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What Do You think Really? Inside of You? Is there a God or a Devil? I Mean Truly, What do You Believe?

July 20, 2019 1:27 am

I arrived quite early in the evening for I had gone backwards in time against the turning of the World. It was cold and crisp, but not cruelly so, though a bad norther was on its way. The sky was without a cloud and fully of small and very distinct stars. I went at once to my beautiful house at Cresleigh Rocklin Trails. It has an intimate view of the greenbelt and its is a beautiful community. It was not until tomorrow night that Mr. Raglan James meant to meet me. And impatient as I was for this meeting, I found the schedule comfortable, as I wanted to find Louis right away. But first I indulged in the mortal comfort of a hot shower, and put on a fresh suit of black velvet, very trim and plain, rather like the clothes I had worn in Miami, and a new pair of black boots. And ignoring my general weariness—I would have been asleep in the Earth by now, had I been still in Europe—I went off, walking like a mortal, through the town. The person living with an alienated and reified, negative identity concept of oneself closely resembles the hypochondriacal patient, except that one’s unhappy preoccupation concerns not a physical ailment but a reified physical or psychic quality that has become the focal point of one’s self-image. The relief one gains from one’s burdensome preoccupation is due to the fact that the reified bad quality no longer is viewed as part of the on-going process of living and of goal-directed thought and action. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13

The perceived reified bad quality has been severed from the “I” that acts with foresight and responsibility and is looked upon as an inherent, unalterable, unfortunate something an ossified part of oneself that no longer participates in the flux, growth, and development of life. It is experienced as an unchangeable fate whose bearer is doomed to live and die with it. The relief this brings is that the person no longer feels responsible for the supposed consequences of this fixed attribute; one is not doing anything for which one can be blamed, even though one may feel ashamed and unacceptable for being such and such. The preoccupation with the reified identity directs attention away from what one does to what one supposedly is. Furthermore, one no longer has to do anything about it because, obviously, one cannot do anything about it. Thus, the anxiety, fear, and effort that would be connected with facing and acting upon the real problem is avoided by putting up with the negative, fixed identity which, in addition, may be used to indulge self-pity and to enlist the sympathy of others. Kind of like how in Anne Rice’s The Tale of the Body Thief, Lestat is so lonely that he considers killing himself by going into the Sun, but David tells him not to, and he does it anyway and only gets darker. And also when Lestat considers letting the body thief take his body, but David tells him, “You’re going to make another ghastly mistake!” #RandolphHarris 2 of 13

So far we have discussed mainly negative self-images. However, alienated identity concepts may be beneficial as well as negative. Alienated identity of the beneficial variety occurs in vanity, conceit and—in its more pathological form—in delusions of grandeur, just as in its negative counterpart the “I” of the vain person is severed from a fixed attribute on which the vanity is based. The person feel that one possesses this quality. It becomes the focal point of one’s identity and serves as its prop. Beauty, masculinity or femininity, being born on the right side of the river, success, money, prestige, or being good may serve as such a prop. While in the negative identity feeling a reified attribute haunts the person, such an attribute serves the beneficial self-image as a support. Yet it is equally alienated from the living person. This is expressed nicely in the phrase “a stuffed shirt.” It is not the person in the shirt but some dead matter, some stuffing that is used to bolster and aggrandize the self-feeling. It often becomes apparent in the behavior of the person that one leans on this real or imagined attribute, just as it often is apparent that a person feel pulled down by the weight of some alienated negative attribute. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13

