaps this kind of life could be achieved, but it sounds like a desperately lonely existence. Perhaps a person could keep so busy or be so controlled that one could even block the loneliness out of awareness, but what kind of life is that? The viewpoint suggested here does, of course, involve a value judgment that meaningfulness is found above all else in human relationships, although it does not appear that few of us would choose to live so isolated an existence. The other alternative is more often practiced, but it seems almost equally unsatisfying. This way of life would be to love guardedly and almost secretly. Although one may not be aware of it, such a person says to oneself, “All right, so I admit to myself that I care for my children and my partner. And maybe there are a few other people in the World who mean something to me. However, I am going to play it cool. I will never reveal too much of myself or let them know how much I care. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
“No sense getting too far out on a limb or being too enthusiastic about our relationship. No use letting them see how much they mean to me. They would be likely to find some way of using it to push me around or hurt me.” A lot of us settle for this approach to love. However, this, too, makes for a kind of loneliness and cheats us out of the deepest and most satisfying experiences of love. And since it involves a guardedness and calculated dullness in our relationships, it cheats us of the free, unburdened feelings that spontaneity in our actions and words could give us all. All of life becomes toned downed and the exhilarating excitement is taken away. The risks of love are ever-present, but the alternatives are not inviting. So from the standpoint of satisfying living it is better even to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all. If we postponed the experience and expression of love until we no longer feared it, we would postpone it forever. Some people do appear to use their fear of love as a perpetual excuse for stalemated living—loving and trembling seem to go together. If we desire love we must learn to love in spite of our fears. This process of taking a chance on love might be compared to the experience of a person who wants to make parachute jumps. If one is no a fool, one is frightened. And no amount of prejump training will eradicate that fears. When the time comes to make the leap one will be trembling internally and, quite possibly, externally. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
No amount of reassurance by experienced jumpers will make it otherwise. Making the leap of love is not too unlike this. No amount of advance preparation or reassurance from others will keep us from experiencing fear. If the experience is too frightening, we can make some tentative leaps in the direction of self-disclosure and the involvement of love and withdraw back into the security of emotional distance. In that, it is different, however, as the parachutist, once committed, does not have that option. When we make our first moves toward deeper experiences and more open expressions of love, it may seem at first that our fear is greatly intensified. This is a very critical time, for we may become so frightened that we choose to withdraw permanently and not allow ourselves another chance to feel so deeply. This sometimes happens in psychotherapy. After a few sessions a person may begin to respond to the therapist’s warmth with feelings of caring. Perhaps the individual does not even allow oneself to verbalize these feelings but suddenly discovers one cannot afford the sessions or does not have sufficient time to work them into a busy schedule. At first, when we allow ourselves to love more deeply, it is understandable that the experience of fear is intensified. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
In the past our defenses—the devices we used to keep our emotionally distant from others—protected us not only from the experience of love but also from the full awareness of our fear. As we allow the defenses to crumble we stand vulnerable and stark before our fear. One thing that will help as we begin to allow ourselves the experience of love will be the awareness that we no longer in the same circumstances as we were when the fear of love developed within us. When we were first exposed to the risks of love, we were children. And when we experienced the hurts of feeling rejected, we were relatively helpless to do anything about the situation. No wonder we were frightened and built whatever defenses against hurt we could be walling ourselves off emotionally. Every person who does not feel this close intimate fellowship with one’s Overself is necessarily a pilgrim, most probably an unconscious one, but still in everything and everywhere one is in search of one’s soul. The soul is perfectly knowable and experienceable. It is here in mortal’s hearts and minds, and such knowledge once gained, such experience once known, lifts them into a higher estimate of themselves. Mortals then become not merely thinking animals but glorious beings. It is not astonishing that mortals have ever been attracted and captivated by something which the intellect can hardly conceive nor the imagination picture, something which cannot even be truly named? #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
