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Our Eternal Life is Useless to Us if We Do Not See the Beauty Around Us, the Creation of Mortals Everywhere!
Every Difficulty Slurred Over Will be a Ghost to Disturb Your Repose Later on
You are afraid. You do not stand en garde against fear. You do not understand the danger of fear itself. We will know these answers when we find those who can tell us, those who have possessed knowledge for centuries, for however long creatures such as ourselves have walked the Earth. That knowledge was our birthright, and he deprived us. Although mass society is a political as well as a cultural phenomenon, many of its critics, among them Ortega y Gasset and T. S. Eliot, have concentrated their attack chiefly against what they regard as its vulgar values, its sameness, its threat to high culture. While one may share their concern about the danger of standardized tastes, or about the threat which mass behavior in politics or in culture poses for individual expression, there is far more to the problem than this—indeed, far more than many aristocratically inclined critics of mass society (and of democracy) want to see. For it is not only beings of sensibility who feel crushed by the sheer weight of mass society and its values. In short, what is alienating in mass society is not merely the corruption of art, or the power of the multitudes—a power often exaggerated—but more importantly, the atomization of individuals who make up the mass. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
Could I have Used My Tongue I Would Not Have Struck Him—I Could Say it Only with a Blow!
Individuals in the mass societies of the twenty first century are to an ever increasing extent involved in public affairs; it becomes increasingly difficult to ignore them. However, ordinary individuals have ever less the feeling that they can understand or influence the very events upon which their life and happiness [are] known to depend. Many public issues are highly complex; to exercise citizenship intelligently, men and women and others must have an inkling of where their interests are possessed. If they find politics incomprehensible, they will be encouraged to depend on experts and leaders and the fake new media (also known as the propaganda department) to interpret and decide for them. However, as a poet, there is only one political duty, and that is to defend one’s language from corruption. And that is particularly serious now. It is being so quickly corrupted. When it is corrupted, people lose faith in what they hear, and this leads to violence. When an age is in the throes of profound transition, the first thing to disintegrate is the language. This leads directly to the upsurge of violence. Billy Budd, at his trial after he had killed the master-at-arms with his fist, exclaims: “Could I have used my tongue I would not have struck him. I could say it only with a blow.” Not being able to find his tongue (because of his severe stuttering), he could only speak by means of the physical expression of his passion. #RandolphHarris 8 of 18
This Whole Person is Architect and Developer, Tenant, and Landlord, Apollo and Dionysus in the House of Human Nature!
If the aged are increasingly isolated from community life, theirs is a fate which many groups share in an urban civilization. Not only does the city weaken the traditional kinship group; it also tends to atomize the individual by freeing one from old bonds. The anonymity and hence the alienation of the city dweller have never been more graphically described than by the following words: The restless and noisy activity of the crowded streets is highly distasteful, and it is surely abhorrent to human nature itself. Hundreds of thousands of men and women drawn from all classes and ranks of society pack the streets of most major cities. Are they not all human beings with the same innate characteristics and potentialities? And do they not all aim at happiness by following similar methods? Yet they rush past each other as if they had nothing in common. They are tacitly agreed on one thing only—that everyone should keep to the right of the pavement so as not to collide with the stream of people moving in the opposite direction. No one even thinks of sparing a glace for one’s neighbors in the streets. The more that city folk are packed into a tiny space, the more repulsive and disgraceful becomes the brutal indifference with which they ignore their neighbors selfishly concentrate upon their private affairs. #RandolphHarris 1 of 14
A Passionate Eagerness to Find God is a Necessary Basis for all the Other Qualifications in its Purist
In Humility the Quest is to be Begun: in Even Greater Humility it is to be Fulfilled
The Spirit’s Beauty Has Lured Mortals on Like a Dream of Unfound Gold for the Heart of Mortals is always Seeking this World of Treasure!
And gradually I realized that I possessed a new concept of loneliness, a new method of measuring a silence that stretched to the end of the World. And all I had to interrupt it were those menacing recorded preternatural voices which carried no images as their virulency increased. It is always and forever the struggle: to perceive somehow our own complicity with evil is a horror not to ne borne. It is much more reassuring to see the World in terms of totally innocent victims and totally evil instigators of the monstrous violence we see all about. At all costs, never disturb our innocence. However, what is the most innocent place in any country? It is not the insane asylum? The perfection of innocence, indeed, is madness. Rocklin charmed me, subdued me somewhat. Almost Venetian, it seemed, the somber multicolored mansions rising wall to wall over the narrow black streets. Irresistible the lights sprinkled over hilltop and value; and the brilliant manicured lawns and plush trees shooting up like a fairy-tale forest into a misty blue sky. We live at the end of an era. The age that began with the Renaissance, born out of the twilight of the Middle Ages, is now at a close. The era that emphasized rationalism and individualism is suffering an inner and outer transition; and there are as yet only dim harbingers, only partly conscious, of what the new age will be. #RandolphHarris 1 of 15
Recall those towering individuals of the Renaissance, explorers of the Earth like Columbus and Magellan, and explorers of the Heavens like Copernicus. Our comparable exploration is the recent trips to the Moon and robots deployed on Mars. However, practically no one remembers the names of the astronauts who walked on the Moon. What we do remember is the machinery; the hero of the moon trip was not an individual but a projectile, and the mortals were tenders of this projectile. Let no one conclude from this, however, that in the new age mortals will be subordinate to technology. It may be just the opposite: the development of technology, filling a role similar to that of the ancient slaves, may force us to find intellectual and spiritual content to fill the vacuum of our days and nights. In the present gap between ages, power is disengaged from its hereditary lines, confused, and up for grabs. Those who have occupied the numbing position of subordinate groups—the African Americans, and Chicanos, women, the less affluent, students, mental patients, convicts—are springing to life, announcing their existence, and presenting their demands. Power becomes a new and urgent issue not only for these groups, but for every individual in our culture who is trying to get one’s bearings and fine one’s pace amid the turbulence. #RandolphHarris 2 of 15
Power lessens in such periods—often called by its alternate names, alienation and helplessness—become very painful. There is one way, however, of confronting one’s powerlessness by making it a seeming virtue. This is the conscious divesting on the part of an individual of one’s power; it is then a virtue not to have it. I call this innocence. The word is derived from the Latin in and nocens, literally, not harmful, to be free from guilt or sin, guileless, pure; and in actions it means without evil influence or effect, or not arising from evil intention. To start with, we must distinguish between two kinds of innocence. One is innocence as a quality of imagination, the innocence of the poet or artist. It is the preservation of a childlike clarity in adulthood. Everything has a freshness, a purity, newness, and color. From this innocence spring awe and wonder. It leads toward spirituality: it is the innocence of Saint Francis in his Sermon to the Birds. When Jesus said: “Only as ye become like little children shall ye enter the kingdom of Heaven,” it is assumedly what he had in mind. It is the preservation of childlike attitudes into maturity without sacrificing the realism of one’s perception of evil, one’s complicity with evil. This is authentic innocence. #RandolphHarris 3 of 15
Such innocence can be a real protection in time of need. If one would keep free from influences that would take away the ideals which one has specifically set up for it to follow, one must try to keep one’s own life in one’ own hands. If one values freedom one must refuse to put one’s self in a position where one will be compelled to echo the views of those who do not share one’s ideas. One may have to choose between the trials of sturdy independence and the temptations of enervating security. It does not ask one to make harsh sacrifices but it does ask one to make reasonable ones. If they seem harsh to one that is only because one has been kept until then in a state of so-called normality by the powerful suggestions of organized society. His normality is merely the pooling of common ignorance and the sharing of common weakness. If the mind is to engage with success in the quest for truth, it must be unfettered and then unprejudiced. It requires moral strength or mental power to refuse the gregarious support of the crowd—be it sectarian church, a mystical group, or some other combination. It requires faith in oneself and the courage to resist the pull of others and be an individual. To venture so far afield from the common way and yet keep quite sane and practical, and not become a human oddity, a social freak, is something indeed. One has to pick one’s way through mistaken teachings, among provisional standpoints, and between ambitious gurus. #RandolphHarris 4 of 15
There is another kind of innocence. A type of innocence which does not lead to spirituality but rather consists of blinders—Pseudoinnocence, in other words. Capitalizing on naivete, it consists of a childhood that is never outgrown, a kind of fixation on the past. It is childishness rather than childlikeness. When we face questions too big and too horrendous to contemplate, such as the dropping of the atomic bomb, we tend to shrink into this kind of innocence and make a virtue of powerlessness, weakness, and helplessness. This pseudoinnocence leads to utopianism; we do not then need to see the real dangers. With unconscious purpose we close our eyes to reality and persuade our unconscious purpose we close our eyes to reality and persuade ourselves that we have escaped it. This kind of innocence does not make things bright and clear, as does the first kind; it only makes them seem simple and easy. It wilts before our complicity with evil. It is this innocence that cannot come to terms with the destructiveness in one’s self or others; and hence, it actually become self-destructive. Innocence that cannot include the soul because it becomes evil. This parallels the innocence in neurosis. It is a fixation in childhood, never lived through but clung to as the only protection against hostile, unloving, or dominating parents. #RandolphHarris 5 of 15