When one is weighed down by some alienated negative attribute, it could be similar to how Reglan James behaves in Anne Rice’s novel The Tale of the Body Thief. “David, that’s what’s wrong with him! I’ve been trying to figure it since I saw him on the beach in Miami,” says Lestat. “That isn’t his body! That’s why he can’t use its musculature or its…its height. That’s why he almost falls when he runs. He can’t control those long powerful legs. Good God, that man is in someone else’s body. And the voice, David, I told you about his voice. It’s not the voice of a young man. Oh, that explains it!” Instead of being possessed by another entity or being, people’s negative emotions give off such a vibe that they do not seem normal. The way they talk, the way they move, the things they say, it indicates something is wrong with them. They are possessed by darkness. The reliance on an identity, on a self-image based on the prop of some reified attribute remains precarious even where is seems to work, after a fashion, as it does in the self-satisfaction of the vain. This precariousness is inevitable since the beneficial self-evaluation of such a person does not rest on a feeling of wholeness and meaningfulness in life, in thought, feeling, and deed. One is always threatened with the danger of losing this thing, this possession, or which one’s self-esteem is based. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13

Today, especially in this country where youth has become a public fetish, many thousands try to preserve its alienated mask while terrified by the prospect of suddenly growing old, when the mask can no longer be worn or will become grotesque. The beautiful picture of youth can alienate beings from their actual life, which effects the internal markup of the being, marking their aura over with years of cruelty, selfishness, and greed, as they advance in age. Their true character is a secret threat that they feel when be exposed as they age because they are superficial and have no substance to go with their beauty. All beauty and no brains. In ever case of alienated identity concepts, there is a secret counterimage. Very often the hidden self announces its presence merely in a vague background feeling that the person would be lost, would be nothing if it were not for the alienated, reified quality on which the feeling of being something, somebody, or the feeling of vanity, is based. In this feeling both a truth and an irrational anxiety find expression. The truth is that no being who looks upon oneself as a thing and bases one’s existence on the support of some reified attribute of this thing has found oneself and one’s place in life. The irrational anxiety is the feeling that without the prop of such an attribute one could not live. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13

Similarly, in the negative alienated identity concepts there usually is a beneficial counterimage. It may take a generalized, vague form: If it were not for such and such (the reified attribute forming the focus of the negative identity), I would be all right, successful, wonderful, and so forth. Or it may take the more concrete form of some grandiose, exaggerated fantasy about one’s beneficial qualities. These artificial beneficial counterimages, too, express both an irrational hope and a truth. The irrational hope is that one may have some magical quality which will transport one into a state of security, or even superiority, because then one will possess that attribute which, instead of haunting one, will save one. However, actually it is nothing but the equally reified counterpart of what at present drags one down. The truth is that beings have potentialities for overcoming their alienation from oneself and for living without the burden and the artificial props of alienated, reified identity concepts. There is a distinction between helpful self-awareness and futile and self-torment rumination. We should oppose the ascetic interpretation we find among our modern hypochondrists and those who turn their vengeance against themselves. Instead, one sees the real meaning of self-knowledge in taking notice of oneself and becoming aware of one’s relation to other people and to the World. The pseudo self-knowledge against which one speaks foreshadows the widespread present-day self-preoccupation which is concerned, fruitlessly, with an alienated, negative sense of identity. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13

A productive self-knowledge is to pay attention to what one is actually doing in one’s relation to others, to the World and to oneself. A complete understanding of a neurosis is not possible without tracing it back to its infantile conditions, I believe that the genetic approach, if used one-sidedly, confuses rather than clarifies the issue, because it leads then to a neglect of the actually existing unconscious tendencies and their functions and interactions with other tendencies that are present, such as impulses, fears and protective measures. Genetic understanding is useful only as long as it helps the functional understanding. Proceeding on this belief I have found in analyzing the most varied kinds of personalities, belonging to different types of neuroses, differing in age, temperament and interests, coming from different social layers, that the contents of the dynamically central conflict and their interrelations were essentially similar in all of them. My experiences in psychoanalytical practice have been confirmed by observations of persons outside the practice and of characters in current literature. If the recurring problems of neurotic persons are divested of the fantastic and abstruse character they often have, it cannot escape our attention that they differ only in quantity from the problems bothering the normal person in our culture. #RandolphHarris 7 of 13