Here is something to ponder over: why mortals should have forfeited all that seems dear, to the point of forfeiting life itself, for something which can never be touched or smelled, seen or heard. What is it that turned mortal’s hearts toward religion, Christianity, philosophy since time immemorial? One’s aspiration toward the diviner life is unconscious testimony to its existence. It is the presence within one of a divine soul which has inspired this turning, the divine life itself in one’s heart which has prompted one’s aspiration. Mortals have no escape from the urge to seek the Sacred, the Profound, the Timeless. The roots of one’s whole being are in it. We are neither the originator of this doctrine nor even its prophet. The first mortal who ventured into the unknown within-ness of the Universe and of oneself was its originator whilst every mortal who has since voiced this discovery has been its prophet. The day will come when science, waking more fully than it is now from its materialistic sleep, will confess humbly that the soul of mortals really does exist. Often as adults we still feel helpless, as though we were still children. However, we are not helpless. If we express love and are rejected, we can do something about it—we can express our anger and frustrations. If our loving proves unsatisfying, we can withdraw from that person is we choose to and express our love to others more able to respond. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
When we love them has nothing to do with our value as a person, we can discover that another person’s inability to express love to us. Perhaps most important of all we can learn that we can survive hurt and that, while we can learn that we can survive hurt and that, while it is never pleasant, it need not be catastrophic. Mortals are free to imprison their hearts and minds in soulless materialism or to claim their liberty in the winder life of spiritual truth. Let them pull aside their mental curtains and admit the life-giving Sunlight of truth. What could be closer to a mortal than one’s own mind? What therefore should be more easy to examine and understand? Yet the contrary is actually true. One knows only the surfaces of the mind; its deeps remain unknown. Our fear of love will never completely disappear any more than would the fear of the parachutist. In both instances there is always a realistic risk of hurt, but as we are able to enter into more and more emotionally intimate relationships, the fear will gradually lessen. If the mind is to become conscious of itself, it can do so only by freeing itself from the ceaseless activity of thoughts. The systematic exercise of prayer is the deliberate attempt to achieve this. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
Just as muddied water clears if the Earth is left alone to settle, so the agitated mind clarifies its perceptions if left alone though prayer to settle quietly. There exists a part of mortal’s nature of which ordinarily one is completely ignorant, and of whose importance one is usually sceptical. What is the trust highest purpose of mortal’s life? It is to be taken possession of by one’s higher self. One’s dissatisfactions are incurable by any other remedy. True happiness lay in drawing nearer to the Infinite Being. That which is Infinity is indeed bliss; there can be no happiness in limited thing. Such is the insecurity of the present-day World that the few who have found security are only the few who have found their own soul, and inner peace. We will find it increasingly easy to be ourselves and to express all our feeling, for we will have increasing confidence that people will generally like us as we are. And when we are frightened, we will likely find it comfortable to express that feeling, too—and expressing it will help to dissipate it. “There is no fear in love, but perfect love casts out fear,” reports I John 4.18. It is true. There is no fear in love—only fear of love and the vulnerability it involves and the repeated experience of love reduces fear. Whether the central message of the New Testament, which revolves around the crucifixion of Jesus, is regarded as the literal truth or as a myth growing out of mortal’s yearning for meaning in life, the theme is a deeply moving one. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
The New Testament is often garbled by theological lingo, and possible drafted by William Shakespeare, but it finally comes down to relationships and appears to be essentially this: God risked creating persons so independent they could love him or thumb their noses at him. He went even further and chose to love them. As it always does, the decision to love necessarily included suffering. However, it must have been worth the risk, for perhaps the alternative even for God was the ultimate loneliness of having no one to love. We can discover for ourselves that it is worth the risk to love, even though we tremble and even though we know we will sometimes experience the hurt we fear. Preference for some human being is necessarily a different thing from charity. Charity does not discriminate. If it is found more abundantly in any special quarter, it is because affliction has chanced to provide an occasion there for the exchange of compassion and gratitude. It is equally available for the whole human race, inasmuch as affliction can come to all, offering them an opportunity to exchange. Preference for a human being can be of two kinds. Either we are seeking some particular good in one, or we need one. In general way all possible attachments come under one of these heads. We are drawn toward a thing, either because there is some good we are seeking from it, or because we cannot do without it. Sometimes the two motives coincide. Often however they do not. Each is distinct and quite independent. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
Randolph Harris II International Institute 