A young man in therapy, who had developed an intricate pattern of capitalizing on such weakness, once dreamed himself as a rabbit being chased by wolves. It turned out that he had been a wolf in rabbit’s skin. Often the only strategy available to such persons, learned by necessity in childhood, consists of accepting the overt powerlessness their situation requires and then getting their power by covert means. In this sense, the perfection of innocence, indeed, is madness. There in the insane asylum people drift through life truly innocent, unable to see into themselves at all. However, it may not be an inability to see into themselves. Nor is it being truly innocent. Only when viewed from the outside it is an innocence. In their detached innocence, they talk with spirit because they cannot find anyone else who is willing and able to understand them. The tremendous growth of mechanical power since the eighteenth century—first steam, then electricity, and now atomic power—made possible a great increase, albeit not necessarily an equitable distribution, of social wealth. While the early stages of the industrial revolution actually improvised millions, by almost any material standards we are today better off then were our ancestors. #RandolphHarris 6 of 15
New mechanical power produced new wealth; but it also imposed rigid controls over human behavior. Thorstein Veblen was one of the first sociologist to interpret the broad cultural implications of mechanization: “Within the range of…machine-guided work, and within the range of modern life so far as it is guided by the machine process, the courses of things is given mechanically, impersonally, and the resultant discipline is a discipline in the handling of impersonal facts for mechanical effect.” Most directly affected are people who work with machines. Unlike the tools of workmanship, which at every given moment in the work process remain the servants of the hand, the machines demand that the laborer serve them, that one adjust the natural rhythm of one’s body to their mechanical movement. However, this discipline extends far beyond the workplace, affecting not only factory workers but the whole of society. Indeed, the clock rather than the steam engine became the foundation of the modern industrial system, for once machines were regulated by mechanical, or non-human, time, an impersonal new discipline was imposed on mortals. Today our lives are increasingly regulated by machines which set standards or performance and product, telling us when to start working, when to stop, what to do and how to do it. #RandolphHarris 7 of 15
Also, the measure of our submission to mechanical controls is that we are largely unconscious of their influence. However, of their influence there can be no doubt. Historically, one of the first major results of mechanization was to transform labor: what had formerly been an integral part of human life became a means to an end. To feed and operate the machines of the new civilization required not just raw materials but free labor. Since industrialism was pioneered by capitalist this meant a special kind of freedom. This is described as the working principle of the early capitalist market economy: Production is interaction of mortals and nature; if this process is to be organized through a self-regulating mechanism of barter and exchange, then morals and nature must be brought into its orbit; they must be subject to supply and demand, this is, be dealt with as commodities, as goods produced for sale. However, for mortals to be treated as a commodity, a brutal operation was required: the freeing of labor from traditional bonds of craft, family and community. Thus one of the many tragic ironies of the early capitalist market economy: expected automatically to produce general welfare, it split the community in ways which survive to this day. #RandolphHarris 8 of 15
To separate labor from other activities of life and to subject it to the laws of the market was to annihilate all organic forms of existence and to replace them by a different type of organization, an atomistic and individualistic one. When labor became a mechanically regulated commodity, mortals lost part of themselves. This returns to our major theme of alienation. The worker, having lost control over both the conditions of one’s labor and the fruit of one’s labor, became alienated from their soul. The spirit (or human mind) is at war with itself; in consequence, it has to overcome itself as its own most formidable obstacle. That development which in the sphere of Nature is a peaceful growth, is for the spirit, a severe, a mighty conflict with itself. What spirit really strives for is the realization of its Ideal being; but in doing so, it hides that goal from its own vision, and is proud and well satisfied in this alienation. Therefore, mortal’s own intellectual creations become independent of their creator and hence alienated to one. Human achievement is a dialectical process in which mortals can advance to higher forms only by overcoming or mastering oneself and cultural forces that one creates. #RandolphHarris 9 of 15
Therefore, the history of mortals is a history of their alienation or frustration, and of one’s self-realization through the conquest of these frustrations. The self-sufficiency of one’s ideal, its remoteness from popular ways, may be boldly and openly expressed in action or kept as an interior and hidden thing. For most the first way may prove to be an imprudent course but for others it may be a necessity. Mentally one cannot fit oneself into any of the accepted categories which the society of one’s place and time provide, so an independent and solitary path attracts one. Physically, one may have to make an uneasy compromise with society, with the result that both benefit by their mutual services. Thus without doing violence to one’s chief principles one yet finds a way to live among those who have no use for them. “Now as they went on their way, he entered a village; and a woman named Martha received him into her house. And she had a sister called Mary, who sat at the Lord’s feet and listened to his teaching. But Martha was distracted with much serving; and she went to him and said, ‘Lord, do you not care that my sister has eft me to serve along? Tell her then to help me.’ But the Lord answered, ‘Martha, Martha, you are anxious and troubled about may things; one thing is needful. Mary has chosen the good portion, which shall not be taken away from her,’” reports Luke 10.38-42. #RandolphHarris 10 of 15
Before anyone can carry out an independent investigation of truth, one must first possess the capacity to do so. To develop this capacity where it is lacking, the philosophic discipline is prescribed. The words Jesus spoke to Martha belong to the most famous of all the words in the Bible. Martha and Mary have become symbols for two possible attitudes towards life, for two forces in mortal and humankind as a whole, for two kinds of concern. Martha is concerned about many things, but all of them are finite, preliminary, transitory. Mary is concerned about one thing, which is infinite, ultimate, lasting. Martha’s way is not contemptible. On the contrary, it is the way which keeps the World running. It is driving force which preserves and enriches life and culture. Without it Jesus could not have talked to Mary and Mary could not have listened to Jesus. Once I heard a sermon dedicated to the justification and glorification of Martha. This can be done. There are innumerable concerns in our lives and in human life generally which demand attention, devotion, passion. However, they do not demand infinite attention, unconditional devotion, ultimate passion. They are important, often very important for you and for me and for the whole of humankind. However, they are not ultimately important. And therefore Jesus praises not Martha, but Mary. She has chosen the right thing, the one thing mortals need, the only thing of ultimate concern for ever mortal. #RandolphHarris 11 of 15
The hour of a church service and every hour of prayer and reading is dedicated to listening in the way Mary listened. Something is being said to us, to the speaker as well as to the listeners, something about which we may become infinitely concerned. This is the meaning of every sermon. It shall awaken infinite concern. What does it mean to be concerned about something? It means that we are involved in it, that a part of ourselves is in it, that we participate with our hearts. And it means even more than that. It points to the way in which we are involved, namely, anxiously. The wisdom of our language often identifies concern wit anxiety. Wherever we are involved we feel anxiety. There are many things which interest us, which provoke our compassion or horror. However, they are not our real concern; they do not produce this driving, torturing anxiety which is present when we are genuinely and seriously concerned. In out story, Martha was seriously concerned. Let us try to remember what gives us concern in the course f an average day, from the moment of awakening to the last moment before falling asleep, and even beyond that, when our anxieties appear in our dreams. #RandolphHarris 12 of 15
We are concerned about our work; it is the basis of our existence. We may love it or hate it; we may fulfill it as a duty or as a hard necessity. However, anxiety grasps us whenever we feel the limits of our strength, our lack of efficiency, the struggle with our laziness, the danger of failure. We are concerned about our relationships to others. We cannot imagine living without their benevolence, their friendship, their love, their communion in body and soul. However, when we think about the indifference, the outbursts of anger and jealousy, the hidden and often poisonous hostility we experience in ourselves as well as those we love, we are worried and often in utter despair. The anxiety about losing them, about having hurt them, about not being worthy of them, creeps into our hearts and makes our love restless. We are concerned about ourselves. We feel responsible for our development towards maturity, towards strength in life, wisdom in mind, and perfection in spirit. At the same time, we are striving for happiness, we are concerned about our pleasures and about having a good time, a concern which ranks very high with us. However, when we look at ourselves in the mirror of self-scrutiny or of the judgments of others, our anxiety strikes us. We feel that we have made the wrong decisions, that we are failing before mortals and before ourselves. #RandolphHarris 13 of 15
We compare ourselves with others and feel inferior to them, and we are depressed and frustrated. We believe that we have wasted our happiness either by pursuing it too eagerly and confusing happiness either by pursuing it too eagerly and confusing happiness with pleasure or by not being courageous enough to grasp the right moment for a decision which might have brought happiness. We cannot forget the most natural and most universal concern of everything that lives, the concern for the preservation of life—for our daily bread. There was a time in recent history in which large groups in the Western World had almost forgotten this concern. Today, the simple concern for food and clothing and shelter is so overwhelming in the greater part of humankind that it has almost suppressed most of the other human concerns, and it has absorbed the minds of all classes of people. However, there is a qualitative difference between historical ages. There are times of ripening when the true elements of the human spirit, held down and buried, grows ready underground with such pressures and such tensions that it merely waits to be touched by one who will touch it—and then erupts. The revelation that then appears seizes the whole ready element in all its suchness, recasts it and produced a form, a new form of God in the World. #RandolphHarris 14 of 15