The great majority of us have to struggle with problems of competition, fears of failure, emotional isolation, distrust of others and of our own selves, to mention only a few of the problems that may be present in a neurosis. The fact that in general the majority of individuals in a culture have to face the same problems suggests the conclusion that these problems have been created by the specific life conditions existing in that culture. That they do not represent problems common to human nature seems to be warranted by the fact that the motivating forces and conflicts in other cultures are different from ours. Hence in speaking of a neurotic personality of our time, I not only mean that there are neurotic persons having essential peculiarities in common, but also that these basic similarities are essentially produced by the difficulties existing in our time and culture. As far as my sociological knowledge allows me I shall show later on what difficulties of our culture are responsible for the psychic conflicts we have. The validity of my assumption concerning the relation between culture and neurosis ought to be tested by the combined efforts of anthropologist and psychiatrists. The psychiatrists would not only have to study neuroses as they appear in definite cultures, as has been done from formal criteria such as frequency, severity or type of neuroses, but particularly they should study them from the point of view of what basic conflicts are underlying them. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13

The anthropologist would have to study the same culture from the point of view of what psychic difficulties its structure creates for would have to study the same culture from the point of view of what psychic difficulties its structure creates for the individual. One way in which the similarity of attitudes open to surface observer can discover without the tools of psychoanalytic technique, concerning persons with whom one is thoroughly familiar, such as oneself, one’s friends, members of one’s family or one’s colleagues. There is a curious relationship between our society’s attitude toward power on one hand and sexuality on the other. This is partially seen in our own day with pornography, our sexy commercialism, our advertising built on luscious blondes and shapely brunettes. If they could, people would mold magic gold into gigantic phallus to shock the ladies and gentlemen. In the Industrial Revolution there began the radical separation between the product of the worker’s hands and one’s relation with the persons who use one’s product. Indeed, the worker normally saw nothing at all of the product one helped produce except one’s own little act. The alienation of labor added to the alienation of persons from themselves and from other people. Their personhood is lost. With the growth of industry and the bourgeoisie, pleasures of the flesh becomes separated from the beings; one’s pleasures of the flesh are bought and sold, as is the product of one’s hands. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13

There are some situations of power when force, or coercion, or compulsion is an integral part of power. War is one of them. With sick persons or children, compulsion or coercion has to be used in proportion to the lack of capacity of knowledge of the other person. When my son was three years old, I kept a firm grip on his hand as we walked across Broadway, a condition that was relaxed as he grew and earned the intricacies of traffic enough to be able safely to take on the responsibility of crossing himself. However, there are ultimate limits to the application of force. If a species of animal uses its superior force to kill off all the other animals in its vicinity, it obviously will not have them for food when it needs them. This balance of nature is a delicate interweaving of the force of various animals and plants in relation to each other. When this balance is upset, we are faced with fearful prospects, indeed—as we are learning to our sorrow in modern ecology. Thus, to keep from self-destruction, power can be allied with force only up to the point where it might destroy the identity of the other. In a gun battle of the West, to destroy the identity of the enemy is precisely the goal of shooting. Hence I cite this as an example of the self-destructive effect of power allied with force. The one who is killed, obviously losing one’s being, is no longer present to give what one can to the community, no longer a person to whom to relate; and we are the poorer thereby. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13

Also the spontaneity of the other person cannot be destroyed without a loss to the destroyer as well. This is the danger in extreme forms of coercion and compulsion in brainwashing, conditioning, and hypnosis. If the person is transformed into something resembling a mechanism, one may still preserve some spontaneity; but if he is transformed into a complete mechanism, one ceases to be a person in the process. Power, therefore, ought to move with the affirmation of the spontaneity of the person it encounters; this will assure it most success in the long run. This is why I permitted Mercedes, an individual with practically no sense of her own power or spontaneity or choice to start with, to decide wen she wished to come to her psychotherapy sessions and when she chose not to. It was a process not only of letting her use her own spontaneity but requiring her to use it. While it is utopian to try to divorce power completely from force, compulsion, and coercion, it is cynical to identity all kinds of power with them. Is a tiny rain drop the same rainstorm? Can it cause a dam to burst as a rain storm? No—although the two are of the same nature, they are not of the same identity. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13

For any being to say “I am God” is incorrect, unless one understands the statement to refer only to the nature of one’s innermost being and only in this way, that one is but an insignificant drop of God with all the limitations that belong to a spark. We have to find our own self before we can find that of God’s. Hence there is real need of the higher self tenet. We are not entitled to aspire towards union with the wholeness of God so long as we still have not attained union with the godlikeness in beings. The mystical quest does not open the inner mysteries of God to our gaze. It opens the inner mysteries of beings. It leads them to one’s own divinity, not to God’s. There was once a less affluent Russian painter who could scarcely get enough money to buy bread for his wife and children. When the artist is on his death bed, his best friends finds the canvas on which the painter was working. It I blank except for one word, unclearly written and in very small letters, that appears in the center. The word can either be solitary—being alone; keeping one’s distance from events, maintaining the peace of mind necessary for listening to one’s deeper self. Or it can be solidarity—living in the market place; solidarity, involvement, or identifying with the masses. Opposites though they are, both solitude and solidarity are essential if the artist is to produce works that are not only significant to his or her age, but that will also speak to future generations. #RandolphHarris 12 of 13

There is no contradiction between advising aspirants at one time to seek a master and follow the path of discipleship, and advising them to seek within and follow the path of self-reliance at another time. The two counsels can be easily reconciled. For if the aspirant accepts the first one, the master will gradually lead one to become increasingly self-reliant. If one accepts the second one, one’s higher self will lead one to a master. When this craving for a guru becomes excessive, inordinate, it is a sign of weakness, an attempt to escape one’s own personal responsibility and to place it squarely on somebody else’s shoulders, a manifestation of inferiority complex such as we are accustomed to see in faces that have long been enslaved by others. Although it is true that one must find one’s own way to the goal, one need not do so as if one exists alone on this planet. One may be helped by drawing creatively on the experience gained by others even while one critically judges it. “And they did land upon the shore of the promised land. And when they had set their feet upon the shores of the promised land they bowed themselves down upon the face of the land, and did humble themselves before the Lord, and did shed tears of joy before the Lord, because of the multitude of God’s tender mercies over them. And it came to pass the they went forth upon the face of the land, and began to till the Earth,” reports Ether 6.12-13. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13

My Heart Turned to a Small, Tight Knot Inside Me, but His Manner Became Completely Authoritative and Commanding at Once!

July 19, 2019 2:03 am

And of course, this deepening knowledge of him made me ache for him all the more. I considered again that in my dark preternatural youth, I had made companions for myself who could never really be companions—Gabrielle, who had no need of me; Nicolas, who had gone mad; Louis, who could not forgive me for having seduced him into the realm of the mysterious, even though he had wanted the secrets himself. There is one psychoanalytic term that has gained wide popularity and in popular use has changed its meaning. Such popular use always indicates a significant fact about a society and therefore deserves our attention. I refer to the term “ego.” People say that something is good or bad for their “ego.” They mean by this that their self-feeling—in the sense of the status which they accord themselves—rises when something is good and falls when something is bad for their ego. In this usage ego is only part of the person. My “ego” is not identical with “I” or “self.” It is not identical with the I who is well or ill, who sees and hears and touches and tastes and smells, who acts, walks, sits, stands, lies, who is moved by others, by what is seen and experienced. Moreover, what is “good” or “bad” for my who is not at all necessarily good or bad for me, although I may be inclined to think so. #RandolphHarris 1 of 17

The popular “ego” gains from success, winning in competition, status, being admired, flattered, loved; it does not gain from facing the truth, from loving somebody else, from humility. It behaves like a stock or a piece of merchandise endowed with self-awareness: if it is much in demand it rises, is blown up, feels important; if not, it falls, shrinks, feels it is nothing. Thus, it I an alienated part of the self. Alienation can be like a psychic accident. Like when the soul of a dead person takes over a living body; a spirit possessing a human being; it has to be persuaded to let go. However, while it is only part of the self, it has the tendency to become the focal point of the feeling of identity and to dominate the whole life of the people who ae involved with their “ego” to a significant degree. Their mood fluctuates with their ego. They are haunted by their “ego” and preoccupied with its enhancement and downfall so much so that the vibration and the constriction coming from egotistical individuals may make others sense that they are being forced quite literally out of their physical self. These individuals may feel that they have a life apart from their “ego,” but they stand or fall with it. The “ego” has become their identity and at the same time the main object of their worry, ambition, and preoccupation, crowding out any real concern with themselves and with others. #RandolphHarris 2 of 17