Ever new regions of the World and the spirit are thus lifted up into form, called divine form, in the course of history, in the transformations of the human element. Ever new spheres become the place of a theophany. It is not mortal’s own power that is at work here, neither is it merely God passing through; it is a mixture of the divine and the human. Whoever is sent forth in a revelation takes with one in one’s eyes an image of God; however supra-sensible it may be, one takes it along in the eyes of one’s spirit, in the altogether not metaphorical but entirely real visual power of one’s spirit. The spirit also answers by beholding. Although we on Earth never behold God without World but only the World in God, by beholding we eternally form God’s form. Form is a mixture of You and It, too. In faith and cult it an freeze into an object; but from the gist of the relation that survives in it, it turns ever again into presence. God is near his forms as long as mortals do not remove them from him. In true prayer, cult and faith are unified and purified into living relation. That true prayer lives in religions testifies to their true life; as long as it lives in them, they live. “And they did remember his words; and therefore they went forth, keeping the commandments of God, to teach the word f God among all the people,” reports Helaman 5.14. #RandolphHarris 15 or 15
If the Mind is to Engage With Success in the Quest for Truth, it Must First be Unfettered and then Unprejudiced
Even his unusual beauty and unfailing charm were something of a secret to him. But I had always wanted many things. What accounted for the duration of the life many of us live? Why do we last so long? I purpose that there are five levels of power present as potentialities in ever human being’s life. The first is the power to be. This power can be seen in the newborn infant—he can cry and violently wave his arms as signs of discomfort within himself, demanding that his hunger or other needs be met. Whether we like it or not, power is central in the development in this infant of what we call personality. Every infant becomes an adult in ways that reflect the vicissitudes of power—that is, how one has been able to find his or her power and use it—indeed, how to be it. It is given in the act of birth, not by the culture as such but by the sheer fact that the infant lives. If the infant is denied the experience that one’s actions can get a response from those around him or her—as show in Rene Spitz’s studies of the pitiable infant orphans in Puerto Rico who were given no attention by nurses or other mother substitutes—the infant withdraws into a corner of his or her bed, does not walk or develop in other ways, and literally wither away physiologically and psychologically. The ultimate in impotence is death. #RandolphHarris 1 of 16
The power to be is neither good nor evil; it is prior to them. However, it is not neutral. It must be lived out or neurosis, psychosis, or violence will result. The second phase is self-affirmation. Every being has the need not only to be but to affirm one’s own being. This is especially significant for the human organism, for it is gifted with, or condemned to, self-consciousness. This consciousness is not inborn but begins to develop in the infant after a few weeks, is not fully developed for several years, and, indeed continues developing throughout one’s life. The question of significance then emerges, and the long and crucially important quest for self-esteem or substitutes for it, accompanied by grief with the lack of it. With human beings, mere physical survival is now no longer the main issue, but survival with some esteem. The cry for recognition becomes the central cry in this need for self-affirmation. If significance and recognition are granted as a matter of course in the family, the child simply assumes them and turns one’s attention to other things. However, if—as too often the case in our disrupted day when parents as well as children are radically confused—self-affirmation is blocked, it becomes a compulsive need which drives the person all of one’s life. #RandolphHarris 2 of 16
Or the child’s affirming of oneself may be made difficult in the face of one’s parents’ pattern of “We love you only if you obey us.” The child this get caught in the destructive aspects of competitiveness, the buying and selling of oneself and the World: one’s self-affirmation is taken by others to be a diminishing of them, and one is diminished in turn by theirs. In these or many other ways one’s self-affirmation is distorted or blocked outright. When self-affirmation meets resistance we make greater effort, we give power to our stance, making clear what we are and what we believe; we state it now against opposition. This is self-assertion, the third phase. It is a stronger form of behavior, more overt than self-affirmation. It is potentiality in all of us that we react to attack. We make it unavoidable that the others see us as we cry: “Here I am; I demand that you notice me!” The speech of Willy Loman’s wife in Arthur Miller’s play, Death of a Salesman, is a good example of this: “Attention must be paid…” Even though “Willy Loman never made a lot of money. His name was never in the papers…he’s a human being…So attention must be paid.” #RandolphHarris 3 of 16
The fact that her assertion was nominally for someone else does not change the fact that she was doing the asserting. When we are doing it for someone else, some of us can assert ourselves more firmly. That is merely another form of self-assertion—often made necessary by canons of politeness or not “blowing one’s own horn.” The fourth phase is aggression. When self-assertion is blocked over a period of time—as it was for the Jewish people for many years, as it is for every underrepresented group of people—this stronger form of reaction tends to develop. When I spent three years in Salonika, I found that the 100, 000 Sephardic Jewish people living there—one third of the population of the city—actually made up the cultured intelligentia of the city. There was a complete absence of anti-Semitic prejudice such as existed in the rest of Europe and America. There was so a complete absence of the aggressiveness associated in this country with Jewish people Indeed, the motto in Salonika was: “It takes two Jews to outwit a Greek, and two Greek to outwit an Armenian.” The Armenians, the group less represented, were the ones in whom aggression and a sharp bargaining sense had developed. #RandolphHarris 4 of 16
In contrast to self-assertion, which is drawing a line at a certain point and insisting “This is me; this is mine,” aggression is a moving into the positions of power or prestige or the territory of another and taking possession of some of it for one’s self. The motives may be righteous enough—to right an ancient wrong, as with the natives in Africa about whom Frantz Fanon, in his book The Wretched of the Earth, writes; or passion for liberation; or pride; or any one of a thousand other things. Motive does not concern us at the moment; we only emphasize that this is a phase of behavior that in every person exists a potentiality, and in the right situation it can be whipped into action. When aggressive tendencies are completely denied to the individual over a period of time, they take their toll in a zombielike deadening of consciousness, neurosis, psychosis, or violence. Finally, when all the efforts towards aggression are ineffective, there occurs the ultimate explosion known as violence. Violence is largely physical because the other phases, which can involve reasoning or persuasion, have been ipso facto blocked off. In typical cases, the stimulus transmitted from the environment to the individual is translated directly into violent impulse to strike, with the cerebrum being bypassed. This is why when a mortal erupts in a violent temper, one often does not fully realize what one has done until afterward. #RandolphHarris 5 of 16
It is tragic, indeed, when whole peoples are placed in a situation where significance becomes almost impossible to achieve. The African Americans are, of has met with a lot of opposition. The central crime of the early Americans is that they placed the Africans, during several centuries of slavery and one century of physical freedom but psychological oppression, in situations where self-affirmation was impossible. In physical slavery, and later in psychological slavery, every one of the nonviolent phases was difficult or impossible. They were permitted to affirm themselves only as singer, dancers, and entertainers for the titillation of the majority group, or as tillers of fields owned by others, and later, in the construction of automobiles. That this would lead to widespread apathy and, later on, to radical explosions should no longer surprise anyone. An illustration comes from the remark of an African American man in Harlem: “When the times comes, it is going to be too late. Everything will explode because the people they live under tension now; they going to a point where they can’t stand it no more. When they get to that point…” #RandolphHarris 6 of 16
He dangles the end of the sentence, correctly letting us simply imagine what might come, because—as indicated above—before the violent explosion we cannot realize what may happen. For as long a people feel forced to remain in such a semihuman state, there will be aggression and violence. If the other phases of behavior are blocked, then the explosion into violence may be the only way individual or groups can get release from unbearable tension and achieve a sense of significance. We often speak of the tendency toward violence as a building up inside the individual, but it is also a response to the outside conditions. The source of violence must be seen in both its internal and external manifestations, a response to a situation which is felt to block off all other ways to response. However, it seems that people in positions of authority are not always willing to address nor resolve situations where people are being exposed to semihuman conditions because they are part of the problem and do not want to get in legal or civil trouble, so they hope that the person reaching out for help resorts to violence as a way to abdicate themselves of any illegal, unethical, or immoral ties to the situation. Their defense will be the person has a problem and erupted in violence and there was nothing we could do to prevent this from happening. #RandolphHarris 7 of 16
The five phases above are ontological ones—that is, they are part of the human being as human. It is the endeavor of ontology to describe the characteristics of being as being—in our case the human beings as human. A child of three may erupt in violence that takes the form of a temper tantrum as many a mortal of sixty; and although we may judge the latter more harshly, the action is potentially present in both. The ontological view does not deny development, but takes its inquiry down to a deeper level. It is not to be identified with the nature theory of violence any more than with the nurture theories discussed earlier. Ontological inquiry is directed at the structure in which both nature and nurture are rooted. I believer that the psychotherapeutic approach provides one of the most fruitful avenues for the investigation of violence and aggression. When pondering the condition of Juan Carlos Chapa Jr., Adel Sambrano Ramos, or Dylann Storm Roof, we can see the seeds and roots of the madness and the violence in our nation. I am aware of the dangers of identifying too closely the society with the individual, but to entirely avoid a relationship between the two is just as erroneous. Social problems and psychological problems can no longer be isolated from each other. I believe it is valuable to try to understand modern social aggression and violence in the context, for example, that we can learn from Elliot Rodger and other persons in dire need of power. #RandolphHarris 8 of 16