The popular ego can serve as the most important model of an alienated concept of identity, even though it may be surpassed in rigidity and fixedness by some other examples of such concepts, to which we shall turn now. There once was a man named Pavel Smerdyakov who, on trial for the murder of his father, suffers his worst misery when the prosecutors asked him to take off his socks. They were very dirty and now everyone could see it. All his life he had thought both his big toes hideous. He particularly loathed the coarse, flat, crooked nail on the right one and now they would all see it. Feeling intolerably ashamed. The accidental, unchangeable appearance of his feet, of the nail of his right big toe, here becomes the focal point of his identity. It is on this that Pavel feels the less affluent who stand around him and look at him will judge him and that he judges himself. Very often real or imagined physical attributes, parts of the body image or the entire body image, become focal points of identity. Many beings build around such a negative identity the feeling that this particular feature unalterably determines the course of their lives, and that they are thereby doomed to unhappiness. #RandolphHarris 3 of 17

The idea of escaping alienation is much like how Anne Rice’s Lestat de Lioncourt dreams of becoming human again in The Tale of the Body Thief, “I rose from the table, struggling, in my excitement, to move like a human. Ah, move like a human. Think of it, to be inside a human body. To see the Sun, really see it, a tiny blazing ball in a blue sky!” Usually, in these cases, qualities such as attractiveness and beauty are no longer felt to be based on the alive expression and flux of human feelings, but have become fixed and dead features, or a series of poses, as so many Hollywood stars or fashion models These features are cut off from the center of the person and worn like a mask. Unattractiveness is experienced as not possessing this mask. In the same way, other real or imagined attributes, or the ack of them, become focal points for a reified, alienated, negative identity. For example: feeling not sufficiently masculine or feminine, being born on the wrong side of the river, being a member of an underrepresented group or gender against which racial or religious prejudices are directed, and, in the most general form, feeling intrinsically inadequate or bad. I do not imply, of course, that in our society the accident circumstance of being born as the member of one social, national, or religious group or class rather than another does not result in very real, objective difficulties, disadvantages or privileges. #RandolphHarris 4 of 17

I am concerned here only with the attitude which the person takes toward such handicaps or advantages or privileges, which is important for one’s ability to deal them. In this attitude the structure of the sense of identity and the way in which such factors as the social background and innate advantages or handicaps are incorporated in the sense of identity play a decisive role. What are the dynamics of such alienated concepts of identity? Sometimes they crystallize around repeated parental remarks which, rather than referring to a particular act of the child, say or imply that the child is or lacks, by its very nature, such and such; that Tom is a lazy good-for-noting or that he is “just like Uncle Harry,” who happens the be the troublemaker in the family. Frequently they develop from an ego-ideal that is alien to the child’s own personality, but about which one has come to feel that, unless one is such and such, one is nothing. Whatever their genetic origin, I shall consider here mainly the phenomenological structure of alienated identity concepts and the dynamics of this structure which tend to perpetuate self-alienation. By making some quality or circumstance, real or exaggerated or imagined, the focal point of a reified identity, I look upon myself as though I were a thing (res) and the quality or circumstance were a fixed attribute of this thing or object. #RandolphHarris 5 of 17

However, the “I” that feels that I am this or that, in doing so, distances itself from the very same reified object attribute which it experiences as determining its identity and very often as a bane on its life. In feeling that I am not such and such, I distinguish between the unfortunate I and the presumably unalterable quality or lack which, for all time, condemns me to have this negative identity. I do not feel that I am doing this or that or failing to do it, but that there is a something in me or about me, or that I lack something and that this, once and for all, makes me this or that, fixes my identity. The person who has this attitude toward oneself usually is unaware of its being a particular attitude with concrete and far-reaching implications. One takes one’s attitude for granted as a natural, inevitable one and is aware only of the painful self-consciousness and self-preoccupation it involves. One cannot imagine how anyone with one’s fate could have any other attitude. The two most significant implications of this attitude to oneself are: the severance from the living I of the reified attribute which is experiences as a fixed, unchangeable quality, and the severance of this reified attribute from its dynamic and structural connection with other qualities, needs, acts, and experiences of the person. #RandolphHarris 6 of 17

In other words, the reified attribute is cut off from the living, developing, fluctuating I in time, since it is experienced as immutable. However, it is also cut off from being experiences as an integral part of the living personality, connected with the totality of the person’s strivings, attitudes, perceptions, feelings, with one’s acting and failing to act. In reality, of course, we can observe that certain actions, moods, and experiences cause changes in the role of the negative identity in the conscious feelings and thoughts of the person. However, one usually does not experience the reified attribute which forms the core of one’s negative self-feeling as something connected with, and due to, one’s own actions and attitudes, but as something fixed on which one has no influence. Furthermore, just as the person’s feeling about oneself may fluctuate with the ups and downs of one’s “ego,” so it also varies with the intensity of the negative self-feeling based on some reified attribute which, at times, may disappear altogether from the conscious thoughts of the person. However, when it reappears it is recognized as the same unfortunate quality that throughout the past has tainted—and will forever taint—the person’s life. Thus, in spite of such fluctuations, the alienated attribute is experienced as a “something” that basically does not and cannot change. #RandolphHarris 7 of 17

To be saddled with a reified, negative identity seems, on the face of it, noting but a painful burden. Yet one often can see people cling to such negative self-images with a great deal of stubbornness and in the face of contradictory evidence. In psychoanalytic therapy, it is often seen that the patient who comes for help tries to convince the therapist that nothing can be done for one, since one is born with such and such a handicap or without such and such an advantage. On closer scrutiny, one may find that such insistence by the patient on the hopelessness of the situation has a way of occurring at a point when the patient is afraid to face an issue, or when one wants to be pitied rather than helped. Thus, the reified identity concept often provides a protection against an anxiety-arousing challenge, a way out of a feared situation, and thereby a certain relief. This relief is dynamically similar to the relief observable in certain hypochondriacal and paranoid patients. It sounds paradoxical to speak of relief in the case of patients who are obviously beset by worry, suffering, and fear as the hypochondriac and the paranoid. However, the hypochondriacal patient who is preoccupied with imagined, anticipated, or real ailments sees oneself as the “customarily handicapped” one and thereby avoids the anxiety-provoking prospect of facing and dealing with one’s real problems. #RandolphHarris 8 of 17

One’s hypochondriacal preoccupation get the patient off the sport with oneself—namely, off the spot where one would have to deal with one’s realistic personality problems. There are neuroses which may occur in individuals whose personality is otherwise intact and undistorted, developing as a reaction to an external situation which is filled with conflicts. Character neuroses is a condition in which—through the symptomatic picture may be exactly like that of a situation neurosis—the main disturbance is possessed in the deformation neurosis—the main disturbance is possessed in the deformations of the character. They are the result of an insidious chronic process, starting as a rule in childhood and involving greater or lesser intensity. Seen from the surface a character neurosis, too, may result from an actual situation conflict, but a carefully collected history of the person may show that difficult character traits were present long before any confusing situation arose, that the momentary predicament is itself to a large extent due to previously existing personal difficulties, and furthermore that the person reacts neurotically to a life situation which for the average healthy individual does not imply any conflict at all. The situation merely reveals the presence of a neurosis which may have existed for some time. #RandolphHarris 9 of 17