Medieval mortals were conscious of themselves only as a member of a race, people, party, family, or corporation—only through some general category. The duty of pioneers, if they are to be successful pioneers, it to realize they will need courage to forget outworn ideas and to free themselves from dying traditions so as to cope with the new conditions which are arising. In this connection, if it were practicable, the suggestion that it is also a duty to cooperate with existing spiritual movements would be acceptable; but experience will show that most of these movements are unable to enter that deep union of hearts which alone can guarantee success to any external union. Such a plan would end in failure and it is better for them to pursue their own independent course than waste time and force in attempting what would not succeed and is not really needed. With the Renaissance emerges the individual as we know them. If one’s entrance upon the scene was gradual rather than dramatic, it is indicated nonetheless clearly by important changes in language. In the Middle Ages the word “individual” means “inseparable”; and it was used chiefly in theological arguments about the Holy Trinity or to indicate a member of some group, kinds of species. The complexity of the term is at once apparent in this history, for it is the unit that is being defined, yet defined in terms of its membership of a class. #RandolphHarris 9 of 16
The separable entity is being defined by a word that has meant inseparable. The crucial history of the modern description is a change in emphasis which enabled us to think of the individual as a kind of absolute, without immediate reference to the group of which one is a member. This change took pace in the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries; and since then we have come to speak of the individual in one’s own right, whereas previously to describe an individual was to give an example of the group of which one was a member, and so to offer a particular description of that group and of the relationships within it. This semantic change reflected profound changes in the social order after the medieval period, particularly the breakup of the feudal caste system. When mortals found that they could change their status and social mobility increased, the idea grew of being an individual apart from one’s social role. Also important, as we shall see, was mortal’s new detachment from power over nature: when mortal (as subject) divorced one’s self from nature (as object) in order to understand and control it, individualism was given further impetus. It is the historical emergence of the individual as we now know one, of mortal alone, that makes alienation so crucially a modern problem. #RandolphHarris 10 of 16
In the past, as we saw, when they lost their status that identified them and offered them some security, mortals particularly felt anxiety or despair. However, when the medieval system collapsed, the likelihood of alienation increased appreciably. Indeed, only with the release of the individual from medieval bonds could alienation become a widespread social problem. The breakdown of the feudal order forced mortals to fall back upon themselves; they had to learn how to cope with countless problems and decision that were once taken care of my Worldly and spiritual hierarchies. However, together with the anxieties generated by this new autonomy mortals sensed a great promise, for in the period of the formation of the national state and the development of a mercantile economy one’s own future seemed to have infinite possibilities. At the end of the curve, in our own century, mortals begin to feel threatened by the encroachment of powerful social forces emanating not only from one’s own corner of the Earth but from every part of a contracting World. If mortals today fear freedom or wish to escape from it, this was not always so—certainly not for the optimistic of the political and scientific enlightenment. However, then alienation is not only an accompaniment of individualism. #RandolphHarris 11 of 16
Perhaps above all, as we have suggested, alienation is a response to fearful new powers that mortals themselves have created and that threaten their hard-won freedom. Foremost among them are the machine and the social structures which administer it. The freedom to command one’s life in one’s own way can be got only by first getting the fearlessness to disregard the criticism and to ignore the expectations of other people. One who would follow an independent path must, to some extent, be fearless. One must refuse to be intimidated by the power, prestige, claims, or size of established organizations, just as one must refuse to be deluded by the idealizations of themselves which they hold before the public. Few people know what a free existence really is; most people live caged in by fear of, or enslavement to, the opinion of others. Even the rich do not know it for their cages are gilt and comfortable. Even the spiritual do not know it for they mere echo back what these others want them to think about God. Complete freedom is possible only to those who have special character, one that is devoid of tyrannizing ambitions and despotic cravings, and even of unworldly strivings. Such is the strange paradox of the quest that on the one hand one must foster determined self-reliance but on the other yield to a feeling of utter dependence on the power of God. #RandolphHarris 12 of 16
Those who are self-sufficient and prefer to learn and develop by themselves, are those who especially need to practise this inward listening and waiting. What we mean is that modern mortals have to become more self-reliant, has to throw off the remnants of tribal consciousness which still rule one, has to learn to think for one’s self. However, it one must stand aloof to one’s own way, with one’s own free thoughts, it remains a benevolent, amiable independence. One wishes all beings well while knowing they receive, suffer, or enjoy the results of their own physical, emotional, or mental action. Ones desire to express individual views, character, and personality must be respected so long as one does not try to impose them aggressively or tyrannically on others. This is the only genuine guarantee of continuity. The genuine guarantee of duration is that the pure relation can be filled as the beings become You, as they are elevated to the You, so that the holy basic word sounds through all of them. Thus the time of human life cannot and ought not to overcome the It-relation, it then becomes so permeated by relation that this gains a radiant and penetrating constancy in it. The moments of supreme encounter are no mere flashes of lightning in the dark but like a rising Moon in a clear starry night. And thus the genuine guarantee of spatial constancy consists in this the mortal’s relations to their You, being radii that lead from all I-points to the center, create a circle. #RandolphHarris 13 of 16
Not the periphery, not the community comes first, but the radii, the common relation to the center. That alone assures the genuine existence of a community. The anchoring of time in relation-oriented life of salvation and the anchoring of space in a community unified by a common center: only when both of these come to be and only as long as both continue to be, a human cosmos (shelter for mortals, a houselike World) comes to be and continues to be around the invisible altar, grasped in the spirit out of the World stuff on the eon. The encounter with God does not come to mortals in order that one may henceforth attend to God but in order that one may prove its meaning in action in the World. All revelation is calling and a mission. However, again and again mortals shun actualization and bends back toward the revealer: one would rather attend to God than to the World. Now that one has bent back, however, one is no longer confronted by a You; one can do nothing but place a divine It in the realm of things, believe that one knows about God as an It, and talk about him. It is not necessary to be surly and irritable in order to be an individualist. One can still be affable, genial, civil, and courteous—even radiant with good will It is a matter of inner equilibrium. #RandolphHarris 14 of 16
One must refuse to violate one’s intellectual integrity or sacrifice one’s spiritual independence. Even as the egomaniac does not live anything directly, whether it be a perception or an affection, but reflect on one’s perceiving or affectionate I and thus misses truth of the process, thus the theomaniac (who incidentally, can get along very well with egomaniac in the very same soul) will not let the gift take full effect but reflects instead on that which gives, and misses both. When you are sent forth, God remains presence of you; whoever walks in one’s mission always has God before one: the more faith the fulfillment, the stronger and more constant the nearness. Of course, one cannot attention to God, touching oneself all over with God, but one can converse with God. Bending back, on the other hand, turns God into an object. It appears to be a turning toward the primal ground, but belongs in truth to the World movement of turning away, even as the apparent turning away of those who fulfill their mission belongs in truth to the World movement of turning toward. For the two basic metacosmic movement of the World—its expansion into its own being returning to association [with God]—attain their supreme and conciliation, their mixture and separation, in the history of mortal’s relation to God. #RandolphHarris 15 of 16
It is in the return that the word is born on Earth; in spreading out it enter the chrysalis of religion; in a new return it is reborn with new wings. Not caprice is at work here, although the movement toward the It may at times go so far that it holds down the movement of going forth again t the You and threatens to suffocate it. The powerful revelations invoked by the religions are essentially the same as the quiet one that occurs everywhere and at all times. The powerful revelations that stand at the beginnings of great communities, at the turning points of human time, are nothing else than the eternal revelation. However, revelation does not pour into the World through its recipient as if one were a funnel: it confers itself upon one, it seizes one’s whole element in all of its suchness and fuses with it. Even the more who is mouth is precisely that and not a mouthpiece—not an instrument but an organ, an autonomous, sounding organ; and to sound means to modify sound. If one is unable to continue in this quest without the association, encouragement, or sympathies of others who are also following it, then one had better not enter it at all, for quite obviously one is not ready for it not sufficiently appreciative of its values. If being different is an honest result of the search for higher truth, it must be acceptable. However, when it is merely a disguised egocentric exhibitionism, it becomes reprehensible. #RandolphHarris 16 of 16
And Distance Has Come and Taken You Far Away Again, but I Will See You Soon, My Friend!