In the second place, we are not so much interested in the symptomatic picture of the neurosis. Our interest is possessed predominantly in the character disturbances themselves, because deformations of the personality are the ever-recurring picture in neuroses, whereas symptoms in the clinical sense may vary or be entirely lacking. Also from a cultural viewpoint character formation is more important than symptoms, because it is character, not symptoms, that influences human behavior. With greater knowledge of the structure of neuroses and with the realization that the cure of a symptom does not necessarily mean the cure of a neurosis, psychoanalysts in general have shifted their interest and given more attention to character deformations that to symptoms. Speaking figuratively we may say that the neurotic symptoms are not the volcano itself but rather its eruptions, while the pathogenic conflict, like the volcano, is hidden deep down in the individual, unknown to oneself. These restrictions granted we may rise the question whether neurotic persons today have traits in common which are so essential that we may speak of a neurotic personality of our time. As to the character deformations which accompany different types of neuroses, we are struck by their differences rather than by their similarities. #RandolphHarris 10 of 17

The hysterical character, for instance, is decidedly different from the compulsive character. The differences which strike our attention, however, are differences of mechanisms or, in more general terms, differences in the way the two disturbances manifest themselves and in the ways in which they are solved, such as the great role of projection in the hysterical type as compared with the intellectualization of conflicts in the compulsive type. On the other hand, the similarities which I have in mind to do not concern the manifestations or the ways in which they have brought about, but they concern the content of the conflict itself. To be more exact, the similarities are not so much in the experience which have genetically prompted the disturbance but in the conflicts which are actually moving the person. In Tales of the Body Thief, by Anne Rice, Lestat was in Paris, France with his mother Gabrielle at a café on the Left Bank. It was a lovely spring day and a grand time to be in Paris, as all the songs say. He was drinking a beer, reading the English papers, and realized that he was overhearing a conversation. He drifted away again. And Lestat realized that he was overhearing this strange conversation and it was not in English and it was not in French. Gradually he came to know that it was not in any language really, and yet it was fully understandable to him. #RandolphHarris 11 of 17

Lestat then put down his paper, and began to concentrate. On and on it went. It was a sort of argument. He looked down and slowly turned around and there were two beings, seated at the table talking to each other, and just for a moment, it seemed normal—two men in conversation. He started to feel like he was fading out and realized that the two individuals were not human beings. It was painfully clear that there were illusory. They simply were not of the same fabric as everything else. They were not being illuminated by the same light, for instance, they existed in some realm where the light was from another source. Like the light in Rembrandt. Their clothes and their faces were smoother than those of human beings. The whole vision was of a different texture, and that texture was uniform in all its detail. God and Satan pretended not to see Lestat, but they allowed him to hear their discussion. The devil said he feels for humankind in their wretchedness, and humans have become more bestial than any beast because they have reasons. The Lord agreed that human beings too easily become lax; they need vigilance, even though beings ever errs the while one strives. God proposed that the human beings should be ever active, ever live creation. #RandolphHarris 12 of 17

God told the Devil that he must go on doing his job. And the Devil did not want to do it. He explained that his term had already been too long. The same thing was happening to him that had happened to all the others. God said the he understood, but the Devil ought to know how important he was, he could not simply shirk his duties, it was not that simple, God needed him, and needed him to be strong. And all this was amicable. This conversation tells us that it is crucial for us to take action, strive, and put in effort. Forever the active deed takes supremacy over other forms of human existence. In the beginning in Genesis, when it is declared, “In the beginning God created the Heavens and the Earth,” this may be to intellectualistic. Perhaps sensibility will do, in the beginning was the Sense. In the beginning there was the Deed. The Big Bang was when the cells of God began to divide. One may well be a bit suspicious of offers and guarantees, of salvation by a guru. How this can be done without thwarting Nature’s intent to develop us fully on all sides is difficult to see. If we are granted absolution from such effort, we shall be robbed of the important values implicit in self-effort. This is why people consider human beings to be an experiment. We are supposed to see what we are made of and overcome our destructive nature and heal, love and create. #RandolphHarris 13 of 17

The searcher who is undeceived by fine phrases and knows when to look for the self-interest behind them, will know also when emphasis on the need of a master is cunningly or emotionally turned into exaggeration of the need. I will be the most deferential of beings before the teaching and in the presence of a truly illuminated being. However, I will stubbornly resist, and stand firm on my ground, when I am asked to surrender my intellectual freedom and become one’s bonded disciple, open no longer to the teaching or influence of any other being. One has to detach oneself—or to let oneself become detached by book or teacher—from false ideas, conventional fallacies, or blind leadership. The statement of high truth made by any prophet or sage will always remain an individual interpretation—this is a point that is too often unnoticed or unknown or unacceptable. All history authenticates it. The highest authority by which any mystic can speak is really one’s higher self’s. One revelation and communication cannot therefore be valid for, or binding upon, other beings. If, however, they do accept one’s pronouncements as such, they do so as a venture of faith. When a mystic takes one’s inner voice to be nothing less than God’s, one’s inner experience to be nothing else than the uttermost union with God, and then proceeds to use them as justification for imposing one’s commands on other mortals, one is no longer a true mystic. #RandolphHarris 14 of 17

One has introduced an “other.” One no longer touched the perfect unity of one’s own innermost being but has returned to the World of duality. And because no finite being can really become the infinite God, that “other” reduces itself to being a figment of one’s imagination at best or a lying, possessing spirit at worst. Full enlightenment is not attainable, expect the exuberant emotional fancy of over-enthused followers, for the gulf between being and God is too deep and too wide to be crossed. However, partial enlightenment is attainable, for something like godlike has been reflected into the human being’s heart. However, if it is impossible to become a part of God, it is possible to become a Child of God—that is, a being inspired and guided by God. In time one’s relation to the higher self becomes more intimae than any Earthly friendship, closer than any human union could ever be. Yet it always remains a relation, never becomes an absorption; always a nearness, never a merger. We never become God. We only become a channel for part of God’s light, wisdom, and power. If perfect union, is not attainable, what is attainable is the intimate presence of, and mental communion with, God in our heart, which brings peace and truth. #RandolphHarris 15 of 17

Social courage requires the confronting of two different kinds of fear. The first is called life fear. This is the fear of living autonomously, the fear of being abandoned, the need for dependency on someone else. It shows itself in the need to throw one’s self so completely into a relationship that one has no self left with which to relate. One becomes, in effect, a reflection of the person he or she loves—which sooner or later becomes boring to the partner. This is the fear of self-actualization. The opposite fear is called death fear. This is the fear of being totally absorbed by the other, the fear of losing one’s self and one’s autonomy, the fear of having one’s independence taken away. This is the fear most associated with men, for they seek to keep the back door open to beat a hasty retreat in case the relationship becomes too intimate. Both kind of fear have to be confronted, in varying proportions to be sure, by both men and women. All our lives we oscillate between these two fears. They are, indeed, the forms of anxiety that lie in wait for anyone who cares for another. However, if we are to move to self-realization, the confronting of these two fears, and the awareness that one grows not only by being one’s self but also by participating in other selves, is necessary. #RandolphHarris 16 of 17

Power was originally a sociological term, a category used chiefly to describe the actions of nations and armies. However, as students of the problem have increasingly realized that power depends upon emotions, attitudes, and motives, they have turned to psychology for the needed clarification. In psychology, power means the ability to affect, to influence, and to change other persons. Each person exists in an interpersonal web, analogous to magnetic fields of force; and each one propels, repels, connects, identifies with others. Thus such considerations as status, authority, and prestige are central to the problem of power. I have used the phrase “sense of significance” to refer to a person’s conviction that one counts for something, that one has an effect on others, and that one can get recognition from one’s fellows. What is the relationship between power and force? Certainly force, the lowest common denominator of power, has been widely identified with power in America; it is the automatic first association with power of most people in this country. This is the chief reason power has been scorned and disparaged as a dirty word. Power is the coercive force in the middle ground between power as energy and power as violence. Not to depend upon and utilize force is simply to be without a foothold in the real World. #RandolphHarris 17 of 17

In Loving Memory of Jill Harris’ Grandmother “Boomba.”