I showed my power to understand. Yes, illusions before, I admit it, but the thing I have spoken here are true. Already you despise your son for his love of mortals, his need to be ever near them, his yielding to the violinist. “Lie awake watching you run through my head, I am alone again, but not for long my friend. We face another day and distance has come and taken you far away again, but I will see you soon my friend, and then I will sing you my song. I cannot go home alone again. No I cannot my friend. Until then, eyes, I recognize taking me back familiar to me from some other time or maybe another life. Remember out times, and know who I am. The memory stays, until we can breathe as one again,” Until then by Sully Erna. Power and the sense of significance, I have said, are intertwined. One is the objective form and the other the subjective form of the same experience. While power is typically extrovert, significance may not be extrovert at all but may be shown (and achieved) by prayer or other introvert, subjective methods. It is nevertheless experienced by the person as a sense of power in that it helps one integrate oneself and subsequently makes one more effective in one’s relations with others. Power is always interpersonal; is it is purely personal we call it strength. Power is social and consists of person in groups acting in concert. #RandolphHarris 1 of 13
This is why the interpersonal view point, the tap root of the cultural school of psychoanalysis, is so important. If one believes the feeling of power in the sense of having influence in interpersonal relations with significant others is crucial for the maintenance of self-esteem and for the process of maturity, when the sense of significance is lost, the individual shift one’s attention to different, and often perverted or neurotic, forms of power to get some substitute for significance. “Here I am, what a nice place to be. I never thought I would see the skies separate for me and here I am. What a nice surprise. If only I had known what life was like on this side. You always bring me light, and you help me find my way. A gentle kiss goodnight is the innocence I crave. Here I am humbled and amazed. This beautiful little miracle of life was gifted to me, and here I am. I never thought I would say, if I could live my life again, I would live it your way. You always brought me life, and you have helped me find my way. I will never waste you time, I will never cause you pain. I will love you all my life, I will love you everyday. Under the light you shine on me, I promise I will be there for you baby. I would never want to leave you anyway, you have become my light. I cross my heart that is in your hands with hope that you will always be my best friend. I promise I will be there until the end,” My Light by Sully Erna. #RandolphHarris 2 of 13
Our particular problem in America at this point in history is the widespread loss of the sense of individual significance, a loss which is sensed inwardly as impotence. A situation in our day more tragic than the violence about us is that so many people feel they do not and cannot have power, that even self-affirmation is denied them, that they have nothing left to assert, and hence that there is no solution short of a violent explosion. Consider a recurring nightmare from a radical student at Columbia University. In this dream, the student Salvatore, came home from school and rand the bell to his house. He was told by his mother that she did not know him and that he did not belong there. He went to his cousin’s house and they told him the same thing. Finally he walked across the country to his father’s house in California and was told by his father that he did not know him and he did not belong there. The dream ended with him disappearing into the Pacific Ocean. “In separation, we come together. It never ends, change has just begun. Believing as we release the departed to know, what no one else could know. A way, into the unexplained. Redeem my soul into my body. To think my souls have been damned again, and again and again,” The Departed by Sully Erna. #RandolphHarris 3 of 13
Judging from how often this kind of dream—“My parents did not recognize me; they closed the door in my face,” “I do not belong to any place”—comes up in therapy, it seems to be an important clue to understanding our times. The student who had that dream was a member of the revolutionary movement not by accident. Violence, or acts close to it, gives one a sense of counting, of mattering, of power (whether the feeling be ersatz or not is unimportant at the moment). This in turn gives the individual a sense of significance. No human being can exist for long without some sense of significance. No human being can exist for long without some sense of one’s own significance. Whether one gets it by shooting a haphazard victim on the street, or by constructive work, or by rebellion, or by psychotic demands in a hospital, or by Walter Mitty fantasies, one must be able to feel this I-count-for-something and be able to live out that felt significance. It is the lack of this sense of significance, and the struggles for it, that underlies much violence. Writing in the Report to the Nation Commission on the Causes and Prevention of Violence appointed by the president after the assassination of Robert Kennedy and the Reverend Martin Luther King, Jr., the historian Richard Maxwell Brown makes sobering statements about American violence. #RandolphHarris 4 of 13
“The first and must obvious conclusion is that there has been a huge amount of it. We have resorted so often to violence that we have long since become a trigger happy people. It is not merely that violence has been mixed with the negative features of our history such as criminal activity, lynch mobs, and family feuds. On the contrary, violence has formed a seamless web with some of the noblest and most constructive chapters of American history.” The aftermath of the 1968 political assassination saw a bevvy of opinions and researches spring up on the causes of violence and its cures, consisting largely of debates between those emphasizing nature, and those emphasizing nurture. The former (stemming back, in the main, to Dr. Freud) held the general viewpoint that aggression is instinctive, part of the genetic equipment of mortals, and human beings are inherently aggressive. According to this view, it is a cross we must bear, an expression of the old Adam inevitably tainting human beings, and the most we can hope for is to control this evil in our hearts or let it out in wars and other culturally approved forms of violence. The other chief view, nurture, claims that aggression is a cultural phenomenon, caused—or at least augmented—by mass communication, faulty education, and especially TV. It is to be attacked and gotten rid of by changing our educational methods and controlling programs on TV. #RandolphHarris 5 of 13
What all too often is tiresomely ignored is that these two approaches are not mutually exclusive. Aggression is part of the basic equipment of mortals, but it is also culturally formed, exacerbated, and can be, at least in part, redirected. Out culture is not simply a given, but is also us. We “homo called sapiens,” as Edna St. Vincent Millay put it in her sonnet, are the kind of creatures who create a vast TV and other forms of mass communication and, using these means, covertly teach aggression to our children. At the same time we endlessly sermonize against aggression. The contradiction this creates adds to the impotence everyone feels and to the hypocrisy with which we surround the issue of power in our culture. However, the real argument against many of these either/or explanation is that they leave out of the discussion exactly what is most important in the problem—that is, the question of the values, rooted in both nature and nurture, that link the two and are bound up with aggression and violence. #RandolphHarris 6 of 13
Richard Maxwell Brown concludes his part of the Report to the Commission on Violence by citing two problems which confront us: “One is the problem of self-knowledge…When that is done…we must realize that violence has not been the action only of roughnecks and racists among us but has been the tactic of the must upright and respected of our people. Having gained this self-knowledge, the next problem becomes the ridding of violence, once and for all, from the real (but unacknowledged) American value system.” However, is there not a flagrant contradiction in this? If violence has been part and parcel of “our highest and most idealistic endeavors” and had been the tactic of the “most upright and respected” people, should we not inquire whether these people find something, perhaps unconsciously, in violence that they value? Furthermore, one can never change a value system by willing it changed or by other conscious means, as though plucking weeds from a garden. The roots of values lie deep in the archetypal and unconscious symbols and myths of the society. Changing the values system first of all requires a probing into the questions: What does violence do for the individual? What purposes does one achieve through aggression and violence? #RandolphHarris 7 of 13
In the utopian aim of removing all power and aggression from human behavior, we run the risk of removing self-assertion, self-affirmation, and even the power to be. If it were successful, it would breed a race of docile, passive eunuchs and would lay the groundwork for an explosion in violence that would dwarf all those that have occurred so far. Thus oversimplifying the issue, we talk as though our choice were only between aggression on the one hand and a race of eunuchs on the other. Caught in the contradiction which this breeds, it is not surprising that we wake up with bad dreams, sensing that the essence of ourselves, the self-affirmation and self-assertion that makes us persons and without which we have no reason for living, is taken from us. What we have failed to see is that aggression has been, on the beneficial side, in the service of those values of life which would, if discarded, leave us bereft, indeed. “How many ways can you break my spirit down…again and how many times have I peeled my face up off the ground…for you. In case that you are starting to think you can run my life…I would think again. Or cripple my faith, when you judge and criticize me…but I am still standing. I do not know if I can say I have lived through everything, but I have walked this Earth with bare feet broken in the snow and my father said to me it never seems to be a simple walk down an icy cold broken road. I will fight with what is inside of me…this warrior spirit inside of me,” Broken Road by Sully Erna. #RandolphHarris 8 of 13
It has long been my belief that understanding aggression and violence requires that power be seen as basic to the problem. I believe, also, that the data given to us by depth psychology cast an especially revealing light on the springs of human power and on aggression and violence. In my concern with power, I am tying to reach a level below both the nature and nurture theories, below both the instinct and culture arguments. I am seeking the answer to the question: What does individual person achieve through aggression and violence? If the pre-industrial World was in many ways no less insecure than our own, at least work and community life were ordered on a human scale. First of all, most mortals lived in small, tightly knit communities in which the family was the productive unit. Second, the tools that mortals used, the pace of work, the distribution of things that were made—all of those were controlled by human capacities and needs. Perhaps most important, instead of being separated from what we now call leisure activities, work itself—ordinarily some craft—was closely integrated in the total life of individuals and communities. Some call this the World we have lost. #RandolphHarris 9 of 13
It was by no means an idyllic Word, but time was, and it was all time up to 250 years ago when the whole of life went forward in the family, in a circle of loved, familiar faces, know and fondled objects, all to human size. That time has gone forever. It makes us very different from our ancestors. Different chiefly because of the technological revolution with its transformation of working conditions, the communities in which mortal life, and the whole complex social order that governs our lives. What happened, however, was companying change in human personality or character; and companying change in human personality or character; and it is the characterological revolution which must be understood if we are to determine whether alienation today differs in form and degree from the miseries of which earlier mortals complained. However, like the scientific and political upheavals which is accompanied, this characterological change had no sudden beginning or point in time at which earlier mortals complained. However, like the scientific and political upheavals which it accompanied, this characterological change had n sudden beginning or point in time at which spontaneously modern mortals replaced feudal mortals. History here is inadequate, and our evidence largely intuitive, or derived from literary works with their descriptions of social types, or from language itself. #RandolphHarris 10 of 13
As much as anything else, one needs personal freedom in this search after truth. Every form of interference and obstruction comes from sources which have acquired only a partial or false insight into truth. However, such freedom is permitted only insofar as one is good enough, wise enough, balanced enough, judicious enough, and discriminating enough to use it properly. Otherwise it leads to non-truth and self-deception. One must learn to think for oneself and to practise discrimination for oneself, if one want to find one’s way to truth. “A veil of sparkling white soothes and bathes me in the light, it feels me with the Suns and visions of the ancient ones. Descend to me, and sooth my disarray, and so it is done—hear my words Avalon. Fields are swaying like dancers in the Moonlight, rivers field with dreams-Unbroken and still promising. Warm inside-open the way in flat into the night—embrace what is to be, Avalon” Avalon by Sully Erna. Avalon is the mythical island, in Arthurian legend. The island’s legendary healing powers were said to restore King Arthur after he was injured in a major battle. His sword, Excalibur, was forged there too. It is a utopian paradise where the legends of English knights and political wholeness unite in a kingdom lost in the mists of time. #RandolphHarris 11 of 13
If a seeker find no one in one’s surroundings, contacts, or society near enough to one’s level of spiritual interests, then one must accept one’s loneliness, because one has chosen to draw away from the common preoccupation. For in order to be a working philosopher, a mortal must go one’s own way. This demand for individuality requires courage and wisdom. If one lack higher knowledge, intuitional feeling, and intellect—whose combination is wisdom—then one must seek to develop them and this demands works. Meanwhile, one can take help from personal guides and superior books. Without wisdom, or at least genuine efforts to work towards it, one’s course could be wrongly set to arrive at disaster. To withdraw from sectarian community life and walk alone requires qualities that only few possess. There is security, comfort, mortal and Worldly support in it. To be able to abandon these things a mortal must have strong inner urge as well as a continuous clear perception of philosophy’s meaning. “Breathe deep, bracing and strong, coming alive. Take back all that is lost, honour your pride. Time stops, silence is now, moving around hands raised fading to black, fall to the ground. From within, you will begin to feel the rise!” (The Rise by Sully Erna) #RandolphHarris 12 of 13
The weakling cannot walk this path. A mortal needs strength to follow out what one’s deep intuition tells one to do, especially where it departs from the allegedly rational or the socially conventional. If one’s guided attitude or actions meets with criticism or opposition, what is that to one? One is not answerable for what other people think about one. That is their responsibility. One is answerable only for what one oneself thinks and does. Only the mortal who has a passion to acquire the certainty of truth, who has the courage to hold unorthodox views and come to independent conclusions, who lives in an atmosphere of original thought, and to whom the charge of heresy is no charge at all, is at all likely to find one’s way to the truth. In truth, however, the pure relation can be built up into spatiotemporal continuity only be becoming embodied in the whole stuff of life. It cannot be preserved but only put to the proof in action; it can only be done, poured into life. Mortals can do justice to the relation to God that has been given to one only by actualizing God in the World in accordance with one’s ability and the measure of each day, daily. This is the only genuine guarantee of continuity. “Time is so wasted it wastes away, resurrect me Jesus Christ, I am so lonely for you. Taken away the innocence of live. Deliver me. Deliver me out of this pain and I will live through you again,” Eyes of a Child by Sully Erna. #RandolphHarris 13 of 13
It is Not too Late at Any Period of Life to Obtain the Eye of Faith and Learn to Live Correctly!
I went into my chamber and in the incandescent light rising from the sea, I unlocked the violin case and I looked at the Stradivarius violin. Of course I did not know how to play it, but we are powerful mimics. We have superior concentration and superior skills. And I had seen Nicki do it so often. I tightened the bow now and subbed the horsehair with the little piece of resin, as I had seen him do. Now I took it out of its case and I carried it through the house. It made a sound, did it not, that no one had ever heard in the ancient World, a sound so human and so powerfully affecting that people thought the violin the work of the devil and accused its finest players of being possessed. That is what a $16,000,000.00 violin sounds like. It is a 1715 ex-Bazzini – De Vito violin, made by Antonio Stradivari. This 304-year-old instrument can speak and tell something to all the people, not only people who understand the music, but all people. The light of the lamps danced in a thousand tiny specks of gold in the murals. I looked down at the violin and tried to remember my idea, and I ran my fingers along the wood and wondered what this thing looked like to them. In a hushed voice I explained what it was, that I wanted them to hear it, that I did not really know how to pay it but that I was going to try. #RandolphHarris 1 of 20
I was not speaking loud enough to hear myself, but surely they could it if they chose to listen. And I lifted the violin to my shoulder, braced it under my chin, and lifted the bow. I closed my eyes and I remembered music, Nicki’s music, the way that his body had moved with it and his fingers came down with the pressure of hammers and he let the message travel to his fingers from his soul. I plunged into it, the music suddenly wailing upwards and ripping down again as my fingers danced. It was a song, all right, I could make a song. The tones were pure and rich as they echoed off the close walls with a resounding volume, an incredible chemistry occurred creating the wailing beseeching voice that only the violin can make. I think every violin has its own soul, and the soul has been imprinted by a previous performer. So I definitely feel the soul of Nicki on this violin. If the violin is not played for a few months, it goes to sleep. I went on madly with it, rocking back, back, fourth, and fourth, forgetting Nicki, forgetting everything but the feel of my fingers stabbing at the soundboard and the realization that I was making this perfect sound that has mystified experts for centuries, and it plummeted and climbed and overflowed ever louder and louder as I bore down upon it with the frantic sawing of the bow. #RandolphHarris 2 of 20
Violins mimic aspects of the human voice, I was singing with it, I was humming and then singing loudly, and all harmonic tones corresponded to resonances in the vocal tract, and the gold of the little room was a blur. This Stradivari violin has a brightness and brilliance, and suddenly it seemed my own voice became louder, inexplicably louder, wit a pure high note which I knew that I myself could not possibly sing. Yet it was there, this beautiful note, steady and unchanging and growing even louder until it was hurting my ears. I played harder, more frantically, and I heard my own gasps coming, and I knew suddenly that I was not the one making this strange high note! It was a tone that rivaled the most perfect female voice. Without out stopping the music, without giving in to the pain that was splitting my head, I looked forward and I saw Akasha had risen and her eyes were very wide and she appeared to be singing, her voice was lively and sweet, and she was moving off the steps of the tabernacle toward me with her arms outstretched and the note pierced my eardrum, and a modern instrument could not compare to the magic of this sound. The moment healed my wounded body and soul. #RandolphHarris 3 of 20
Sheer will has shaped my experience more than any other human characteristic. God still exists and damnation and salvation have established the boundaries of a small and hopeless World, allowing one to see over the jungle of dark singing treetops at the distant silver curve of the river and the low Heavens where the stars burned through the pearl gray clouds. I was weeping at the sheer sight of it, at the feel of the damp wind against my face. As some may know, the follower of a labelled cause, movement, or part tends to become unfair to competing causes, exaggerating their weak points but minimizing or even shutting one’s eyes to those of one’s own. One who refuses to attach oneself but remains independence is more likely to judge without prejudice and after a genuine investigation of both sides. The advantages of being in a position of intellectual and social, religious and personal independence are several. If it is luckily found, the chance of finding truth and, of expressing it, is surely large. Still, drug addiction is another possible effect of powerlessness. The conviction of powerlessness is especially profound with young people, and this is also where drug addiction is most prevalent. #RandolphHarris 4 of 20
Their addiction is a form of violence, first of all, in that the individual violates one’s own mind—which, indeed, is the purpose of the drug; and there follows later all the petty crime and greater crime that drug addicts get into. The basis of addiction is a lot of weakness and a blocked anger. The weakness takes the form of I cannot meet the demands of my family; I cannot get a job; I am impotent in pleasures of the flesh; I am a no person. The anger takes the form of the addict’s revenge upon one’s family and the World for forcing one into this painful position of powerlessness. Impotence in pleasures of the flesh is present before taking the drugs; a large majority of addicts report that they had suffered from premature or quick climaxes or had great difficultly in standing at attention at all. Their fear is that they were not man enough to satisfy a woman. The heroin wipes away all this discomfort of perpetually feeling weak. It anesthetizes the person, partly through chemical and partly through psychological means, and gives complete relief in place of the original profound and continuous pain. No more inferiority, no more worry about being a failure in the working World, no more fear of being a coward in battle, no more disappointing one’s parents—all these oppressive feelings evaporate. #RandolphHarris 5 of 20
A typical case of an affluent drug addict is roughly as follows: he grows up in the lace curtain suburbs, where the scents are so strong you smell the raw green leaves as well as the pink and yellow blossoms. His father works at a white shoe firm, comes from a long line of feudal lords who licked their fingers and threw the bones over their shoulders to the dogs as they dined, and his mother quells her own anxiety by feeding him (the “Eat, baby, eat. It is proof you love me” syndrome). His father is successful financially but otherwise could be stronger; he has two Cadillacs but can only throw his weight around the house by boisterous swearing or some other way of expressing his frustration. The son is enlists and goes to Vietnam. On his way back, he throws his medals into the Pacific as a symbol of freedom. Back home he gets a position as a Criminal Investigator with in the Office of Investigation at the United States Post Office, leading complex federal criminal, civil and administrative investigations. Feeling increasingly social, he meets some new friends in the music scene and they convince him to take a shot of heroin. #RandolphHarris 6 of 20
Finding it gives him great comfort and that is all his friends do on their spare time, he soon also finds he has to pick up this habit to fit in, as it gives them a purpose in life. His friends start also stealing money from him for the drug. His employers find out and dismiss him from his job, telling him to come back when he is clean. Throughout the whole sorry account, he gets a divorce, his wife gets custody of his daughter and keeps the custom house in the hills, and there emerges most clearly the young man’s powerlessness and loss of purpose. The origin of this sense of powerlessness is generally the young person’s lack of a relationship with a strong father. (Sometimes it is attributable to his relationship with the mother, but not as often.) Having no male figure with whom he can identify, he has no direction, no structure which the father is supposed to bring in from the outside World, no set of values by which to direct oneself or against which to rebel. In less affluent household, this lack of a strong father is taken for granted. Sometimes less affluent people have more realistic reasons for taking heroin—their problems are externalized, and hence drug addiction does not represent such a serious illness as it does for the affluent. The affluent drug addict seems not to have the oedipal motive of striving to surpass his father, which can give a constructive dynamic for development; but the son will take revenge upon the father by means of the addiction. #RandolphHarris 7 of 20
Heroin addiction gives a way of life to the young person. Having suffered under perpetual purposelessness, one’s structure now consists of how to escape the police, how to get the money one needs, where to get one’s next fix—all these give one a new web of energy in place of one’s previous structureless World. The treatment method comes out of this situation of powerlessness. In the home of a good church, a great deal of power is let loose in sessions and Bible study, power that is directed toward the demand for absolute authenticity. These groups are encouraged to be as direct as possible with each other (without being rude or physical violence) in insisting on honesty. The phrase dope fiend is used, for example, because there is no euphemism in it; they insist on not covering up the cold truth in how they handle their affairs. However, when we spend so much time describing the attacking serpent that we fail to see the source of healing, we are no different than a dope fiend. We do not have to focus on the serpents or the pain of their venomous bites or their fear of death in order to be healed. We simply have to look to the source of healing: our Saviour, Jesus Christ. Obviously this gives a structure that cannot be evaded; the strong substitute father comes out in our faith in Christ. #RandolphHarris 8 of 20
We know from the scriptures and the teachings of latter-day prophets that genuine repentance requires feeling sincere remorse. However, focusing too much on the negative can lead to fear, loss of hope, and diminishing self-worth—in the words of Nephi, we begin to “droop in sin” (2 Nephi 4.28). Those who struggle with sin sometimes lie and rationalize in an attempt to minimize the consequences of their behavior. However, somewhere inside themselves, they are aware of that they have done and know they are accountable for it. They know they are in spiritual bondage. Almost everyone I have met struggling with addiction suffers from a terrible sense of shame and a belief that he or she is broken, defective, and beyond the love and grace of God. However, this belief, in my experience, is far from the truth. Usually I find that those who struggle with addictions are warriors with tenacity, courage, and a strong desire to be clean. They win far more battles than they lose as they march toward recovery. This seems to boil down to a rediscovery of one’s power and how to use it. The notorious permissiveness that was so completely followed in the Clinton and Obama era is out, and what is in is what gives personal power. #RandolphHarris 9 of 20
This may be hard for some to comprehend—if people are so strong, why is overcoming addiction so difficult? Addiction is often misunderstood, and some believe that if a person would simply choose to recover or work harder at stopping, he or she would be able to. However, the nature of addiction—and all sin, for that matter—is such that we cannot heal ourselves from it. The children of Israel could not heal themselves from the bites of the fiery serpents, and we cannot simply wish or even work addiction away. We must find our hope of healing in Christ. On the anvil on which the treatment is hammered out, all things are used that will recover some sense of power in the addict, which is necessary for one’s cure. The addict’s anger and one’s energy are connected; the angrier one can becomes—which means direct, not expressed in revenge or in other indirect ways—the more likely one is to get cured. The addict is a person of much energy, but it has been blunted by one’s drugs. When one comes off drugs, one is apt to have a good deal of anger; it is on this angry energy that one’s rehabilitation depends. However, it is the social side of power that is stressed. The desired emphasis seems to Dr. Alfred Adler’s concept of social interest; we all have one basic desire and goal: to belong and to feel significant. #RandolphHarris 10 of 20
Consider the experience of those who struggle with addiction and how it brings heavy burdens of secrets and pain. Repentance may involve an emotional and physical process. Both repentance and recovery may take time. Even though a person may have some initial success, further emotional healing may be necessary to completely repent and recover. It takes faith, hope, love, support, time, and prayer to heal from the patterns of self-deception. In its panorama of disorder and change, history offers plentiful evidence that mortals in times past also felt no small uncertainty about themselves and their identities, suffered no little anguish of gloom, despair and feelings of detachment. Great and small people are saying they wish they had never been born. No public office stands open where it should, and the masses are like river hogs, eating whatever is insight, without think about their Saviour. Artists have ceases to ply their art. The few slay the many. One who yesterday was indigent I now wealthy, and the sometime rich overwhelm one with adulation. Impudence is rife. Oh that man cease to be, that women should no longer conceive and give birth. Then, at length, the World would find peace. #RandolphHarris 11 of 20
There was a similar moral collapse in Greece during the Peloponnesian war. As for medieval Europe, Huizinga reminds us that the Middle Ages were essentially violent in character: wars, class struggles, hysterical crowd behavior, vice and crime (on an unparalleled scale, particularly in university towns), plagues, scarcity, superstition, the conviction that the World was coming to an end—such was the “black” background of medieval life. The unattached person during the Middle Ages was one either condemned to exile or domed to death: if alive, one immediately sought to attach oneself, at least to a band of robbers. To exist, one had to belong to an association: a household, a manor, a monastery, a guild; there was no security expect in association, and no freedom that did not recognize the obligations of a corporate life. One lived and died in the style of one’s class and corporation. People had known a kind of psychological security; they took for granted all the actual insecurity of life in a vale of tears. If one has to analyse problems for oneself and has no one else to do it for one, the endeavour may help one to learn discrimination and good judgement. It is better to make one’s own decisions independently. This is not the case, however, if one feels too incapable of thinking out an issue, or too illiformed about it, or too vacillating to make up one’s mind on its pros and cons. #RandolphHarris 12 of 20
If one’s understanding of this teaching delivers one from excessive dependence on another mortal or on external methods, it will clear one’s path and help one’s self-reliance. However, if it outruns itself and makes one cocksure, proud, arrogant, and irreverent towards one’s Saviour, then it has degenerated into misunderstanding. This will block one’s path. Joy is more than pleasure; and it is more than happiness. Happiness is a state of mind which lasts for a longer and shorter time and is dependent on many conditions, external and internal. In the ancient view it is a gift of the gods which they give and take away again. In the American Constitution, “the pursuit of happiness” is a basic human right. In economic theory the greatest happiness of the greatest possible number of people is the purpose of human action. In the fairy tale, “they live happily ever after.” Happiness can stand a large amount of pain and lack of pleasure. However, happiness cannot stand the lack of joy. For joy is the expression of our essential and central fulfillment. No peripheral fulfillments and no favorable conditions can be substituted for the central fulfillment. Even in an unhappy state a great joy can transform unhappiness into happiness. What, then is you? #RandolphHarris 13 of 20
Let us first ask what is its opposite. It is sorrow. Sorrow is the feeling that we are deprived of our central fulfillment, by being deprived of something that belongs to us and is necessary to our fulfillment. We may be deprived of relatives and friends nearest to us, of a creative work and a supporting community which gave us a meaning of life, of our home, of honor, of love, of bodily or mental health, of unity of our person, of a good conscience. All this brings sorrow in manifold forms, the sorrow of sadness, the sorrow of loneliness, the sorrow of depression, the sorrow of self-accusation. However, it is precisely this kind of situation in which Jesus tells his disciples that his joy shall be with them and that their joy shall be full. Sorrow can be the Sorrow of the World which ends in death of final despair, and it can be Divine sorrow which leads to transformation and joy. For joy has something within itself which is beyond joy and sorrow. This something is called blessedness. Blessedness is the eternal element in joy, that which makes it possible for joy to include in itself the sorrow out of which it arises, and which it takes into itself. In the Beatitudes, Jesus calls the less affluent, those who mourn, those who hunger and thirst, those who have been persecuted blessed. And he says unto them: “Rejoice and be glad!” #RandolphHarris 14 of 20
Joy within sorrow is possible to those who are blessed, to those in whom joy has the dimension of the eternal. By its very nature the eternal You cannot become an It; because by its very nature it cannot be placed within measure and limit, not even within the measure of the immeasurable and the limit of the unlimited; because by its very nature it cannot be grasped as a sum of qualities, not even as an infinite sum of qualities that have been raised to transcendence; because it is not to be found either in or outside the World; because it cannot be experienced; because it cannot be thought; because we transgress against it, against that which has being, if we say: “I believe that he is”—even “he” is still a metaphor, while “you” is not. And yet we reduce the eternal You ever again to an It, to something, turning God into a thing, in accordance with our nature. Not capriciously. The history of God as a thing, the way of the God-thing through religion and its marginal forms, through its illuminations and eclipses, the times when it heightened and when it destroyed life, the way from the living God and back to him again, the metamorphoses of the present, of embedment in forms, of objectification, of conceptualization, dissolution, and renewal are one way, the way. #RandolphHarris 15 of 20
Here we must once more reply to those who attack Christianity because they believe that it destroys the joy of life. In the view of the Beatitudes they say that Christianity undercut the joy of life by pointing to and preparing for another life. They even challenge the blessedness in the promised life as a refined form of seeking for pleasure in the future life. Again we must confess that in many Christians, joy in the way is postponed till after death, and that there are Biblical words which seem to support this answer. Nevertheless, it is wrong. Jesus will give his joy to his disciples now. They shall get it after he has left them, which means in this life. And Paul asks the Philippians to have joy now. This cannot be otherwise, for blessedness is the expression of God’s eternal fulfillment. Blessed are those who participate in this fulfillment here and now. Certainly eternal fulfillment must be seen not only as eternal which is present, but also as eternal which is future. However, if it is not seen in the present, it cannot be seen at all. This joy which has in itself the depth of blessedness is asked for and promised in the Bible. It preserves in itself its opposite, sorrow. This blessed joy provides the foundation for happiness and pleasure. #RandolphHarris 16 of 20
Blessed joy which is promised in the Bible for this lifetime on Earth presents in all levels of mortal’s striving for fulfillment. It consecrates and directs them. It does not diminish or weaken them. It does not take away the risks and dangers of the joy of life. It makes the joy of life possible in pleasure and pain, in happiness and unhappiness, in ecstasy and sorrow. Where there is joy, there is fulfillment. And were there is fulfillment, there is joy. In fulfillment and joy the inner aim of life, the meaning of creation, and the end of salvation, are attained. The asserted knowledge and the posited action of the religions—whence do they come? The presence and strength of revelation (for all of them necessarily invoke some sort of revelation, whether verbal, natural, or psychic—there are, strictly speaking, only revealed religions), the presence and strength that mortals received through revelation—how do they become a content? The explanation has two levels. The exoteric, psychic level is known when a mortal is considered by oneself, apart from history. The esoteric, factual one, the primal phenomenon of religion, when we afterward place one in history again. Both belong together. #RandolphHarris 17 of 20
Mortals desires to have God; one desires to have God continually in space and time. One is loath to be satisfied with the inexpressible confirmation of the meaning; one wants to see it spread out as something that one can take out handle again and again—a continuum unbroken in space and times that insures life for one at every point and moment. A mortal can achieve one’s independence by grades without rebellion but one is seldom so wise as to do so. More often, one lacks patience, takes the more foolish violent way, and attains one’s freedom at a cost, to oneself and to others, that could have been much less for the same result by evolutionary ways. The passionate contempt for organized authority, or its complete rejection, may be only a cover for weakness: the inability to undergo a course of discipline, much less undertake it for oneself. The danger of walking alone is also the danger of identifying one’s own private judgments, impulses, desires, and thoughts as intuitions from the higher self. However, independence of mind as its own perils, for it may lead to stubbornness in error, to arrogance in behaviour, and to fanaticism in attitude. One who depends upon one’s own personal intellect and personal strength alone, deprives oneself of the protection which God could give one. #RandolphHarris 18 of 20
The endeavor after independence can achieve only a partial success, never a total one. We find that we are tied to other people. Life’s rhythm of pure relation, the alternation of actuality and a latency in which only our strength to relate and hence also the presence, but not the primal presence, wanes, does not suffice mortal’s thirst for continuity. One thirsts, thirst, pain as clear as light for something spread out in time, for duration. Thus God becomes an object of faith. Originally, faith fills the temporal gaps between the acts of relation; gradually, it becomes a substitute for these acts. The ever new movement of being through concentration and going forth is supplanted by coming to rest in an It in which one has faith. The trust-in-spite-of-all of the fighter who knows the remoteness and nearness of God is transformed ever more completely into the profiteer’s assurance that nothing can happen to one because one has faith that there is One who would not permit anything to happen to one. The life-structure of the pure relation, the lonesomeness of the I before the You, the law that mortals, however one may include the World in one’s encounter, can still go forth only as a person to encounter God—all this also does not satisfy mortal’s thirst for continuity. #RandolphHarris 19 of 20
The magic of faith leaves something stronger than memory of the circuit of the blood of Christ through us. One thirsts for something spread out in space, for the representation in which the community of the faithful is united with God. Thus God becomes a cult object. The cult, too, originally supplements the acts of relation, by fitting the living prayer, the immediate You-saying into a spatial context of great plastic and power and connecting it with the life of the senses. And the cult, too, gradually becomes a substitute, as the personal prayer is no longer support but rather pushed aside by communal prayer; and as the essential deed simply does not permit any rules, it is supplanted by devotions that follow rules. We can fully trust in a loving Heavenly Father, who is constantly trying to help us become the person he knows we can become. Our Father in Heaven has given us not only one but two physical eyes. We can see adequately with only one eye, but the second eye provides us with another perspective. When both perspectives are put together in our brains, they produce a three-dimensional image of our surrounding. And by the power of the Holy Ghost ye may know the truth of all things. We have a loving Father in Heaven, and we all agreed to come to this Earth as part of a divine plan. #RandolphHarris 20 of 20
Randolph Harris II International Institute 